Turn on the TV this morning and the first thing that's on is a story about a teen gunman shooting four people at a US school. Apparently the 14-year-old had been upset about being suspended from the school, SuccessTech Academy, the day before. He killed himself after shooting four people. According to one report, he had spoken in the days prior to doing it about coming in and "shooting up the school."

And according to the news people this morning, he wore a trench coat. AND was a fan of Marilyn Manson. As if suddenly it's Marilyn Manson's fault the shootings occurred. Unless Marilyn Manson is actually the child's parent, I kind of fail to see how he could be linked to it... Particularly when I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who have a bit of a soft spot for the man of the odd eye who have somehow managed to restrain themselves from grabbing some weaponry and blasting away at everything in sight. It's like after the Columbine massacre with Marilyn Manson and Rammstein and The Prodigy copping blame for "violence."

As for the trench coat thing, okay. I can see why people would feel like he's channelling Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but it's also coming into the cooler season in the Northern Hemisphere and the trench coat phobia is making me wonder whether people in Melbourne I see in wearing them should make me worry about whether they're about to whip out a pistol. Or something... Also, what about the popularity of the awful Stella McCartney trench coats in the line she did for Target? When will this madness end!?

On a more serious note, why don't they look at what might have actually caused it, rather than knee-jerk-edly blaming music and trench coats? It reminds me of the thing with blaming "emo" for the suicides of Stephanie Gestier and Jodie Gater. And if you're not careful, the dreaded "emo" would come for your kids, too, apparently. It wasn't that they'd apparently suffered some pretty serious bullying at the school they'd attended, which had failed to deal with the issue, and they'd both been depressed.

Apparently the kid who did the shootings at SuccessTech had been involved in fisticuffs (it's my word of the week, apparently) with other kids at the school before. Maybe he'd been bullied, maybe he was depressed... Maybe the apparent readily-available nature of guns with that whole constitutional "bearing arms" thing that contributes somewhat. To paraphrase Dylan Moran (because I haven't watched Monster for a while), "When these school shootings happen in the US, everyone goes, 'Oh, this is horrible, dreadful, HOW could this happen!?' Well... Everybody has guns there. And guns only have a limited range of household possibilities. Unlike a Californian wine, say, which you could use to clean submarines..."

Instead of making misguided judgments and scapegoats and villains from things that really aren't to blame, perhaps it would be better to take a serious look at the factors contributing to such tragic actions. If the problems that can lead to these sort of things occurring are dealt with instead of dying with the victims and occasionally the perpetrators, maybe it could help prevent these things happening.

Surely the majority of these things don't happen without some kind of "cause" that's been compounded over time, which could possibly have been dealt with positively, rather than it being some brainsnap psychotic episode?