I've heard that this movie was a favourite of Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris. How much of an impact did this movie have on the Columbine massacre?
shareI heard Eric liked Event Horizon too. Movies never caused any violence.
shareI'd like to see a source for your claim that movies have never caused any violence.
shareIsn't there a scene in basketball diaries where Leo shoots up his classroom in a trench coat?
share[deleted]
I'd like to see a source for your claim as well.
shareMillions of people saw Natural Born Killers. If watching that movie caused people to go on murderous shooting rampages, there would have been hundreds of them every single day. And they would have started in 1994, not five years later.
Violent movies don't create violent psychos, they merely attract psychos who already have a predilection toward violence.
No influence at all. Eric and Dylan were severely bullied and never got the help they needed. Bullying and the school system not helping them caused Columbine, not NBK.
shareLots of people are bullied and harassed in school, at home and everywhere else and don't decide to murder innocent people. Neither do violent movies make them do it. Some people are just born with murderous intentions.
"You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you." Mr Darcy
Unfortunately not all bullying victims turn out non-violent, such as the case with Eric and Dylan. Had the school staff taken their issues more seriously, the whole Columbine massacre would've likely never happened.
shareYeah it's easier for a scrapehoat instead of getting to the problem
shareEric and Dylan simply fed off each other, a horrible combination that led to mass murder. I think Eric was severely mentally ill and domineered over Dylan and ultimately led him down the primrose path to disaster. The violent video games/movies and easy access to guns definitely contributed to their madness.
share[deleted]
They were the bullies and they had guns and took prozac. Thry also loved Hitler. The answer is gun control and yes, less bullying, less drugs legal and illegal.
share"The answer is gun control"....no, it's not.
shareYou're right. We don't need gun control. We need a complete ban on guns. Thanks for the correction!
shareAdam60z so you think the 2nd Amendment should be tossed out then? Do you hate the Constitution? If they "ban" the guns, how are you/who's going to protect your ass when the criminals, who don't give a shit about the law and will get the guns through black markets or steal them, come to your house to steal all your shit at gunpoint or just simply kill you for the fun of it? Or the government decides to turn on its people and go full tyrannical? What are going to do then? I don't think you've thought this through too well. Hate to break it to ya, but the 2nd Amendment is the only thing keeping you from being turned into a slaughtered cow. It's there to protect you and your sovereign human rights. Period.
shareJust want to make sure I have you right. So you want to fight the government with guns; you're going to lose I can assure you. As for the 2nd Amendment, yes, I agree that the militia does have a right for have muskets. As for slaughtered cows, I'm a vegetarian.
share"So, you want to fight the government with guns".....like I said, only if they get too big and tyrannical. Also, the government isn't God, it is fallible, there's more of us than them and we will not lose like you so naively think.... I can assure you on that, sorry buddy. Governments have been taken down in the past many times by the people because the government serves us, we don't serve it. "Militia does have a right to have muskets.".... actually, they would have AR-15s, shot guns, assault rifles, automatic machine guns. "I'm a vegetarian"....oh, so you're a soy boy? Well, that says a lot right there lol. I bet you're an atheist too.
shareGun control won't stop psychos, criminals, and terrorists from doing what they do. When I was a kid in the '60s I had a .22 rifle, and I could buy ammunition at the hardware store, no questions asked. Lot's of boys had rifles. You could order any gun you wanted through the mail, except machine guns. Yet school shootings, and mass shootings of any kind, were almost completely nonexistent. The problem isn't guns, it's people. Gun control would only affect law-abiding gun owners, who are not the problem in the first place.
shareNo not at all
shareDidn't Columbine already become irrelevant once the US started having a gun massacre rampage mass killing every other weekend? Most of them having a much higher kill count than Columbine...
The real issue that needs to be addressed is why a wealthy 21st century western nation for some reason feels the need to let any demented psycho citizen walk into a gun store and buy an assault rifle along with as much ammo as he wants because apparently he has "second amendment rights"....
No film is responsible for any crime. Period. Same thing applies for music and video games. They tried blaming Marilyn Manson and the video game Doom for Columbine as well. The blame game is always played after those types of tragic events. People (and particularly the media) always needs someone or something to blame. The only two people who know the truth behind what caused Columbine are the two shooters. But seeing that they're dead, that motive died with them. So we may never know why. But the film Natural Born Killers is definitely not the reason.
sharewe know the motive, and the causes , we just dont know why they thought thought it was ok to do what they did
shareNo, we don't really know the motive actually. It wasn't because of bullying. That was a narrative created by the mainstream media. From my research, at best, their motive seemed to be inspired by political extremism.
shareLet's examine this. Children have been bullied at school since the beginning of time; certainly in the past 100+ years. Guns have become increasingly more difficult to get over time. We could blame Prozac, or other antidepressant drugs, but Prozac had been in use for 12 years, and antidepressant drugs have been around since the 1950s. Maybe the internet is to blame, but it was still quite rudimentary in 1999, and not the anything-goes platform where one can find anything always. Yet, Columbine was the first of what has become a never-ending string of school massacres committed by students. Why?
Maybe you can think of other changes that could be to blame, but it's undeniably true that in the decade or so leading up to the shootings, i.e. the formative years for the shooters, movies, television, music, and video games became far, far, far, far, far more violent, and violence in general went from being seen as extreme and to be shunned to something that you were ridiculed for as a prude if you wanted to limit its presence in media.
Was Natural Born Killers to blame? Probably not outright, but it's silly to believe that if it was among their favorite films, it didn't play a part. We all emulate role models, and if their role models were two people who became beloved celebrities by massacring people, it's far from a stretch to assume that influenced their behavior. I'd say it's pure gullibility to assume it didn't.
To take a quote from the 1996 film Scream - "Don't you blame the movies. Movies don't create psycho killers. Movies make psycho killers more creative."
Basically, I can't accept the fact that any film plays a significant role in someone carrying out an act like Columbine. I think if anyone does something like that, than that's a natural non-movie related impulse that's already within them. And by the way, if we're going to get technical and blame Natural Born Killers, than we could also blame the 1993 film Killing Zoe as well. There's a lot of elements within that film that could relate to the Columbine killers as well. And what about that scene from the Basketball Diaries? There are so many different things we could point the blame at. But it would be useless and would clarify nothing.
And one thing that's never talked about is the fact that the Columbine killers took a lot of inspiration from the Oklahoma City bombing.
I think NBK has been singled out because it was a movie the killers were especially fond of watching. And no, I don't think a violent film or video game will turn an otherwise normal kid into a killer, but I do think they have an effect on people. People are basically the same as they ever have been, so something in our environment has made it acceptable to go on teen shooting rampages. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that as kids become numbed to violence, it becomes easier for them to feel okay about committing violent acts.
When you watch movie after movie where the hero is killing for fun, and shown violently murdering innocent people, and torturing and killing those who annoy or disagree with him, it has an effect. We emulate our idols. I do it, you probably do, too. When you spend hours a day shooting realistic guns at realistic people and watching their heads realistically explode, it probably makes it less of a stretch to actually shoot another person in the head.
Again, I'm not arguing that a normal kid will watch NBK and shoot up his school tomorrow. What I wonder is, why did the maladjusted, bullied, depressed kids of 1975 never shoot up their schools? What changed in the '90s that resulted in a generation coming of age that felt it was totally normal, acceptable behavior to go on a shooting spree in the classroom? If not the drastic changes in film, music, tv, and video games, then what?
To be fair, while Harris & Klebold were clearly very interested in violent movies and video games, I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't apply to most school shooters. It didn't seem to apply to Seung-Hui Cho and Adam Lanza, for example.
shareDo we know for a fact that they did not watch those kinds of movies or play those kinds of games? And again, it's not as if I am saying those are the primary factors in why people go on shooting sprees, but that it is likely a significant contributing factor.
shareI'm not an expert on the lives of school shooters, but I do not recall any source claiming Cho and Lanza had an interest in violent video games or movies. If I'm wrong, there ought to be evidence to the contrary (and as I said, if a study were done of school shooters in general, I wouldn't be surprised if most didn't really care for violent media.)
By contrast, Doom was indisputably an important part of the lives of Harris & Klebold. One example of this is from Harris' diary:
I have a goal to destroy as much as possible so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that, so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom like FH or FS or demons, so It's either me or them. I have to turn off my feelings.
I'm not saying anything as cut and dried as every school shooter did it because of video games. I see it more a case of the increase in violence in cinema and video games has almost certainly numbed young people to violence in a way that previous generations weren't, and I believe that makes it that much easier for someone to be okay with going on a shooting spree. I don't think it is the only cause, or even the primary cause, nor do I think every person who commits such an act does so for the same reasons.
shareI still don't agree, since it has to be shown that a substantial number of school shooters were "numbed" by increasingly violent movies and video games, let alone a majority of them. One could just as easily (if not more easily) argue that people have been "numbed" by learning about or seeing things like the Vietnam War, news reports of violent crime, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the Iraq War, etc.
By 1975 there were plenty of violent films such as Bonnie & Clyde, Night of the Living Dead, Death Wish, Dirty Harry, etc., yet spree shootings weren't as big an issue. By 1989 there were obviously even more violent films, yet again spree shooting wasn't as big an issue. You'd have to demonstrate that violent films in the 90s reached such a point where it became "that much easier for someone to be okay with going on a shooting spree." I don't think that's possible.
As a kid in the '50s and '60s, I watched Lucas McCain of "The Rifleman" and Matt Dillon of "Gunsmoke" blow away nearly 500 people with their guns, and that's only two shows out of hundreds. For my eighth birthday I got a .22 rifle, and as a teenager I could buy ammo at the hardware store any time I wanted it. Lots of boys had rifles. Anybody could order a gun through the mail. Yet, at that time, there were extremely few, or no, mass shootings. Compared to those days, guns and ammo are very restricted and difficult to get now, and shootings seem to happen at least every week. Something has changed, but the problem can't be blamed on the availability of guns, or on violent media.
shareAvailability of guns likely plays no part whatsoever in the prevalence of mass shootings. As we've both pointed out, guns are harder to obtain today than ever.
The kind of gun violence you mention, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, etc., was of a more innocent variety. There was never blood, and the good guy always shot the bad guy. Sometimes the bad guy killed someone earlier in the show, but he always got caught or killed, and the deaths were far from realistic. There was a bang, a puff of smoke, and the actor fell down.
Interestingly, right around the time films started showing more realistic deaths, and included blood, we had the first real mass shooting, the 1966 Austin Tower mass murder. As movies became more bloody and more violent, the number of shootings increased. I know at this point someone is going to chime in with "correlation doesn't always imply causation," but often it does, especially when it's two things that go hand-in-hand, such as people viewing bloody gun violence in movies then going out and committing bloody gun violence in real life.
I don't pretend to know for sure that this is the reason, but it strikes me as very likely that the first generation that grew up watching violent, bloody movies and playing violent video games where the point is to walk around shooting people in the head became the first generation to routinely engage in violent bloody mass shootings where they walk around shooting people in the head.
I did enjoy NBK for it's groundbreaking luridness, but ultimately I think it glorifies guns and I don't endorse it.
shareI won't blame this particular movie, but I do have a pet theory that what was once unthinkable for the great majority of us is now imaginable. If we rarely ever heard about children being hurt, it might not occur to anyone to hurt a child, but now that genie has been let out of the bottle, and some can't help themselves from doing something ugly. Not to mention the NRA agenda to make sure we have easy availability of weapons of mass destruction. Send them your thank you cards.
shareI agree with your pet theory, but i dont think we should censor everything because of weak minded idiotsbeing influenced , we have to deal with it some other way.