Pulled Quotes

With so much death happening all around us, it hurts me even more to see a story about children choking themselves to get a ‘high’ feeling.  Janet Kornblum, in the USA Today article does a great job of reporting the story.  Not only does she give a first hand account of the death of a child through this dangerous games she gives clear warning signs and what is being done to prevent this from happening. 

I am curious to know how investigators can decide whether the death was due to the game or a suicide.  It mentions it in the article but does not go into depth.  Out of the 82 youths that have died, how do they know half weren’t suicide.  In that case, although still dangerous, this choking game may not be as rampant as we think.  I am not sure if she should have included the information about autoerotic asphyxiation and self-strangulation during masturbation.  The reports did not have information pertaining to these two things, so it leaves me with more questions.  This leaves more possibilities to why these kids are dying, they may be suicidal or horny teenagers!

One thing that really bothered me about the story was when the mother said her son did not like to drink or smoke.  Of course, he was only 13.  Which kids are drinking earlier and earlier, but I don’t think any of them particularly like it.  It is more from peer pressure. Also, if she didn’t know he had been choking himself for pleasure, how did she know he didn’t drink or do drugs?  Although hard for a grieving parent to answer, I think these answers would have been interesting to hear. 

I also question whether more light that is shed on this subject will cause more children to want to do it.  She said there were youtube videos of kids doing this.  Maybe a good follow-up story would be interviewing these kids on youtube, or even why these videos are allowed online.   Hopefully children are getting more ideas by seeing this article.  Curiosity sometimes gets the best of us, so journalists need to be careful reporting stories like this.

Overall, this was a very informative article.  Kornblum gives the slang terms, such as space monkey, which allows the out of the loop parents to know what their kids may be talking about.  She also gives the warning signs and what people are doing about preventing these deaths. 

     It was less than a year ago when over thirty college students were killed at Virginia Tech. There was a suicide on Stetson’s campus last month, an attempted suicide last week, and an off-campus suicide yesterday. What is going ON?
     Now it came to my attention that there was a shooting at Northern Illinois University on Thursday. Though the first article in USA Today did not give a lot of details about the shooter, an online article from USA Today’s website shed more light on the man who killed five students and then himself. 
      Steven Kazmierczak, 27, a relatively recent graduate from NIU, had purchased  handgun accessories, oddly enough, from the same Internet dealer that the Virginia Tech shooter dealt with. I want to know, first of all, if the site is going to have to undergo any changes or regulations so that this doesn’t happen again. I don’t know for sure, but could a site like that do a background check before selling their weaponry?
       Police are looking to talk to Kazmierczak’s girlfriend to see if they were having probelms or had recently broken up. I am anxious to follow the investigation to see if, in fact, that was a possible motive for his murder/suicide. Because of Kazmierczak’s suicide, it will be harder for police to determine his motive, but I am optimistic that they will get some good leads as to why he chose to come back to his alma mater and kill himself and others.
          On a separate journalistic note, I have to add that the lead from the online article  (Victims of Thursday’s shootings at Northern Illinois University were mourned Saturday as the search for explanations for the rampage continued and memories of last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech were revived) and the lead from the Friday/Saturday/Sunday print edition (DEKALB, Ill. — Students crawled, hid and ran in terror from a man dressed in black who appeared from behind a screen at a lecture hall Thursday at a university west of Chicago and blasted students with gunfire before killing himself in a melee that was over in less than two minutes, school officials said) were both very good.