Stephen King on Sunday Morning

[Ombudsman]

King was on CBS Sunday Morning today. Here's an excerpt about how chose no longer to print his book Rage due to the subject matter. This section is longer than what was shown on TV.

MASON: "All of your books are still in print except one, correct?"

KING: "Well, it's not in print because it was a novel about a kid who goes to school one day and shoots his Algebra teacher and holds his class hostage with a gun. And he's got this whole back story about his abusive father and a lot of teenage angst and a lot of problems.

"I started it when I was in high school, and I finished it when I was in college, and I published under the Richard Bachman pen-name, and it didn't garner a lot of attention. It was certainly never a bestseller, but it was found in the effects of several different kids -- well, I won't say several, but two, at least, who were involved with school shootings, one of, thank God, nobody was hurt or killed. The kid just surrendered.

"But with the other one, there were deaths, and there were injuries. And that was enough for me.

"I don't think that books or movies are ever the cause of this sort of violence, and I don't think that's true of video games, either. I think that of all the kids who play these things, somewhere among them are kids upon whom a certain violent scenario will act as an accelerant or give them a path that they might not have figured out on their own, and they'll do something that's violent. I think in most cases, if they don't find that book or that movie that they want to act out, that they will do something else.

"For instance James Holmes went into a showing of the Batman movie, a midnight showing, and he was dressed as the Joker. If that movie doesn't exist, does that mean James Holmes lives a perfectly normal, constructive life? The answer, I think, is no. He finds another outlet, some other trigger that causes there violence. But the violence is part of that person's character.

"The trick is to find these people before they do it, but I didn't want 'Rage' to be one of those accelerants, so I pulled the book."

MASON: "Even though you didn't think it caused it, you didn't want the book to be there?"

KING: "I felt that it became a part of a fantasy scenario with these people, and I didn't want it to happen with anybody else. So it was not gun control, it was book control in this case.

" I think a lot of pro-gun people like Wayne LaPierre could take a lesson from that, and show a little more responsibility. I have no patience with people of the LaPierre stripe who say the deaths of innocent children or the deaths of unarmed bystanders is just part of the price we pay for our Second Amendment freedoms."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57 ... rytelling/

[billy.pilgrim]

way to go Steve