TEEN MURDERER LOVES SAUCY GERMAN VOCALIST
I don’t mean to make light of such a serious subject, but the “here we go again”-ness of this whole situation strikes me as being absurd to the point of being funny.
Bobby Gladden, a fifteen year-old who is the latest dickhead to shoot people for no apparent reason (he opened fire in the cafeteria of his Baltimore high school on the first day of class, killing one classmate and critically wounding another before a teacher, who definitely deserves some kind of educator’s award, managed to subdue him), apparently really liked Rammstein. His Facebook page — which, as of this writing, hasn’t been shut down for some reason — features a big, crazy-looking picture of Till Lindemann as the cover photo, and the following quote from the vocalist: “Love is like a flower, even the most beautiful kind dies.” In the “About” section, Gladden proclaims, “im a metalhead, and thats about it.” He also proclaims that he liked to go by the handle “SuicidalSmile,” loves The Manson Family, and only has twelve friends. The last status update the kid posted before opening fire reads:
How do any of these things add up? I don’t think they do. Like, at all.
To wit: I recently watched a TED Talk with Dr. Jim Fallon (not this guy) in which he asserted that violent and murderous individuals a) all have the same kind of frontal lobe brain damage that makes them physically immune to serotonin, the chemical that makes people feel calm and, y’know, not like murdering assholes, and b) were all exposed to a traumatic, violent event at a young age “in 3D” — meaning right in front of their eyes. Assuming Dr. Fallon is correct — and I have no reason to doubt him, ’cause fuck do I know about this shit? — than the things that a kid like Bobby Gladden likes are completely incidental, because he is a product of his environment and a genetic predisposition towards terrible behavior. It’s the combination of the two that made him into what he is — not simply one or the other. Put another way: he could be sitting around listening to Sondheim all day long and he might still feel the urge to kill everyone in the vicinity.
But you already knew that there was no connection between Rammstein and violence. I mean, Kraftwerk, maybe, but not Rammstein.
So why are we even starting down this road of discussing the passions of Bobby Gladden, adolescent killer?
Like I said: the “here we go again”-ness of this whole situation strikes me as being absurd to the point of being funny. Even if what Bobby Gladden did is anything but.
-AR
[The NY Daily News by way of Metal Insider]
