Another Deadly, Dumb Kid Trend: Eleven Year Old Hangs Himself Playing “The Choking Game”

One of the side effects of a nihilistic society — a place that covers babies in clothing with skull designs on it, a place where police and military host “zombie apocalypse” drills, a place where everyone is dehumanized from the time they are born — is that you wind up with the younger generations becoming obsessed with death.

This isn’t your average child’s play. We’ve seen kids killing or almost killing themselves in a number of utterly idiotic ways. The duct tape challenge where a kid almost died tried to escape from purposefully having himself duct taped to a tree. The fire challenge where young adults hit record on a video camera, then douse themselves in alcohol or a liquid containing it before lighting a match or a lighter. The knockout game.

These aren’t really “challenges” or “games”. They’re deadly… and really dumb.

Now we have “the choking game,” a real hit with the 9-to-13-year-old crowd. Sounds fun just by the name, doesn’t it?

The “game” involves choking yourself with a belt or a rope or something similar or letting your friends choke you. The goal is to faint, to purposefully cut off the oxygen supply to your brain and knock yourself unconscious.

If you don’t die, I guess you win…?

Lots of kids haven’t died, but have wound up in vegetative states for the rest of their lives playing “the choking game”.

Some kids, however, lose the choking game. Kids like Eleven-year-old Garrett Pope, Jr. whose funeral was held this week (via KSLA):

“He didn’t do it on purpose,” said his dad. “He made a terrible mistake.”

Garrett and Stacy Pope say their son had the belt around his neck, but not cinched. They assume he thought that meant it was a fail-safe. But the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office says instead of falling backwards he fell forwards, accidentally killing himself.

But he did put the belt around his neck on purpose with the goal of choking himself…

This trend has apparently been around for a few years now, to the point that videos have been made warning everyone of the dangers.

It’s really sad we live in a society where we have to make PSAs warning kids not to play games that involve cutting off the oxygen supply to their brains.