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American Hysteria

DANGEROUS TEENS

American Hysteria

W!ZARD Studios

Society & Culture

4.43.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Despite how these last few years have felt, schools are still statistically the safest place our kids and teenagers can be. Our evolving archetype of the goth mass shooter that was born out of the Columbine massacre isn’t accurate to who those young men really were, nor what they hoped to to achieve. From the Reagan and Bush era wars on crime and drugs came another kind of juvenile threat known as Superpredators, as The Central Park Five case demonized black kids as a violent mob wrecking havoc all over the nation, eventually leading social scientists and politicians to predict that their numbers would explode into the hundreds of thousands. With this in mind, when we demand political actions again extremely rare, though devastating, event of the school mass shooting, the angry young white men we have come to view as the most common perpetrators are not the ones stopped by the rising presence of school police. Today I ask the question: When we panic about school shootings on both the left and the right, who are the invisible victims of our collective outrage?  *Note: This episode states the chance of a K-12 student being killed by a school shooter as 1 in 614 million. This is the risk faced each day, not for an entire lifetime. My apologies for not making this clear. Thanks to statistician Chandler Piché for reaching out.* American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler Show art by Roache Voice Acting by Will Rogers Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly! Follow American Hysteria on social media: Twitter: @AmerHysteria Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs,

0:12.2

unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking, how they shape our psychology and culture,

0:17.1

and how much of our past we can find in the present.

0:20.3

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

0:25.4

The two killers belong to a group of students that named itself the Trenchcoat Mafia.

0:30.1

Experts call them super predators.

0:32.4

Kids that once stole hubcaps, now rape and murder.

0:35.5

By the year 2005, we may very well have a bloodbath of teenage violence.

0:49.9

I thought that this episode, like all of them, really, was going to be pretty straightforward,

0:55.5

something I know you've heard me say before.

0:58.2

I thought I'd explore the fears of various countercultures that lit up headlines over the years,

1:03.8

the greasers and the hippies, the punks and the metalheads,

1:06.8

and finally bring it all around to our newest, biggest teenage villains.

1:11.2

I thought I'd do a simple debunking of school shooting myths around violent video games,

1:15.9

mental illness, and bullying, and then make a call for the better gun control that I've long hoped for.

1:21.9

But the more I read, the more I found that there was a side to all of this that wasn't being discussed,

1:27.3

one that was having a much more devastating impact on our youth than the mass shootings we've come to know so intimately through the media.

1:35.2

I decided enough people were tackling all the myriad of myths I just mentioned.

1:40.1

So I wanted to do something different. Even though this is an emotionally charged topic, I need you to follow me down a different path to a different part of this conversation.

1:51.1

One, we're not having enough.

1:54.2

Running alongside the panics in the 80s and 90s about murderous teenage metalheads that we covered in our season one series on

2:01.4

Satanic Panic, were other kinds of panics, too, emerging out of Reagan's wars on drugs and

...

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