am on Sydney time, hence delay in response.
this series of murders cannot in any way be sheeted home and lumped in with school shootings, except on the very shaky ground that the ages of the perpetrators is similar. And, I suppose, the fact that they both had left school, which is , I gather, a trait, somewhat of some school shooters.
These were young men who were on an adventure. They said so. They claimed they were off to Yukon for work, or Whitehorse.. It had nothing to do with their school, or the underlying 'causes' that 'multitudes ' of researchers say on this topic, and I might add, most of the research is done by Americans, about Americans, because that is where these school shootings, in the main , occur, despite one in Finland last year. If anything, once the political aspect is removed, it has more to mirror in the antics of Breivik in Norway than any school shooting in the USA. Random victims, but in Breiviks case, not a random location.
Therefore, it just isn't logical to transpose that research, into that subject, into these murders and these two murderers. They had no connection whatsoever to their eventual victims, nor to the location , which appears to be random to both killers and victims. Totally random. Nothing to read or extract from a school shooting, or a mall shooting , for that matter into this event.
In many ways, it is surprising that Kam and Bry chose to do their killing on the lonely highway, without an audience, without the expectation of a 'statement of intent' , without the hue and cry of far more potential victims.
And like Breivik, like the kid in Finland, like the bloke in Charlotte, like the mall shooter in Dayton, like ( and so on and so on ) all white males, all having been well fed and housed and clothed and compulsorily educated , in the Western philosophy and tradition
and in the main, educated quite professionally for at least 12 years of their lives, unlike, as I can say with utter accuracy, billions of young men around the world. Billions. They had , despite parents divorcing , which is certainly the norm , more than parents staying to gether, really, a protected life in comparison.
Since this kind of thing has been going on for a very long time , (remember the one girl who was a perpetrator decades ago, the girl from the song " I don't like Monday' by the Boomtown rats? So far, she is the only female school shooter ) , it doesn't seem that research has got very far, the same old 'causes' are trotted out. The mothers is the first howl, usually, then video games, then horror DVDs , then the School, wherever it may be , then the brutality of teenage friends who pick on this sad child, then the 'system' and somewhere some one says 'what about the fathers?" and that's quickly moved on from, then the Government, then the voters, then the doctors, and then it's back to the Mothers fault, again.
