Every year there seems to be a new threat that endangered the American way of living. Last year it was North Korea and them threatening to bomb movie theaters, the year before that it was violent cartoons destroying the brains of the youth, and this year’s new threat seems to be the infamous internet message board 4chan.

This year has been a troubling year for 4chan, with people trying to shut it down at the beginning of the year for supposedly being the source for all of the celebrity leaked nudes, to later on this year where certain people got offended by a joke started on the boards called project harpoon. Recently the website had gotten in some heat over a post posted around the time of  October 1st.

The post read “Some of you guys are all right, if any of you guys go to school in the northwest, don’t go to school tommorow.” This post as been said to been the post of Chris Harper Merceer.  On October 2 in the state of Oregon,  26 year old Merceer went into Umpqua Community College and shot and killed 10 people including himself.
Merceer wrote a six page manifesto detailing what he was planning on doing and why he did it.

“Many will ask how can they prevent this? You can’t,” said Merceer in his manifesto. “You could never give me what i wanted. Nothing could have stopped it.”

Ever since the post, people have been calling out 4chan for turning a “sweet innocent boy” into a killer. Some people have even been calling for the dismissal of the website all together. But 4chan has not been the only thing that has been blamed for mass homicide like the one that happened in Oregon.

Things like Marilyn Manson, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Mortal Kombat have been all blamed for a violent act against someone else. Marilyn Manson is one of the most prevalent examples of this, getting blamed for the 1999 Columbine High school shooting.

On April 20, 1999, two kids named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, dressed in trench coats and combat boots, went into Columbine High School in Colorado and shot and killed 13 people and injured 24 others. The shooting was a media hot spot, with media outlets all over the world taking over the small town trying to get the next scoop on the shooting.

The media pointed their fingers straight to the Antichrist Superstar, Marilyn Manson. The media claimed that the two kids were huge Marilyn Manson fans, just because the kids were wearing black clothes and trench coats like “Marilyn Manson would wear”.

“The president is over in mid eastern countries that most of us have never heard of,” said Manson in the 2002 Michael Moore Documentary Bowling for Columbine, “but I’m a bad guy for singing some Rock n’ Roll songs.”

When tragedy happens, people look to for someone to blame. That is just human nature. People point their figures at things like Rap music, Rock and Roll, video games, and guns, but people who do that are looking at the wrong thing.

Hip hop doesn’t kill people, nor does video games. People kill people, so let’s put the blame on them.