Somehow everyone I knew in my Jr. High School understood which ones were fiction and which were not. We had things called movies too. I don't remember kids stabbing each other to try to get Freddie Kruger to approve of them though. Just because fiction is on the web doesn't make it any less fiction and by age 12, shouldn't kids know the difference?

I think that this should wake people up to the fact that psychopathy doesn't have an age limit like driving or drinking alcohol. You don't have to reach a certain age milestone to have it.

And we would hang out together, exchanging stories about movies that we saw and books that we read.

The only danger of Dungeons and Dragins was to my love life.

He's a Republican now, but otherwise a decent human being.

I'm not certain they can be rehabilitated.

The DA who charged them as adults is running for AG, BTW

did the kids parents, you know, actually engage themselves into their kids lives?

wouldn't more of these types of incidents be happening if the internet was the soul cause of this?

I really get tired of bad sensational reporting.

I don't think that kids should be in a closed room without anyone knowing what website they visit, with whom they communicate.

I think that it started with Columbine, through Sandy Hook and up to Santa Cruz: disturbed kids and young adults collect information and warp it in their minds without their parents having any inclination.

Yes, I am a dinosaur. When I was a kid, and even with the next generation, there was no such thing as a kid behind a closed door when no one knows what he was doing.

(Houses then were different; we did not always have those tiny tiny individual rooms per kid; often had to share it with a sibling or with an elderly family member who could not live alone).

if you don't have a good relationship with your child, then the child doesn't feel safe to discuss things with you or you with them.

again, blaming the internet is treating the symptom and not the cause.

blaming the family where kids are allowed to watch (and read) whatever they want without any parental direction and, yes, supervision.

I am an old baby boomers. We were under tight control. Our parents were not our friends and then we grew up and we rebelled and, I think, we were better adults, fighting to create a better society.

cheers!

because there weren't cell phones and we were pretty much allowed to roam around during the day as we wished as long as we were home for dinner. That didn't turn us into homicidal maniacs however. I wouldn't be surprised to find out down the road that at least one of these girls is seriously mentally ill (maybe both - Waukesha is a big suburban area and kids who have issues tend to find each other).

That said as a parent today you do have to be a little savvy with the devices. My husband tracks what my kids do on line and I agree w/you on the privacy issue - there are no locks on the bedroom doors and I walk in whenever I please to see what they are up to ... but I do think these girls are beyond that level of intervention.

slightly odd. The idea seems to be that there is some kind of "faking" going on regarding whether these children were delusional.

They carried out a cold-blooded murder plot and stabbed another child nearly to death.

So, what ... they're NOT delusional?

It just seems that when someone does something disturbed that is ALSO evil and destructive, there's a huge impulse to deny the behavior is disturbed in the first place, lest we blunt the case for vengeance.

It's not a question of whether the internet "caused" anything either. People don't become disturbed because they become obsessed with an image or an idea. They become obsessed with an image or idea because they're disturbed. Or, the two feed each other.

There's probably not going to be a simple answer here.

Otherwise we'd have to blame these attacks on video games, heavy metal music, pornography or reefer.

and supervision.

If 12 year old girls are planning killing; if 17 year old boys collect guns and are planning attack on their schools the same question should be asked: where are/were the parents.

And parental involvement can be compromised by the demands of economic reality, where parents have to work multiple jobs or irregular hours or both.

It's a sad situation driven by complicated factors, while the media simply wants to focus on the tried-and-true easy answers.

Clearly you don't care about kids these days.

Fluoridation of water.