Kip Kinkel Is Ready To Speak

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
George Zornick
@gzornick
A phenomenal, compassionate piece of reporting from @jessicaschulb - we believe this is the most extensive interview ever done with an American school shooter, but it's so much more than that:

Kip Kinkel Is Ready To Speak
At 15, he shot and killed his parents, two classmates at his school, and wounded 25 others. He’s been used as the reason to lock kids up for life ever...
huffpost.com
10:47 AM · Jun 12, 2021

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kip-kinkel-is-ready-to-speak_n_60abd623e4b0a2568315c62d

In the spring of 1998, Kipland Kinkel, then 15, shot and killed his mother, his father and two students at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. He wounded 25 others. At the time, the country was only beginning to fear that mass shootings at schools might actually become a trend.

A shooting at a Mississippi high school the previous October was followed by a cluster of killings across the country perpetrated by students who seemed to select victims at random. After the third in eight months, at a middle school near Jonesboro, Arkansas, President Bill Clinton asked Attorney General Janet Reno to take action. “We do not understand what drives children, whether in small towns or big cities, to pick up guns and take the lives of others,” Clinton said. Two months later, Kinkel’s crime marked the highest-casualty school shootings by a student in three decades. Less than a year after that, the tragedy at Columbine happened, followed by the horrifying string of school shootings that have become a routine of American life since.

Kinkel was sentenced to nearly 112 years without the possibility of parole, which to many in the community felt like the closest thing to closure. A parent of one of the students Kinkel killed said at his sentencing she had “no idea how long it will take before we can lead a normal life without all the constant reminders” of her son’s death. The media rushed to piece together a narrative about him. Friends and acquaintances described a boy with an all-American upbringing but who was obsessed with bombs and guns, dressed in black and listened to Marilyn Manson.

That image of Kinkel has remained frozen in time: the dangerous child people point to as the reason some kids need to be locked up for life. For decades, Kinkel never tried to correct it. He refused every interview request and even avoided being photographed in group activities inside the prison. He worried that reemerging publicly would only further traumatize his victims. But last year he agreed to speak to HuffPost.

*snip*

[soothsayer]

1. It's a good read

[flying rabbit]

13. +1 NT

[CentralMass]

2. How can you be sure that an individual capeable of murdering

his parents, two other students + wounding 25 more is safe to be released ?

[Nevilledog]

4. Or how he's not?

[LisaL]

5. Last thing we need is more mass shooters running around.

NT

[Nevilledog]

6. Or mentally ill? Or juveniles?

It's an incredibly complex problem.

[underpants]

9. I can't imagine anyone ever being released after that.

Mental health issues aside - I fully understand- but he murdered his parents and had quite a plan that ended up killing 2 more. Treatment sure but I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to sign off on his release.

[malaise]

16. Should a child with serious mental health issues be sent prison for life?

Asking for a friend

[CentralMass]

26. Should he or she be let loose on society ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurston_High_School_shooting

"He wore a trench coat to hide the five weapons he carried: two hunting knives, his rifle, a 9x19mm Glock 19 pistol, and a .22-caliber Ruger MK II pistol. He was carrying 1,127 rounds of ammunition.[5]"

[TexasTowelie]

3. It's all Marilyn Manson's fault.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. This is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read.

Thank you for posting it. My god. K&R

[Nevilledog]

8. ...

[WhiskeyGrinder]

11. It's truly one of those articles that I wish we could ensure people would read before they commented

on it.

[Nevilledog]

17. Reading some of these posts is making me sad.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

25. It's hard to imagine another way. But we have to try, and articles like this help.

[msfiddlestix]

29. This

Heart breaking on so many levels...

[underpants]

10. Incredible article. Truly remarkable. I do have a silly small question.

The school reprimand had a Grateful Dead “Steal your Face” logo?



?ops=scalefit_1280_noupscale

[Nevilledog]

20. Cannot answer that

[underpants]

23. I can't imagine there is an answer.

Maybe it was the teacher’s own thing.

[Klaralven]

12. Stories like this are why we need an effective death penalty

Life without parole does not work. Eventually, there is a movement to let them out.

[SoonerPride]

18. There is never a good or effective death penalty.

It should be abolished for all time.

[bullwinkle428]

22. Yes, I remember all of those marches that were organized in the effort to have

Charles Manson released from prison!

[Binkie The Clown]

14. I lived 2 blocks from that school when it happened. I'll never forget that day. nt

[LiberatedUSA]

15. I remember the Columbine shooting like it was yesterday.

I never heard of this one until reading about it today.

[csziggy]

19. About the voices in his head

From the article linked in the OP:

Eventually, he settled on an explanation: “I believed that the Disney corporation was working in conjunction with the U.S. government, and they had planted a chip in my head and so the voices were coming from this chip,” Kinkel said during an interview.

Not Microsoft - Disney. Who would have expected that?

[Nevilledog]

21. It was more than 20 years ago

[csziggy]

27. It just struck me that then he held Disney repsonsible

But maybe for a kid, Disney was more threatening than a software giant.

[Nevilledog]

28. Think back 20 years ago......was Microsoft that much of a culture reference?

I don't remember giving much thought to Microsoft then.

[csziggy]

30. Withe the success of Windows taking over much of the computer world

There were people even back then warning about what Microsoft would become. Though I doubt that was in the mind of a 15 year old who was not into computers.

[Niagara]

24. Heartbreaking and worthwhile to read.

I have no idea how a person can hide (from a psychologist) that fact that they're hearing voices. I wouldn't want to know how terrifying that would be.