But millions of people have already "handed over the keys to their brains"
and, the fact is, showing the faces of murderers prompts copycats. There
would be no "copycat killers" if they weren't handed a role model by
somebody selling them ads.

Earlier this month a kid in Oregon fired a rifle into a high school. Later
he said he was inspired by a documentary about Columbine. That's what I'm
getting at: Kids who idolize symbolic antiheroes will emulate them to
capture the same 15 minutes of fame.

I see it the other way around. People are responsible for their own
actions. If they have handed over the keys to their brains, they are
responsible for the result. (Despite the fact that we have to live with
it). But handing over the keys to our brains is exactly what you seem
to be proposing.

Your theme seems to be that we can't do it (properly) ourselves, because
we are making "bad" choices. Who is going to decide what's a bad
choice? Government? The Pope? The PTA? The League of Parents of
Small Children? Gatt himself? We already have too much meddling in our
private lives by the superstitious, the power hungry, the righteous, the
misguided, and the stupid.

The scariest video I've ever seen was a short clip about kidnapping. A
car drives up to a kid and asks where Mulberry street is. The kid goes
up to the car to answer, and inside of a few seconds the back door
opens, somebody snatches the kid, and the car drives away.

What was scary was not that kidnapping is so easy, but rather, the
message which followed, which was that kids should run screaming if
somebody drives up and asks directions. It turns kids into assholes who
are so disconnected from society and so mistrusting of those around that
they will grow up into people who would think nothing of firing a rifle
into a crowd at school.

That was twenty years ago. Those kids have grown up now.

Jose
--
Get high on gasoline: fly an airplane.
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