Commentary by R. Tone Kister
I watched a Sonia Sotomayor interview on television this
past week with great interest. She has
written a book I may be interested in reading, but more to the point of this
letter.She stated in the interview that her values of today are primarily guided by what she read and watched as a child. When asked what she watched and read, she stated “Perry Mason and Nancy Drew”. The interviewer half-heartedly suggested that without Nancy and Perry we would not have Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice today. Her response indicated that was likely true.
Now what does that tell us and the world about inputting into children positive or negative influences? We did not have school or theater or church shootings on a regular basis 60 years ago. What changed? The schools, the guns, the ammo, or the people? Think about it. The people changed, and what changed them? The stuff that influences them! Quality-in \Quality out, junk-in / junk-out! Seem too simple? Denial is a most powerful emotion, but the truth is usually simple.
For the most part the games, television and books of our time preach bullying, violence, subterfuge, scheming, double-dealing, lying, cheating, killing, etc. Our moral values promoted in the movies and soap-operas are the exact opposite from good. Why is it so easy to understand positive input into children, works good. But negative isn’t proven to work bad?
Take away all the guns, 100%, and what will you bet the folks will build their own pipe bombs and take down the entire school or theater . . . And take pride in building it themselves! Just keep looking away from the source of changed attitudes, the media and we will turn ourselves into a police state with the same problems and no freedoms. Maybe we can stop the senseless killings from drunken driving or texting while driving, caused by outlawing motor vehicles. Take them all off the road, and the jerks can’t kill with ‘em. Problem solved???
Please wake up to what really must be done. Clean up the games, movies, commercials, books and whatever else is dragging us down as a society. Put quality back in our children’s minds and we will get quality out down the road. Sonia Sotomayor the only Hispanic Supreme Court Justice is living proof that it works
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A judge in Texas has released a teenage murder suspect's confession, in which he says the 2007 film "Halloween," by heavy metal musician and film director Rob Zombie, inspired him in the slaying of his mother and sister.
"While watching it I was amazed at how at ease the boy was during the murders and how little remorse he had afterword [sic]. I was thinking to myself it would be the same for me when I kill someone," 17-year-old Jake Evans wrote in his confession, according to a copy released on Thursday by Parker County Judge Graham Quisenberry.
According to police, Evans killed his 48-year-old mother, Jamie Evans, and his 15-year-old sister, Mallory, inside their upscale Aledo home Oct. 3, 2012. In a four-page written confession police said that Evans wrote hours after his arrest, he said he watched "Halloween" three times that week.
The 2007 film, which is both a prequel and remake of John Carpenter's 1978 film of the same name, highlights the early years of fictional serial killer Michael Myers. In the film, a 10-year-old Myers murders several people, including his older sister, his sister's boyfriend and his mother's boyfriend.
"After I watched the movie I put it back in the case and threw it in the trashcan so that people wouldn't think that it influenced me in any way," Evans wrote, according to police.
Violence like the massacre that happened in Aurora, Colo., today is a staple of action films, including Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. A similar, now haunting, scene unfurls in "The Dark Knight Rises" when a masked villain leads a violent gang into a packed football stadium and deploys guns and explosives on the unsuspecting crowd.
While there has been no indication as to the motives of James Holmes, the suspected 24-year-old shooter who is now in custody, new evidence suggests that he was inspired by the Batman series of comic books and/or movies.
Law enforcement sources confirmed to ABC News that Holmes said "I am the Joker" when apprehended by authorities. His hair was painted red, the same hair color of Heath Ledger's Joker at one point in 2008's "The Dark Knight." Holmes also booby-trapped his apartment, a favorite technique of the Joker.
Barry Loukaitis, 14, who killed a teacher and two classmates in 1996, loved the film Natural Born Killers, and identified with the kid "Jeremy" (in Pearl Jam's rock video),� who went to school to kill others and then himself.� Other kids have identified role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade as giving them the feeling they could act out on aggressive impulses. Two boys who killed the mother of one of them by stabbing her 45 times admitted that they'd been inspired by the teenage slasher movie, Scream.� One of them told a friend that the slayings in the film were "cool," and that "it was the perfect way to kill someone."
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