Apparently the loner/loser who died after allegedly murdering a fellow student in Montreal had a website profile at “vampirefreaks.com” in which he said all kinds of darkly portentious things.
The CNN article ends with this choice paragraph:
AP reported that vampirefreaks.com came up in a murder investigation earlier this year. A 23-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl accusedin a triple murder in Medicine Hat, Alberta, had profiles on the Website.
Okay, let’s think about this for a second and make sure we’ve got the cart in front of the horse… the Internet has a website that caters to those with dark fantasies about death, cursedness, tragedy, and the goth perspective on the mortal condition, eh? And now we learn that some of these people commit suicide and/or murder?
Boy, howdy. Shut that site down NOW. Because people never killed people before they had websites where they could talk about it… did they?
Oh, wait. In 1989 there was a different shooting in Montreal in which 14 people were killed. That was pre-World-Wide-Web, for those of you keeping score at home.
There is no changing the fact that some people are twisted enough to act upon their mental instabilities in violent ways. Whether these people twisted themselves through substance abuse, or otherwise re-wired their pleasure centers so they can get off on the pain of others, it’s not the internet’s fault. I will concede that some of these people recruit, and they twist each other by goading each other into more and more depraved lines of thought, but don’t go trying to lay all the blame in one place. Had Kimveer Gill not had internet access, we’d probably be blaming his musical choices, the video games he played, or the trashy vampire novels he dogears. None of these things enable mass murder without the help of a sick and twisted person.
You cannot blame the bottom of the barrel for the things that sink to it.
Speaking of “enabled,” kudos to the police officers on the scene. It seems they were there on an unrelated call, observed suspcious behavior (gunman on campus? Shots fired? Hmmmm…) and engaged the suspect effectively and permanently.
