The recent shooting massacre at Virginia Tech has had many searching for a reason behind the actions of Seung-Hui Cho. While some have automatically blamed video games as the cause for violent events such as those which occurred at Columbine and VT, another theory has been proposed by others. The shooters were the victims of being bullied.
Michele Santos, an education physiologist, said, "The profiles of school shooters Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, show a disturbing commonality: They were bullied by their classmates, sometimes for years."
Santos continued, "The best study ever on school shooters was done by the Secret Service.They looked at every school shooter to see if they could profile who the next shooter would be. Almost always they were boys. Almost always they were middle class. They had an easy accessibility to guns. The only commonality for every kid was that he’d been unmercifully bullied from a very early age."
Rockstar released Bully in 2006 under a firestorm of protests and complaints from children advocacy groups who said the game glorified the actions of bullies and was sending the wrong message to those who played the game — that bullying was acceptable behavior.
The comments by Santos shed new light on the motives for school shootings — it’s the people who bullied the shooters that may have planted the seed of anger in these individuals and not the playing of video games.
[via MSN]
