Abstract This paper examines the main effects of media violence and attempts to determine if it provoked Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to go on a shooting rampage at their high school. It looks at how such effects as imitation and copying, triggered novel behaviors, disinhibtion and desensitization can all be applied to the background and lifestyle of the murderers.
From the Paper "Eric Harris has a website that openly expressed his anger towards his town and his high school. Some quotes from his website were, "God, I can't wait until I can kill you people," and " I'll just go to some downtown area in some big city and blow up and shoot everything I can." The two boys were tormented and picked on at school; they even told their classmate that they were going to seek revenge (Morris, 1999, p. 45). Harris and Klebold made a video for a class, where they were hit men who were hired out by people who were picked on to kill the people who picked on them. They used references in this video to the video game Doom, that they played and also referred to the movie, Pulp Fiction (Morris, 1999, p. 26). It is apparent that these young men were not stable; they idolized Nazism and praised Hitler. "
