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Kids, online and off, feast on violence

By Karen Thomas, USA TODAY

Violent images "warp young perceptions," President Clinton said Wednesday.

A friend of one of the Colorado shooters said the teen did it for fun.

The world is reeling from Tuesday's massacre at a Colorado high school, where teen outcasts embarked on an explosive, bloody rampage that resulted in the deaths of more than a dozen people before they took their own lives.

Why? How? What's happening to our youth?

A decade ago, satanic rock music was blamed for a rise in teen suicides. Not too long after that, TV's Beavis & Butt-head was blamed for a spate of young fire-starters. Just two years ago, a 14-year-old boy claimed that the 1995 film The Basketball Diaries inspired him to begin firing on students at a Kentucky high school. Parents of those slain students filed a $130 million lawsuit against the filmmakers last week.

This week, fingers are being pointed at a current hit movie: One Littleton witness told a national TV audience that the killers looked like Keanu Reeves' character in The Matrix. The popular computer game Doom also is being mentioned.

The new ingredient: the Internet, with its rapid-fire access to an array of information - from pipe bomb how-tos to White Supremacy chat rooms.

Could the global kindred spirit of the cyberworld make outcast teens more likely to act out their rage?

Colorado suspects Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had Web pages and frequented chat rooms. Little is certain about their TV or movie viewing habits. Music preferences may have leaned toward heavy metal or a German techno-sound.

The Colorado teens were part of the audience that watched Tuesday as the horror in Columbine High School unfolded on TV. Could the instant feedback of their act have prompted or fueled their rampage?

Is the swirl of cultural violence influential enough to empower a pair of teens to build pipe bombs, grab sawed-off shotguns and kill?

"When this kind of tragedy happens, all of the major institutions in society have to do some deep collective soul searching," says Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education. "We, as a society, have to ask, 'What is the impact of a steady diet of violent media content on a growing child?'"

Tons of research exists examining the impact on children of TV violence, film debauchery and bloody images. There are facts on both sides.

"But that debate is over," says Montgomery, because "new forms of media are emerging, from digital television to video games to the whole Internet culture, and we don't know what their impact is."

News and Net reports have said that Harris was a fan of the computer game Doom,in which players hunt and kill through dark corridors, and according to his purported America Online profile, Harris also was computer savvy enough to program his own levels for the game.

Doom's creator, id Software, is listed with several other game companies in the $130 million suit brought by parents of teens slain in Paducah, Ky. So are film companies Time Warner and Polygram Video, the distributor of The Basketball Diaries. Parents hold the companies accountable for prompting the 14-year-old who did the shooting.

The recent flood of teen-oriented movies often feature class misfits. Lindsay Doran, president of United Artists, which released The Rage: Carrie II, says, "Filmmakers made a lot of decisions to make a responsible version. Do we think about this stuff? We absolutely do. You can't not like Catcher in the Rye because someone read it and killed John Lennon."

Psychiatrist Michael Brody, who treats troubled children, sees problems with newer media. "With immersion-type media, such as video games and computer or Internet games ... you win by how many people you kill, and I think these kids catch on.

"Most games kids used to play, the game ends. Now it just leaks out into reality. The kids continue the game. It's almost like it's a nonreality. And they teach no pro-social values. There's no ethics in video games."

Unlike the Kentucky shooting, the Colorado carnage played out heavily on the Internet. Within hours after news broke, messages proliferated from people purporting to be in the "Trenchcoat Mafia," said to be responsible for the massacre.

"Hail to the Trench Coat Mafia," said one posting. Another site teased, "National Bring Your Gun to School Day."

Technology commentator David Schenk says the Internet doesn't encourage sick pranks, but it does act as a powerful microphone.

"There are probably 10- and 12-year-olds who understand that the more sick they are, the more outrageous they are, the more likely their voice will be heard."

The Colorado shooters were high school juniors, a time where there's "a lot of loneliness and a need to relate to other people," says Brody. Chat rooms fill that void wonderfully for many kids, but "if it's a chat room where they're talking about how to commit violence or fix up a bomb, that's very scary. On the Internet, the bad judgment of one kid could be reinforced by the bad judgment of the entire group."

The blame game

Game companies and other entertainment media are being held up as scapegoats, says Mike Davila, editorial director for Gameweek magazine.

"Maybe they got these ideas straight out of video games. Granted you have a shotgun and you toss pipe bombs. But they could have gotten them straight out of a book, newspaper or a TV show or a movie."

"You can't have millions of kids every day watching people get killed on TV, and then see the same people alive the next week without (desensitizing) kids" to violence, says Linda Ellerbee, who's hosting a special on the shootings airing tonight on Nickelodeon. "I'm not going to blame the media for what happened in Littleton. But you can raise the question of what part did the media play."

No longer is the entertainment industry singled out, says Syracuse University popular-culture professor Robert Thompson. "We've had how many centuries with world wars, the Holocaust and slavery and there was no television to blame. It's a sign that we're maturing to a point where it isn't all that simple."

He does question the omni-presence of 24-hour news channels, through which "we are allowed to wallow in the details (of violent news stories) ad infinitum. I'm not sure how good culturally this is to turn these events into 24-hour miniseries on television.''

That any individual film could be blamed for a teen-ager's behavior is unfair, says Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at California State University at Los Angeles. "Many violent movies, such as Basketball Diaries or Men in Black or The Matrix, characters wore the same sort of black trench coat" as the Colorado teens, he says. "(Movies) do not take choir boys and convert them into killers. There is a background of potential violence. The research shows unequivocally, people who are predisposed to violence are attracted to violent media" not the other way around.

A number of other films also could be seen echoing the Littleton tragedy. Heathers, for example, features Christian Slater (who also dons a black trench coat) and Winona Ryder as renegade high-schoolers who off those in the cool clique. Slater's character goes so far as to rig the gym bleachers with explosives.

Film isn't the only outlet for black trench coats, though.

What about pro wrestler the Undertaker, who often sports a long black coat? Wrestling free-for-alls, among the highest-rated cable shows, are often criticized for their violent and sadomasochistic images.

Rocker response

Kids are bombarded with violent, dark messages from culture today, says Nikki Sixx, 40, guitarist for the guitar-smashing heavy metal group Motley Crüe. "The culture is always going to be dark. There's always the danger of that becoming the thing the child latches onto."

He thinks parents need to take more responsibility for their children's values, and says he often talks with his young sons about what are they are seeing and thinking.

Rocker Ted Nugent agrees. Nugent, 50 and an NRA board member, took his share of blame decades ago for negative influence on his teen-age fans.

"My kids and my kids' friends know Marilyn Manson is out there saying stupid things. They know there are devil worshipers. They know people kill and rape and murder and get off with a slap on the hand. But they're not shooting anybody, or sacrificing goats," he says.

"It's too easy to make music a scapegoat," says Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. "Music does not drive teen-agers to violent despair."

Explains Dave Sirulnick, head of MTV's news department: "Any of the bands that are usually brought up in this kind of discussion - Marilyn Manson, etc. - sell millions of albums. And virtually none of the kids who buy them do this kind of thing. Music is an outlet for expression. People into this kind of music, or any kind of music, aren't the ones to worry about. They're into something; it's the kids who withdraw that you have to worry about."

Kids are looking for understanding, says Sixx. "So they go find answers on TV or with their peer group, or they'll find a lyric that makes them say, 'I can relate.' Because they're alone and looking for answers."

But nobody's really alone anymore in the computer age. Not with Internet cyberpals just a click away.

Wednesday, online kids of all ages were chatting about the Colorado tragedy. They expressed grief. Many empathized with the victims. Some sympathized with the killers.

Six hundred youths ages 13 to 21 were surveyed on line Wednesday at Bolt (www.bolt.com ), the Internet's largest teen-focused destination. Asked "could one of your classmates be a killer?" an astounding 51% answered "yes." And 13% were unsure and answered "maybe."

Wrote one 18-year-old Bolt subscriber, "We don't live in a Gap commercial, there are always gonna be people who don't get along with others. This is no excuse to take lives."

Young adults are the only people who can shed light on this tragedy, says Beverly Coleman-Miller, a violence-prevention researcher and visiting scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Adults are basically still stuck in the 'I can't believe this is happening in our neighborhood' syndrome."

The Colorado students "already saw a structure at work that the teachers, educators and the police department obviously missed," she says. Those "kids are smarter than the adults about this."

For the adult world to understand the surging violence among youth, its inhabitants must "maximize children's brilliance," she says, in a smart, media-saturated universe.

Contributing: Leslie Miller, Susan Wlosczyczna, Joh Chetwynd, Gary Levin, Claudia Puig, Mike Snider, Kevin V. Johnson