Daily BrewB.C. boys draw RCMP attention with 'how to kill your teacher' video
Whoopee cushions are so 20th century, knock-knock ginger takes too much work and prank phone calls are a little too tame for today’s refined tastes.
Where that leaves today’s youth, it seems, is to stretch beyond the bounds of tasteful tomfoolery and delve into the world of potential criminality.
Take the case of two pre-teen B.C. students, whose online hijinks have set in motion a police investigation and school board probe.
According to the Nanaimo Daily News, a local school board is investigating a YouTube video titled “How to kill your teacher,” which has been linked back to two young residents of Castlegar, B.C.
The video shows two young boys with toy guns in a bedroom, explaining to an audience how to do the nefarious deed. “We’re going to teach you guys, you little young bucks, how to kill your teacher,” one of the boys says to launch the tutorial.
The six-minute video, which has been removed from YouTube but is still available on another site, doesn’t contain any tangible advice on how to kill a teacher. Rather, it is a recording of two young boys playing out scenarios in which the teacher is painted as an antagonist, which end with the boys attacking one another with toy guns, books, crayons and elastic bands.
It’s bad, it’s wrong. And in a world where school violence is a real concern, it has to be dealt with.
Yet, save for the context and the niggling sense that they have a specific teacher in mind – they constantly refer to the subject as a specific gender and hint at the person’s name near the end of the video – it seems to be a basic case of childhood roughhousing.
The video was first noticed and reported by an Orlando radio host, who said he wasn’t comfortable dismissing the video as harmless fun.
"The world is different now; you see YouTube and MySpace and Facebook and you understand that," said Shawn Wasson in an audio recording posted to The News Junkie Facebook page.
"I have a 14-year-old son, I understand that it can happen, that anyone can post anything. But when I watch that, I hear the words they are saying, I see the aggressive actions they are making, and I think that if I were a teacher in that area I would want to know what was going on."
He’s not wrong, of course. Talking about killing teachers is bad, posting videos online to the same effect is worse. And several recent cases point to the troubling social media habits of public enemies.
There is no indication or suggestion that these kids are the next Luka Magnotta or Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger or New York police shooting suspect Ismaaiyl Brinsley, all of whom left disturbing social media crumbs before their attacks.
And that’s the point. These are not criminals.
These are children, who lack context or common sense. They live in a world where a friend is anyone who clicks “like” on their Facebook photos, where every thought is streamed unfiltered to followers online.
A prank is no longer putting a Whoopee cushion on your teacher’s chair. Pranks are big, dumb and play out – like everything else these days – online and in front of the world.
It is a world where, for a laugh, people aim laser pointers at airplanes, regardless of the danger for pilots and passengers. It is an era where a 16-year-old Ottawa boy can be charged for tricking SWAT teams into responding to fake emergencies at homes and schools across North America.
In an interview with the Daily News, Nanaimo RCMP spokesman Const. Gary O’Brien said authorities don’t want to get involved in laying punishments against these children unless absolutely necessary.
“The main thing is that we want to identify who the kids are and sit down with them, with their parents, to discuss the total inappropriateness of the video,” he said.
These aren’t the first kids to have flights of imagination that cross the bounds of appropriateness. A generation ago, they would have said their words, wrestled the way friends do, and moved on. This is not that generation.
This generation, the evidence is posted online to be found and rightfully fretted over.
And in this generation, such threats have to be dealt with, lest a childish mole hill someday give way to a terrible mountain. But not every mole hill is destined to become a mountain. Youth is for learning, and adulthood is for teaching.
If nothing comes of this video but an inevitable cycle of public outrage and moment of honest introspection for the children involved, we’re all better for it.
