Sinful Brotherhoods

Wretchard at The Belmont Club has a good point here:

Over the past few days the US has experienced an epidemic of threats on schools by Cho wannabees, each swearing to break some kind of sick record for psychosis. The spike in these incidents is interesting because they resemble the outcome of a controlled experiment. The numbers of guns out there has not varied much in the last week, but the media coverage of such deranged acts has. The one factor has been held constant while the other has been varied. And the results are strongly suggestive of what my childhood confessors used to emphasize: that bad thoughts have consequences.

The endless, voracious, amoral news cycle and the unfathomable diversity of the Internet made "bad thoughts" into mere thoughts. No matter how despicable your behavior of choice, you can find "objective" news reports about it and scores of web sites and forums of like-minded perverts.

Give the subgroup of "like-minded perverts who want to commit mass anger-killings" the excitement of seeing one of their own glorified -- a nebbish turned into Psycho Killer God -- and watch what happens.

Give another subgroup "like-minded perverts who want to rape pre-pubescent boys" web sites that celebrate their sickness and media who cover the North American Man-Boy Love Association as if they were just another spokesman -- and you know there will be innocent victims aplenty.

It is the new reality, and it's happening at a time when morality and ethics are no longer taught in school, and psychology stands ready to explain away crime or shift blame, and judges who lost their common sense to liberalism stand ready to buy the psychologists' excuses.

It's easier of course to just blame guns and the culture. But that ignores Wretchard's simple test: There weren't suddenly more guns, there was only a sudden burst of all the wrong media coverage.