Violent Culture

Violent Culture: The Media, The Internet, and Placing Blame, a paper written by Darren Beals depicts a cruel and brutal case. The paper tells of a young Kip Kinkel and how the media and internet helped this brutally savage teenager get his resources to act out a very hennas crime. Kip Kinkel rouse to fame one morning in 1998, after killing his parents and using an arsenal of weaponry to murder some of his fellow classmates.

Many parents, school teachers and the various broadcast media have past on the blame to unusual source, the internet. They do so for giving kip such valuable resources and information about guns and explosives. It seems that the help from the internet was not directly to blame, but merrily gave suggestions in how to accomplish his goal. I don't believe that the internet was the reason that these violent and disturbing acts happened, but I do agree with Darren Beals when he said "We can't keep pointing fingers, while avoiding the real issue-our national culture of violence" (150).

The internet has always been a valuable resource for information on every subject known to man. Search engines are a way to search the web for various subjects and definitions. A very popular site is called Yahoo.com and you can find what ever you are looking for. I wanted to do some of my own investigating and found by typing the query "Explosives" at Yahoo it yielded a result of 294,000 possible internet sites. I choose this method of research because Darren Beals discovered a similar result, "A quick Altavista word search yields 121,470 matches to the word query "gun types" (149). These examples only show what the internet has to offer kids like Kip, but a deeper look will show the dark side of this information highway.

Many sites can give you all the info you need to create a very large arsenal of your own, I found Nodoze.net by clicking on the first web link available out of the 294,000 web sites listed in my search. This site contains plenty of facts on anything controversial, Nodoze.Net say's "Unlike the dodgy "Cook Book", we have hundreds of individual documents and reports related to different explosive, most of which can be manufactured at home" (Nodoze Networks). "Access