I hadn't seen Mark's piece on Alternet. My bad on that one. And what can I say, I absolutely agree with him, even if you label it 'perfidious nonsense' - funnily enough, that denunciation doesn't do anything to dissuade me. I'd like to once again emphasize the distinction between an explanation and a justification. That the horrible abuse Cho suffered in high school was a cause of his rampage should be OBVIOUS to anyone who can think at all. A recognition of this fact should precede all other discussion.

By the way, Francois, something to think about is the notion that guns have always been easily accessible in America, probably even more so in the past than now. And yet, these school and workplace shootings only began about 25 years ago. What changed? Is it just that more 'insane' people are somehow being bred these days?

Michael, I'd like to try to answer your questions as best as I can.

"I wonder how you account for that open solicitation to hunt down and then post the address of one of the Columbine survivors"

Well, I thought it was very funny, for one thing. Novel ideas are hard to come by in American journalism. It was a joke. Rocky's address never got published, though it very well could've been. It might interest you to know that Rocky sent Ames a death threat as a result of that piece. Ames published it all on the eXile.

"or Ames's comparison of Klebold and Harris to John Brown and Nat Turner"

This is where it gets tricky, I agree. However, I didn't read it as a straight up comparison. I read it mostly as an attempt to demonstrate that just because society deems someone "insane" doesn't necessarily make it so. I found his critique of words like 'insane' 'evil' and 'weird', unlike you, extremely compelling and genuine. Anyway, I don't want you to think I'm ducking this question. I thought his argument on this point was plausible but not convincing. And I questioned him on this in my review. It's an intellectual provocation, not really a conviction, that's how I see it. I believe these rampage artists are reacting and responding to a fundamentally unjust society, but because that's vague in comparison to a more specific menace such as the institution of slavery, this is an obviously vulnerable point. However, I think it's reasonable to assume that most white Americans didn't know what the hell to make of John Brown and Nat Turner, just as they are now extremely baffled by someone like Eric Harris. It wasn't at all clear at the time that Brown and/or Turner were staging protests against the unjust practice of slavery, which is why their actions were considered "crazy" - when people don't understand something or someone, they tend to dismiss them as madmen because it's the easiest and most convenient thing to do.

"Indeed, you cite approvingly that fetid eXile contest to disclose the current address of Rocky Hoffschneider as though it were a tribute to Ames's moral rectitude."

I would never try to comment on someone's "moral rectitude" principally because I don't really believe in the concept of morality. We are all seriously flawed individuals who do and say a lot of stupid things. I think the bottom line here is that nobody was physically harmed by Ames's article. As the former editor of comic magazine, I'm surprised you take so much offense to this one bit.

When Columbine happened, I was definitely not surprised. I saw kids getting abused in high school, and the whole thing sort of made sense to me. And millions of other kids understood it also. But these seditious thoughts are conveniently suppressed and ignored.

"You write that the "evil" he represented -- as the stereotypical adolescent male of Middle American suburbia -- was greater than that of what Harris did, so you're saying that uttering vicious anti-Semitic taunts and shoving one's girlfriend in a locker is worse than murdering 12 students and a teacher, and wounding 24 others. Do you still stand behind this proposition?"

Well, this is a distortion of what I wrote. But the answer to the question is yes. The Rocky Hoffschneiders of the world are still on top, and probably even gaining in strength. The Onion satire hit the nail on the head. Because instead of trying to learn from Columbine, Americans were content to just ignore it as the doings of a couple of crazies, and the non-debate about gun control and video games ensued. Like Cho, Eric Harris made his grievances well known, but they were automatically dismissed because taking them seriously would fundamentally challenge the norms of American society. It's too much for normal people to wrap their brains around. Cho's media package to NBC was deemed irrelevant to the police investigation! So even when the evidence was staring these people straight in the face, it doesn't have an impact. And this just means that shootings will continue until underlying causes, rather than band-aid remedies, are addressed.

School and workplace shooters are most certainly 'made' rather than 'born'. It takes years of abuse to set people off. Many of them are quite simply revenge killings, with fed up or terminated workers going straight after their bosses.

One thing you completely ignore is the fact that America is at the center of this phenomenon. Why do these shootings occur predominantly in America, and why now as compared to, say, 50 years ago? Canada has lax gun laws, and yet these events are virtually unknown up there. How do you explain this?

At the very least, Ames took these questions on, while great thinkers like Christopher Hitchens blew them off. Hitchens' critique of the pseudo-sentimentality surrounding the VT shootings was spot on, but he completely dropped the ball by asserting that the thing was "random and pointless" and had "no implications beyond itself". In other words, there's no explanation for it. Yeah, right. That's just not good enough for me, sorry. I've lived too long and seen too much to buy into that.

Grueter