11 Year Old in Mexico, Tells Classmates, "Today is the day" then opens fire.

[Stuart G]

Source: CNN

CNN) — A teacher was killed and six other people injured when an 11-year-old student opened fire Friday at a private school in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, officials said.

The shooter, a sixth-grader armed with two guns, also died, said Adelaido Flores, the regional coordinator for public safety in Coahuila, near the Texas border.

Coahuila Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme told reporters that classmates said the boy was generally well behaved but voiced a strange warning before his rampage on Friday.

"He told some classmates, 'Today is the day,' " Riquelme said.

Shortly after 8 a.m., the student asked to use the restroom. After about 15 minutes, the teacher went to look for him and found him leaving the restroom with weapons in hand, the governor said.

Riquelme said authorities believe the boy was influenced by the video game Natural Selection, a first-person shooting game. He said the boy was wearing a undershirt emblazoned with the game's name.

"He had mentioned the video game, which I believe he tried to recreate today," the governor said.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/10/americas/mexico-coahuila-school-shooting/index.html

[usaf-vet]

1. I'm retired from the computer industry. Two things that were not allowed in our house.

1. Violent video / movies
2. Computer games.

Granted our kids are now in their late 30s to mid-'40s and today there are far more games and devices to play games.

But when I read a report in the late 1980s that showed that the military was using video games in some of their recruit evaluations and advanced training schools. I decided that was not a good sign of things to come.

Two examples:
We now have lethal drones being flown from remote locations tens of thousands of miles away.
Graphic shoot and kill videos desensitize the user to death and violence. As many studies have shown.

[Stuart G]

2. Thank You for your insight...appreciate your post on this subject. ..no text..

[usaf-vet]

3. You are welcome.

[Talitha]

4. Have you ever seen 'The Last Starfighter' (1984)?

In the film, an alien defense force plants arcade games on Earth in order to discover if there is anyone here who's skilled enough to help them fight in an interstellar war. It was a novel idea for a film but even back then, I suspected our military would find such talent useful.

[mr_lebowski]

7. I've been watching violent movies and playing computer games since I was pretty young

And I've never even been in a fight. Don't own a gun. Have zero violent tendencies whatsoever.

Granted, this is anecdotal evidence, but I know lots of other people with the same experience.

Also, it obviously might not work the same way for people who are born w/a screw loose.

There are ratings on movies and games for just this very concern.

[usaf-vet]

9. Some people will live an entire lifetime without ever getting cancer. Other will not be so lucky.

The point is we are not all alike but in the case of movies and gaming, they have found a place in training and predicting.

The military decided a long time ago the computer gaming was a useful tool, a predictor of who might perform favorably in a given scenario. So my point is they HAVE used it where it has been proven to be useful.

You do not have to be born with a screw loose. There are many career fields in the military that require specific skills. For instants to be an air traffic controller you need to be able to think and visualize objects in 3D space. You can test that with computer simulation.

To allow a new recruit to say become a vet specialist to work with and care for animals. They can test if you have a fear of say dogs or snakes. Computer testing gives some guidance of what to expect.

On to movies the rating system only works if someone is enforcing it. If your parents ignore ratings what good is the rating.

[mr_lebowski]

11. Okay, but I wasn't arguing against any of the points in this post ...

I'm arguing that I don't think violent games create violent people.

Not to mention Natural Selection is a game from 2002 with fairly rudimentary graphics (not even close to the photo-realistic stuff of the past decade), AND you don't even kill people in it, you're a 'space marine' fighting with other humans to defeat an alien menace to a space station.

[angrychair]

24. The bible

Is full of murder, rape, incest, slavery, the literal murder of thousands of babies, pillars of fire destroying cities and flood waters literally destroying the human race.

Are Christians any more likely to have sex with their sister or have slaves than others?

This ridiculous notion that books, movies, music or video games will cause people to violence or sex or anything else is ridiculous and completely unproven.

These people that commit acts of violence like this, mass shootings, have either poorly treated or untreated mental illness. These people need treatment and removal from society, not an excuse or a scapegoat.

[Kid Berwyn]

13. Thank you for sharing.

Bad ideas come from somewhere. Same for good ideas.

[IronLionZion]

14. The further people get from the smell of burning flesh and sight of blood spatter

the more willing they are to kill. Trump has openly campaigned on using more drones, missiles, and heavy bombers and avoiding the large infantry ground wars typical of past Republican presidents. It will maximize the kill counts overseas while minimizing the number of Americans coming home in body bags.

[7wo7rees]

17. Thank you. N/T

[TomVilmer]

18. I like violent games, if they are fun to play...

... and has also been a pacifist all of my adult life. The same experience has my son and many friends. And BTW, most studies of the subject.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/video-game-mechanics-aggression.html

[TNNurse]

5. What have we done to the planet and the people on it????

[Aristus]

6. Once again, they blame video games, and not easy access to guns.

I realize this is Mexico and not the U.S. but if an 11 year-old can get a gun, that's easy access.

[paleotn]

8. America's number one export.

[hack89]

16. You are joking, right?

Mexico, central and South America have some of the highest murder rates in the world. They are off the scale compared to the US.

[KYBlue]

19. Most guns in Latin America are from the US

In fact Mexico only has one gun store in the whole country. The rest of the guns are imported from the US, usually illegally by the drug cartels. If the US didn't have such lenient gun laws, Latin America would have considerably fewer gun deaths.

[NickB79]

21. The cartels are armed with full auto weapons and explosives

Those are only available from corrupt police and military forces, not US gun stores.

[paleotn]

22. So I suppose....

Project Gunrunner was not much to do about anything? Umm, yes. The cartels get much of their firearms from guns stores in the good ole U.S. of A.

[paleotn]

20. Not in the least.

School shootings. Where on earth are those most likely to occur?

And as for Mexico and Central America, much of the violence is a direct result of our politics and business interests over the last 100 years, particularly with respect to left leaning governments....Commies! Aaah!.... and drugs.

[JohnnyRingo]

10. He wasn't "influenced" by a video game.

It was more an active training course for what his twisted mind conceived and executed. Nor was "influenced" by handguns.

The boy was influenced by a hatred that lived deep inside him.

[mr_lebowski]

12. A virtual reality game could be used as a training course but a game played sitting down

in front of a 2d panel, with a gamepad in your hand, isn't going to train you for jack shit.

And that particular game, from 2002, with rudimentary graphics and mechanics, has you playing with other humans to defeat an alien menace on a space station, you don't even shoot other people in it. It is pretty tame in the violence level by even the standards of a decade ago, let alone today's.

If the latest Call of Duty is like a Tarantino flick (it's not THAT graphic, but body count is obviously high), Natural Selection is like ... I dunno, maybe Dirty Harry.

[migsan]

15. Parental responsibilities

So the parents or community has no responsibilities in this shooting. The parents or family members who lives with this child had no idea this child had anger issues?

This is the problem of human behavior, no personal responsibility. Just blame someone else.

[paleotn]

23. Behavioral problems?

Maybe so, but it's one thing to throw a tantrum in class and quite another to have access to the hardware to gun down his classmates. So, while you're standing high and mighty on your "personal responsibility" high horse, the rest of us will do something more practical like work towards limiting a child's ability to access firearms. That way fewer will have to die while we struggle to get everyone "personally responsible." I'd bet the families of the victims would appreciate that more than a half ass sermon.

[Zeus69]

25. Easy to blame video games...

But the research doesn't support "video games cause serious, violent crime"
Strong predictors of violent crime are things more difficult to talk about and correct: poverty, substance abuse in the house, child abuse...

[link:https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/5/20755092/gun-shooting-video-game-chart|

[lunasun]

26. I was at a late night comedy club and the comedian at the end of his set got not so funny and

took his last few minutes to comment on society such as how he could never vote for trump etc.

He was about 30, and one of his comments was about a bully in grade school and how he wished he could beat him up or thought about how he could mess up the his locker as payback but never back then did he day dream or think about killing him.

11 years old access to guns and killed himself too