I couldn't find any appropriate forum for this, so i suppose i'll put this here. Stephen King wrote a novel called Rage when he was in highschool/college, and later published it under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The book is about a mentally unstable high school student who holds his class hostage and shoots a teacher. He wrote this before any school shooting had taken place. Then school shooting actually started happening, and King pulled the book out of print because he feared it would inspire similari incidents. Several shooters actually quoted the novel during the shootings, and some even had it with them. Is Stephen King responsible for the shootings? Also, I have wanted to read this book for over a year, but the only way to get it that i know of is on Amazon for $300. I checked my library, but it's not there. HOW CAN I GET MY HANDS ON IT?!
Obviously Stephen King isn't responsible for the shootings. I hope that wasn't a serious question. If your library doesn't have it, or any other libraries around you, the only way to get your hands on it is to buy it
its in a collective book called "the bachman books" there are 4 or 5 stories in there that he did under that name..... i read it years ago....well worth picking up! the long walk and road work are the two that come to mind other then rage...
obviously he's not responsible. the morons who did the shootings are the only ones who can be held responsible. and look on ebay, i just did a quick check and found the spanish version lol
Yes the book is responsible. With great power comes great responsibility. The book was obviously not capable of interpreting that as you can see.
Kind of a silly question, of course he's not responsible. Are the writers of The Lone Gunman responsible for 9/11??
If you can't get your hands on a physical copy, there is an audio / ebook version floating around on the web, google should be able to point you in the right direction.
Aha. The post I was waiting for. Then why is it cool to hate on the Bible, or the Koran, or the Talmud, or the Doctrine and Covenants, or any other religious book when it comes to religious people acting like fools? (I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just trying to get people to see this) I guarantee if you conducted a study, and asked 100 people whether they thought this book the OP is talking about caused the Columbine shootings, and then a year later sent out another survey asking people if the Koran caused the 9/11 attacks, that the former survey would be answered in the negative more times then not, while the latter would be answered in the positive more times than not. Hell, I've seen this exact sentiment on this board a million times. Double standards are cool, aren't they?
I hadn't considered that, although I agree with you completely. I certainly wouldn't say that Rage was responsible, nor would I say the Koran was responsible, although I do think texts like The Bible etc should be held to more account in things like this than novels / short stories, strictly on the basis that so many people invest so much of their lives in those writings, that they have a direct impact on the way many think about and view the world.
Remember Mark David Chapman and "The Catcher in the Rye?" People can certainly hold novels/short stories in the same regard as religious people do their scriptures. That's all I'm saying
You make a good point, but a novel and a religious text are two very different things. The Bible/Koran/etc give people guidelines to live their lives by. The Bible explicitly tells people what they can and cannot do, a novel is simply - well you know what a novel is. That being said, I don't blame the religious texts on the stupid things religious people do - I hold the people and the organization responsible, so I do agree with you. It's just that when you are told your whole life you will go to hell if you don't obey the rules of a book, well, that cannot be compared to reading a novel and taking actions based on the thoughts that novel brought out in you - you feel me? I don't know if I explained that well.
Mark David Chapman and the Catcher in the Rye, and Riligeous Scripture are different. I'm saying that in Rage, the character takes a gun and shoots up his school. The students who did this in real life read the book, looked at their own miserable lives, and decided that wasn't a bad idea. The Catcher in the Rye isn't about a man who kills a celebrity. The Koran isn't about flying planes into buildings. People looked at those works and distorted them with their own twisted minds. Yeah, King didn't pull the trigger himself, but he gave the direct inspiration, intentionally or not.
yes, he IS partly responsible... as are the people who published and printed the book, stephen kings parents, the parents and other people associated with the shooters, as are the people who invented the gun, people who manufacture guns, and the people who directly provided the guns to the shooters. and so on.
I've read books with rape scenes in them, if I go out and rape and blame the book should the author be scrutinized? It doesn't matter if the person emulated exactly what happened in the book, the author is not at fault whatsoever. Should we censor books with violent protagonists in them?
No, he is no more responsible for school shootings than the movie HEAT is for the North Hollywood shootout. Also, there were school shootings before King published those works. Big one that comes to mind is the San Diego shootings in 1979. I think a better question is why these incidents have exploded in frequency starting in the 1990's.