[Hitman]

Political views are one thing, but unfounded accusations such as that one are uncalled for. Feel free to attack leftist economics and 'liberal morality', but please do not make such claims without at least giving a source to back them up.

Unfounded? You want a source to back them up? Sure. I am that source. I have been working in the courts already for some years now, including non-adult courts, and I can tell from 1st hand experience the origin of many of those social problems. It has nothing to do with politics -If politics is to be understood in the classical meaning of "ways of exercising the directing power in a society"- and I do not attack leftist economics or liberal morality. This has nothing to do with economics, but rather with a degradation of some concepts, including that of the welfare state.

I have talked with many pshicologists and psychiaters when having criminal cases with under-18 kids involved, and conclussions were normally more or less similar: Lack of authority in the parents, near-total vacuum of authority in the school (here's where the state comes in) and as such, a formation of youngsters with no clear limits and no conscience for the suffering of others. While those are obsviously some extreme cases, the illness of the system is evident. These last years the ratio of attacks against teachers has grown enormously here in Spain. When the teacher calls the parents, the result has been more than often an attack by the parents to the teacher . There is no respect for the state or the authority represented by the teacher, all that people seem to think of the modern state is "I have right to this and to that" and "I have no responsability, it is the others who have it". Did you know that 25% of the claims against the civil administration of the state in the courts are because someone fell in the street and wants a economic compensation arguing that the street was not in perfect conditions? There is a zero tolerance to frustration, pain and effort in our society, everything bad seems to need be responsability of others and of course a compensation must come in terms of money. That's already an existing feeling, to a certain degree, in a vast majority of the population. Further examples: Leaving the car bad parked (F**ck the other guy if he can't take his car out, I will be back in some minutes), making excessive noise at home with radio, TV, or a party (Neighbours? Who cares about them?) and so on and on. And children SEE how they parents act like that. The more antisocial the parents, the more antisocial the sons. A lack of respect for others slowly turns into something much worser, I have seen it daily in the court in different degrees, mild or heavy.

When a child grows in such an environment, the limits are not clear to him. He thinks he has right to demand anything and that translates sooner or later in violent behaviours when frustration of not achieving something appears. The need for new sensations and limit experiences increases, as it is a form of quest for the limits. The limits nobody has taught them so far. And when they trespass the limit and finally find it, the result is way too terrible to go backwards. This history is to be seen DAILY in a court, just digging into the personal situation of a criminal youngster is enough to show in 90% of the situations the same pattern.

One example in recent spanish youngster criminal history: A girl was kidnapped, raped and killed by a group of under-18 kids. To kill her, they beaten her and then run a car several times forward and backward over her. Because she did not die, they burnt her alive.

It is stadistically impossible that all of them were born as psychopats. And yet they all behaved as psychopats, because they had been in fact educated like that. They became sociopats! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopathy

While this can happen anywhere and anytime, it is becoming increasingly frequent in the modern 1st world civilization. Too frequent. I can point you to some documentation of the State Prosecutor in Spain, where he informs how the youngster criminality increases above the increase in population levels, but it is written in spanish:hmm: And IMO the cause of a good part of that is the degradation of many of our cultural concepts. A relaxation in the laws and culture slowly leads to a relaxation of limits to certain behaviours. When it starts to be an extended behaviour to ignore the neighbour and behave as if the individual is the only one around, and who has right to do whatever he wants, when courtesy and good manners dissapear from daily life and rubbish behaviour takes its place, sooner or later the extreme violent actions start becoming frequent, and not isolated situations.