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Jeff Lindsay is an author of Conquering Innovation Fatigue. See InnovationFatigue.com for more info.
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Saturday, September 16, 2006

 

Terror Averted in Green Bay: Police Foil Columbine-Like Plans of Troubled Teenagers

Northeastern Wisconsin barely escaped suffering a Columbine-like disaster at East High School in Green Bay, just 30 minutes north of Appleton. Thanks to a tip from another student, Green Bay police were able to stop two seventeen-year-olds, Shawn Ryan Sturtz and William Charles Cornell, who had prepared bombs and weapons to carry out a massacre at their suburban school. Details are in the WFRV story, "Green Bay Teens Were Obsessed With Columbine Massacre."

These students were truly into the dark side, being heavily into "Goth culture" and obsessed with thoughts of pain and death.

Even in seemingly healthy communities, kids can access all sorts of materials and influences that can bring them to become agents of destruction. More vigilance from parents and others is needed. We were tremendously lucky, but more problems may be brewing anywhere.

The dark and violent nature of video games, movies, and other forms of entertainment available online and through major media outlets can make it all the easier for the mentally unstable to go from troubled to demonic.

Parents, wake up. What kind of materials do you expose your kids to? What are they learning from the movies they watch and games they play? Are your children becoming psychopaths in your own home?
Comments:
The difference between this post, in which you quote news stories verbatim and don't bother to add such concepts as "innocent until proven guilty" or even the possibility that what the news reports and the charging documents allege, might not be the whole, or even true, story, contrasts sharply with your posts regarding charges against a local Hmong man. Why do you accept charges as written and news stories as broadcast in the case of the Green Bay teens, and criticize the same press in the Tor case? Why the double standard?
 
Sure, of course they are innocent until proven guilty. We don't know what they would have actually done - but it sure looks like something was wrong and the police involvement was needed.

In this case, it's not just an allegation without further evidence that resulted in the flare up. The kids did have weapons. Other people heard them discussing plans. Is there any reason to question whether there should have been an arrest?

For the Hmong man, I am close enough to the story to know that there are some serious problems with the story as reported, to know the positive reputation that the man has, and to know that there are significant racial issues involved.

It's not a double standard, but a matter of different levels of evidence plus additional familiarity with one of the cases.

If you are aware of reasons why the boys should not have been arrested, why they allegations are questionable, and why the whole case is a hatchet job based on bigotry against white teenage boys or something, then please share you information. In the absence of such information, I'm not aware of any reason to doubt the basic elements of the Green Bay story, but there is plenty to question in the racially charged Hmong story.
 
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