Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Home - The InterNet - IRC/Chat - Online Suicide 2
Online Suicide 2
Posted on February 12, 2003 in IRC/Chat Suicide
The Brandon Vedas scandal may blow up in our face if net denizens do not take matters into our own hands and strive to direct policy. The greatest threat is too great a public policy response, one which holds ISPs responsible for the actions of idiot users.
Talking someone into suicide is evil, if not criminal. If writing a carefully delineated law proves impossible (we don’t, after all, want to supply a nutcase like John Ashcroft with a mechanism for making war on his political and religious enemies), then we should resort to promoting ostracization of the individuals involved and anyone like them.
It would be a good use of our freedom of speech.
I’ve located a partial transcript of the last online chat of Brandon Vedas. For additional background, there’s this commentary by Leonard Pitt, the BBC article that blu posted, and my own, earlier comments.
A personal memoir follows.
I’ve never felt the desire to commit suicide. Mental health experts now wonder if it has anything to do with major depression, since they have noted that suicide attempts seldom, if ever, occur when the depressive is at the bottom of the cycle, but often when the depressive is on the upswing.
I once ran into a netter (who might well have been in this chatroom) who told me that the way he dealt with people who were talking suicides was this: “Go ahead. Do it,” he’d say. “If I had a gun, I’d hand it to them. Here. You’ve got the means. Do it.”
He honestly believed that his challenge cured them of their desire.
I predicted that the day the guy who got the gun picked it up and blew his brains out right then and there, my friend would be cured of his stupid therapy.
He was dumbfounded.
A note on “constitutionality”: I suspect that if a law were enacted making it a crime to egg on a person into committing suicide, it would be upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court on the same grounds as laws which make it a crime to stampede a theater crowd into a panic by yelling “Fire”. But my concern is how far would such a law go?
