Tuesday, 04 March 2008 // General
Jeff Weise's Newgrounds Profile
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Newgrounds profile of Jeff Weise, the kid who committed one of the many school shootings in 2005: http://regret.newgrounds.com/
There are a few reasons why this is interesting and unsettling.
First of all, if you read anything that he wrote or just watch his short Flash animations, anybody not attuned to the world of teenagers of this generation would say that this stuff was "obviously" an indication of a school shooting and that it's astonishing that nobody noticed this and "did something about it." Ignoring, of course, the thousands of other nearly-identical videos, Livejournals, and forum posts, and the people who produce them every day but don't shoot up their schools. I know it usually takes about a hundred more repetitions than it should before people as a whole finally figure something out, but they still don't get that.
The unsettling part to me is just the way that he doesn't seem at all unusual. Looking at this profile, it's hard to believe he DID go through with it. I don't mean that in contrast to the former paragraph of this being a "warning sign" of violence; it's just hard to believe this was his pinnacle, this is what he was at the end, and he really is gone. This is all that's left: Livejournal and Newgrounds profiles that he made as a hobby or a personal cathartic outlet because you can't say these things outside of the internet, or maybe just to make friends with an antisocial image. He's just a Newgrounds kid, stuck in time.
Will people look at this in 50 years and have any idea what this was about? Or will they dissect it and detect "clues" invented by their own wild imaginations?
And if any of us went and shot a bunch of people, what would they say, and what would they leave around?
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