Why does society glorify Bonnie and Clyde, yet hates more recent random shooters?

[Deleted]

Please don't compare those with modern aged people. The entire society and culture was different back then.

Both were/are bad people, but in an entire different way.

[Grummgug]

sigh.. The point is cowboys are romanticized as these rugged outback heroes and in nearly all american westerns portrayed as heroes against the evil savage Indians. People don't want to know the truth about what really happened back then, or understand the native american culture and what the white america ancestors did in those times.

I didn't want to get into finger-pointing at different societies tho, even if unintentional.

[Barnabas]

I never understood this one. Bonnie and Clyde were mass killers. That entire gang was nuts. Yet society venerates and glorifies them, makes films about them, and they are almost iconic lore. We glorify mass killers like Jesse James as if they are a celebrity.

Yet we see a mass shooter every once in a while, and we denounce them and wonder why they did it, and how could they do such a thing...

And then we have no problems with massive media coverage of the shooting, which some can misconstrue as glorifying the event. And some crazies who view the media coverage and things like Bonnie and Clyde coverage as glorifying will be convinced to shoot people as well. They hope they get a film made about them someday, perhaps.

It all seems really screwed up.

There's a huge difference in the types of crime committed. If Bonnie and Clyde shot a teacher and her students and then themselves they would be forgotten about. They would also be disliked. It took a fucking long manhunt to finally kill them and this was after they robbed a lot of banks. You can't respect any of the recent killers.

[Grummgug]

There's a huge difference in the types of crime committed. If Bonnie and Clyde shot a teacher and her students and then themselves they would be forgotten about. It took a fucking long manhunt to finally kill them and this was after they robbed a lot of banks.

Bonnie and Clyde killed a TON of innocent people. It wasn't just about the bank robberies.

[Barnabas]

Bonnie and Clyde killed a TON of innocent people. It wasn't just about the bank robberies.

Sure but like I SAID IT WASNT CHILDREN for the second time.

[Joegeneric]

I don't know what kind of crack you're smoking.
Everytime some crazy person kills a bunch of people, the media IMMEDIATELY makes him/her famous.
Very little attention is paid to the victims in all reality.
You probably know the names of a bunch of mass murders, Can you name the killers from Columbine? Can you name the victims?

Headline from NBC News: "The killing of 26 people, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school Friday morning is the second deadliest school shooting in the United States, behind only the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007."

Its like they're talking about a new high score record in a football game, glorifying the person who did it.
If you were someone who was on the verge of snapping, and you saw all the other crazy killers whose names and motives were plastered all over the national news networks, and you had some message in your mind that you felt needed to be out there, what better way than to murder 20 people to get your name and message to EVERYONE in the country?

I can name the columbine killers, but sadly, I only remember 1 of their victims. How about you?

[Barnabas]

I don't know what kind of crack you're smoking.
Everytime some crazy person kills a bunch of people, the media IMMEDIATELY makes him/her famous.
Very little attention is paid to the victims in all reality.
You probably know the names of a bunch of mass murders, Can you name the killers from Columbine? Can you name the victims?

Headline from NBC News: "The killing of 26 people, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school Friday morning is the second deadliest school shooting in the United States, behind only the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007."

Its like they're talking about a new high score record in a football game, glorifying the person who did it.
If you were someone who was on the verge of snapping, and you saw all the other crazy killers whose names and motives were plastered all over the national news networks, and you had some message in your mind that you felt needed to be out there, what better way than to murder 20 people to get your name and message to EVERYONE in the country?

I can name the columbine killers, but sadly, I only remember 1 of their victims. How about you?

I can't name the shooters or the victims. I guess I just didn't care too much for them. School shooters are retards imo. How can you have any respect for them? The story ends when they kill themselves. I like a bit more chase and the COME AT ME BRO type killers.

[Deleted]

they robbed banks and alot of people were mad at the banks because those people blamed the ecenomic crisis on the banks?

[Cirque]

They've ended up being romanticized, their story and relationships have a lot more potential to a romantic view than most shooters.

And anyway, they're not alone, where I live there's at least two infamous criminals that get romanticized in a similar way. But, as Slummish said, that's never going to be rampage killers (if that's the term) - there's no story to be told there, nothing to imagine, usually no story afterwards either cause most shooters end up being barking mad (to who we can feel no connection whatsoever (note that I do not mean a connection on a criminal level, obviously)), or else dead.

[Notos]

I guess you could say the Bonnie and Clyde story has more "meat" to it than most of the recent shootings, and some people sympathized with them.

[Halicia]

Different times.

Bank robbers are NOT heroes of the common man the way they were 80 years ago.

[Thage]

Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and other notorious bank robbers often had very charismatic spokesmen running the gangs, and often pulled off their exploits during times of economic difficulties. They're the ultimate individualists--people who shrug off laws they see as stacked toward the wealthy elite and steal from the rich to rise above rural or impoverished roots. At least, that's the front they presented to the media and to the average American, while they painted the federal agents and rival gangs as government-funded thugs and ruthless sociopaths, respectively.

It's all a matter of how career criminals and bank robbers of the Great Depression and therafter played the media, and how folk tales naturally sprung up in the Old West about people who defied the law and made it stick, whereas most killers today come off as raving lunatics or turn their gun on themselves after massacring a room full of people who can't fight back. I'm not saying the glorification is deserved, but the romanticization typically comes from a snowball effect that began when the gangs' spokesmen started playing the media.

Fun Fact: Despite most actresses cast to play Bonnie and Clyde over the years being very attractive, especially during the forties and early fifties, Bonnie was noted as being ugly and Clyde was a bit plain in real life.

[poser765]

I don't think that we, as a society, venerate them. What we do is recognize a story. And the fact is that's all we like about them...the story. The romantic caricature of their real life. It's a story of two small people trying to make it big...making their own life while being a couple. Action, adventure, love, and tragedy. Has all the makings for perfect drama. We also have to realize that the story is even better for the viewer/reader/whatever because the hero/heroin are so morally ambiguous. We love protagonists that we can relate to but don't really want to. Does that make sense? It's just fiction...fiction based on a true story maybe, but fiction none the less.

Very few people could give two shits about Bonnie and Clyde. What we love is the STORY. There is no story in a mass school shooting.

[Sam the Wiser]

There's nothing noble, romantic or exciting about a killer that walks into rooms full of unarmed sitting ducks; blows them all away indiscriminately with no reason, provocation or motive; and then turns the gun on himself.

You can't compared the actions of iconic outlaws and criminals to the garbage we see today in the actions of Adam Lanza, Anders Behring Breivik, James Holmes, Jared Loughner or Seung-Hui Cho.

Society doesn't glorify rampage killers. Take a look at the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

No one there has been romanticized and that list goes back more than 100 years.

Found crazy interesting story from your link... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Gene_Simmons I'm shocked I've never heard anybody ever bring this guy up. What he did was kinda huge. Was this big when it happened I was not even born at the time.

[Lemons]

No one is going to make a movie about a person who killed a bunch of elementary school kids. Not in this century, not in the next. If you think they would then you're a complete idiot.

[lordjust]

they're exactly the same. murderous savages. glorifying any of these animals is ridiculous.

They are not the same. All these glorified murders are anti-heros. Yes, they did a lot of bad things but because of a good intention at their time. Back in the days of Bonnie and Clyde a lot of people were angry about the government and for people seeing someone standing up and doing what a lot of people wanted to do (get rich and not rob banks and kill a lot of innocent people) which made them famous. These people had the same dream as a lot of other people and risked everything to achieve their goals and that's something people can sympathize with. They aren't glorified because of the killing but because of the message people wanted to see in their actions.

Nowadays rampage killers don't have motives anyone can sympathize with.

[Kavaren]

They stuck it to the bankers when the banks had ruined people. During this time anyone doing a "Robin Hood" was awesome.

Their car was too fast to be caught by cops. They had v8 engines and no solid way to be tracked. Interstate/national police forces were weak. This made law enforcement (a tool of the banks) look stupid.

They outgunned the cops. Best gun a cop had could barely go through a car door, maybe fire 5 shots/sec. Clyde had a BAR squad machine gun sawed-off that could go through a car and a concrete wall behind it @ 10 shots/sec.

They had a cool romance going.

[StayTuned]

Bonnie and Clyde never killed little children for the fucks of it. They robbed banks and did some serious gangster shit. Sure, they murdered people, but the whole story around those two, their love, the dangerous life they lived.

It's a completely different story to some outcast nerd who snapped and thought it would be cool to kill 10 years olds and to commit suicide right after to aviod his punishment.

[Grummgug]

Bonnie and Clyde never killed little children for the fucks of it. They robbed banks and did some serious gangster shit. Sure, they murdered people, but the whole story around those two, their love, the dangerous life they lived.

It's a completely different story to some outcast nerd who snapped and thought it would be cool to kill 10 years olds and to commit suicide right after to aviod his punishment.

Its just completely stunning to me that people would actually delineate between what Bonnie and Clyde did and what more recent mass killers have done. There is no difference. I do not see how robbing banks (this is a good thing?) or a love affair makes them any better.

[poser765]

Its just completely stunning to me that people would actually delineate between what Bonnie and Clyde did and what more recent mass killers have done. There is no difference. I do not see how robbing banks (this is a good thing?) or a love affair makes them any better.

It doesn't make them better...it makes them a better story.