Oh no… it’s the INTERNET again!

Apparently the loner/loser who died after allegedly murdering a fellow student in Montreal had a website profile at “vampirefreaks.com” in which he said all kinds of darkly portentious things.

The CNN article ends with this choice paragraph:

AP reported that vampirefreaks.com came up in a murder investigation earlier this year. A 23-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl accusedin a triple murder in Medicine Hat, Alberta, had profiles on the Website.

Okay, let’s think about this for a second and make sure we’ve got the cart in front of the horse… the Internet has a website that caters to those with dark fantasies about death, cursedness, tragedy, and the goth perspective on the mortal condition, eh? And now we learn that some of these people commit suicide and/or murder?

Boy, howdy. Shut that site down NOW. Because people never killed people before they had websites where they could talk about it… did they?

Oh, wait. In 1989 there was a different shooting in Montreal in which 14 people were killed. That was pre-World-Wide-Web, for those of you keeping score at home.

There is no changing the fact that some people are twisted enough to act upon their mental instabilities in violent ways. Whether these people twisted themselves through substance abuse, or otherwise re-wired their pleasure centers so they can get off on the pain of others, it’s not the internet’s fault. I will concede that some of these people recruit, and they twist each other by goading each other into more and more depraved lines of thought, but don’t go trying to lay all the blame in one place. Had Kimveer Gill not had internet access, we’d probably be blaming his musical choices, the video games he played, or the trashy vampire novels he dogears. None of these things enable mass murder without the help of a sick and twisted person.

You cannot blame the bottom of the barrel for the things that sink to it.

Speaking of “enabled,” kudos to the police officers on the scene. It seems they were there on an unrelated call, observed suspcious behavior (gunman on campus? Shots fired? Hmmmm…) and engaged the suspect effectively and permanently.

15 thoughts on “Oh no… it’s the INTERNET again!”

  1. Blaming the internet for this is like blaming the library that shelves Mein Kampf for someone reading it and joining the white supremacist movement. (Of course, there are countries where they’re perfectly happy to do that, too.)

    It’s a means of disseminating information, knowledge, and entertainment. Not all of that information will necessarily be wholesome, and some of it will in fact be attractive to the mentally unstable/suicidal/homicidal/what-have-you.

    But I’ll bet the pro-censorship crowd everything I own that I can read Mein Kampf without becoming a Nazi, and that I can visit “vampirefreaks.com” every day without deciding to kill someone. And I would imagine the same holds true for the vast majority of people with access to either.

    Of course, there’s a problem of what to do with the very small portion of society that’s mentally ill enough to take suggestion from things like that easily. And I do think identifying them before they can harm someone is important – but not on the basis of what they read. There are much better behavioral profiles than that, but I’ll admit they’re harder to implement.

    1. of course you can read Mein Kampf

      without becoming a Nazi. if you can manage to get through it… i’ve tried, twice. it’s utter tripe.

      (it was sort of a “know your enemy” self-education project for me…)

  2. Amen to that.

    I’m amazed that the music one listens to, or websites you visit CAUSE your to kill…

    By that logic, I should have an impressive body count to my name. I’ve been slacking off, aooarently.

    I suppose it’s easier for parents to get on TV and say “The music caused my child to shoot fellow students” instead of what they should be saying, which is “We dropped the ball, and our kid turned into a killer…”


    –Sister Miriam Godwinson, “The Blessed Struggle”

  4. I count my efforts to avoid depressing news to be mostly successful, as I’d no idea about this story until you mentioned it, and still have no details that aren’t included here. 🙂

  5. Actually, it sounds like they are trying to blame it on his game playing. First I heard of the incident was on a gaming site because of that, because I apparently live under a rock.

  6. What ever can you mean Howard?

    Don’t you know that if you don’t pass those emails along to 15 different people within 15 minutes, something truly bad will happen to you?

    Don’t you realize that before guns, there was no such as homicide?

    Don’t you realize that before internet porn, there was no such thing as rape?

    Sheesh. For such an intellectual individual, you sure can be naive.

    Oh, damn…. stupid sarcasm button… left it on again…

    1. Before guns there was no war! All war started with Europeans stealing fireworks from peaceful Chinese scientists and making heat seeking missiles and gatling guns with them! That’s what started the rape of the New World that continues today with the plague and drug and violence induced slaughter of native Americans over the past several centuries! Only in Israel can you find such a tradition of violence – from the Western-funded Israeli oppressor-invaders that want to kill every peaceful native inhabitant of that land.

      Down with guns! Up with peace!

  7. Why is it every time someone goes nuts and kills a bunch of people, pundits are scrambling for an explanation that takes the blame off the sentient human who did the killing and onto some sort of inanimate object?

  8. gun registry

    One day after a shooting: Opposition leaders use the shooting to try and strengthen the failing gun registry. It must be kept no matter what the cost, they claim.

    Two days after a shooting: The guns used were all registered and legal. None of them change their minds, instead they are suddenly absent.

    Rinse and repeat.

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