Headline reads: ‘Crazed man shoots girlfriend, her lover and a cop’
Old news. I guess ‘Culture of violence breeds new victims’ wouldn’t have cut it. This man wounded his ex-girlfriend WITH AN FUCKING SHOTGUN (because she dumped him while he was in jail, the reprehensible bitch), killed this woman’s new boyfriend, and then waited in ambush before shooting a policeman in his patrol car, presumably because he was bored waiting in a soggy bush for five hours.
“What bullshit! That isn’t news!” I hear you cry. What you want to hear about is the repercussions on the police force, the fines and levies, enquiries and debauched proceedings preceding the redundancies and ruinous terminations of various officers. All this- all this for having used an experimental weapon to stop a man with a twisted, and violent, a bestial soul; he was no better than a rabid animal. "What were the police doing...", I hear you cry, "... attempting to protect the lives of the men and women of Northumbria, putting the lives of those same men and women, and their own (Fascist) lives ahead of the life of such a fine, and good, man"? Was he bollocks.
If any one of us had been in their positions I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have had any qualms about using god-damn near everything we had on that DOG- he had shot three people to that point, and there was every indication that he would do so again, assuming the letter he sent to the police was genuine. It's a curious case that in a society more than happy to (routinely) put down dangerous/ overly-aggressive dogs we should be happy to make excuses for dangerous men.
The society of today seems to be on a collision course with reality. The hypocrisy of our culture (one of the most enlightened cultures in the world if you believe the rumours...) is massive; on the one hand is advocates violence across the board and on the other it demonises (albeit rightly) those who give in to it *Cough* Raoul Moat *Cough*.
Television and films have long been deplored by the faint hearted for consisting of very little, if not perpetual violence. Furthermore, the most popular video games - the icons of entire generations - have been dominated by First Person Shooters (FPSs) and Real Time Strategy (RTS) war simulators- games such as DOOM, Quake, Unreal Tournament, 007: Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Total Annihilation, and Command & Conquer, to name but a few. I wonder why it is that entire sections of the populace begin to think that violent behaviour is nothing to be worried about? They are only exposed to it DAILY afterall. Perhaps we should bear in mind the advice of Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (look at me being all inter-textual!), when he stated that 'Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them'. In other words we've become so used to violence that we aren't instantly appalled by it any more; the thought of being violent is now easier to rationalise, thus it's easier to commit, hence the cycle continues ad nauseum.
Not only is this wave of aggression limited to fictional varieties. For some time now, violent sports have been on the rise in the West, and have enjoyed popularity for hundreds of years. American magazine 'USA Today' recently posted an online article stating that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), an organiser & promoter of what is dubbed 'Mixed Martial Arts', has the second largest online fan base of ALL sports, worldwide; the UFC has been quoted as having '...an agressive social media strategy...'- riding the current wave of acceptance towards violence amongst Western youth groups. Despite only establishing itself in the early 1990s the UFC now has more online fans, and more of it's practioners (read: fighters) using sites like Facebook and Twitter, than any other sporting organisation- including the Premier League (though excluding the NBA).
The irony is, of course, that many of the people involved in perpetuating this culture of aggression and violence - the programmers of the games, the writers of the film scripts and the fighters of the sports - are not at all what you would expect. Usually the techies are meek individuals looking to harbour revenge fantasies because they can't look after themselves in the real world- they use their games as a form of escapism, so that they have a release for their own self loathing, that we don't routinely have to scrape brain matter from their unkempt apartments. Moving on, the fighting men involved in organisations like the UFC are usually very humble men, and yes they might come from rough backgrounds etc. etc. but they tend (for the most part) to be incredibly humble, and are just thankful that they have a chance to earn money in a constructive manner (usually by bleeding for our entertainment); they've been given a break by someone, and they know it, and are thankful for it. More than that, they can come to represent the pinnacles of incredibly important virtues- hard work, endurance (mental and physical), humility, and the importance of respect.
The problem lies in the marketing strategies, which play up the 'high impact nature of the sports, and the 'player vs. player' aspect of the games. It's not so much a case of 'ordinary' people (if there really is such a thing) being corrupted by these things, as it is a case of what will happen when corrupted people emerse themselves, or are emersed involuntarily (as many young people are) in this corrupted environment.
And let's not forget that, equally, quite a lot of the problem can be layed at the feet of public ignorance and bloodthirst creating a market for this kind of entertainment.
Stupid public. Shame on you.
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