Music And The Columbine Traged Essay Research

Music And The Columbine Traged Essay, Research Paper

Music, Society, and the Columbine High School Tragedy

By Adam Salomon

Violence, it is the last resort of the oppressed. Since biblical times, it has also played the lead role in many events, starting with the murder of Abel by Cain. Religious wars, that still exist to this day, have broken out across the world due to oppression. The act of showing furious outrage has become part of the human nature, yet it has drawn a fine line between what is morally right and what is wrong. Within the past couple of years though, that line has blurred significantly. What was once considered as intolerable behavior has become an everyday occurrence, and we are bombarded with it on a daily basis. One can not pick a newspaper up without noticing an article about murder or an abusive child care worker. Violence has reached the level where we, as human beings, are not bothered by it anymore, although cartoons and video games depict it, and movies are based on violent behavior. One can even claim that violence has corrupted the music industry because bands such as Vicious Circle, Moral Anxiety, Bone Orchard, and Simple Aggression are writing music that youths are attracted to. The names of these bands, alone, are enough to make the light-hearted cringe. However, in the wake of the recent tragedy that transpired at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, people have been placing the blame on heavy metal music, rather than the true catalyst of the event. It is wrong to single out an entire genre of music and put words in people’s mouths because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the gunmen in the incident, apparently listened to metal. There are many factors that could cause an event of this magnitude, but music is not a true catalyst. The general population is trying to patch society’s holes, rather than attempting to cure its ills by pointing fingers at things they don’t understand.

Within the past couple of years, the number of school shootings in the United States has risen dramatically. In February, 1996, Barry Loukaitis, a ninth grade student who was continuously teased, arrived to Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington dressed in black and armed with a rifle gun. By the end of this school rampage, two students and a teacher had lost their lives. As unfavorable and vile as this shooting seemed at the time, it was only the beginning.

Two fatal shootings occurred in 1997. In October, Luke Woodham, then sixteen, killed his mother, went to his high school in Pearl, Mississippi with a gun, and shot nine students. Two of them had died during the rampage. Two months later, during the holiday season, three students were killed, and five injured, as a Michael Carneal, fourteen, brought a gun to a West Paducah, Kentucky school and started shooting in the hallway.

In March, 1998, the death toll reached five during a shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The shooting occurred when Andrew Golden, eleven, and Mitchell Johnson, thirteen, pulled the fire alarm and waited in a nearby woods for the student population to make their way out of the building. Once they had a clear view of the students, they opened fire and claimed the lives of four girls and a teacher. Three other shootings occurred that year, including a shooting at a Fayetteville, Tennessee high school parking lot on May 19th. However, only two days later in Springfield, Oregon, two teen-agers were killed and more than twenty injured when Kip Kinkel, then fifteen, opened fire at his high school. In addition, Kip’s parents were found dead at their home.

There aren’t always warning signs before such an event takes place, though. Within these six school shootings, only three of the killers showed signs of aggression beforehand. Barry Loukaitis, who opened fire at his school in Moses Lake, Washington, wrote poetry about killing with the “ruthlessness of a machine” weeks before the incident. Kip Kinkel, who murdered his parents, then some students at his school in Springfield, Oregon, told a class that he dreamed of becoming a killer. Finally, Mitchell Johnson, the gunman at Jonesboro, became more aggressive in nature after his parents’ divorce in 1994. “He started talking back and always pushed the limits,” recalled his father, Scott. Mitchell saw a therapist on one occasion after the divorce. However, his mother, Gretchen, asserts, “…A therapist for what. This is a little boy who played football and basketball. He loved school and wasn’t on any drugs.” To this day, she doesn’t understand why her son resorted to murder, though many continued to speculate that violence in the music that Mitchell listened to contributed to such actions.

“Perhaps the reasons for such tragedies are right under all our noses and we just don’t want to see it,” explains Eric Johns, a member of the heavy metal band Simple Aggression, and, “We don’t want to believe that the society we raise our children in is somehow flawed.” The unfortunate truth is, there are numerous flaws, many of them brought upon by our very own parents, as in the case of Mitchell Johnson. The child is left with no one to trust, and thus relies on music to get him or her through the darkest of times.

The music of bands such as Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, and more recently, Marilyn Manson, have provided the perfect escape from reality, a reality that some children and teenager