Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
33 Dead In Virginia Tech Massacre
Update 2 4-17-07: Woah. The Smoking Gun has a photocopy of a seriously disturbed play written by Cho.
[link] The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child's mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with "a deadly blow.
Update 4-17-07: The shooter was 23 year old English Major Cho Seung-Hui from South Korea.
[link] Mr. Cho, who was majoring in English, had lived with his family in Centerville, Va., a suburb near Washington. He also had a room in one of the dormitories on the university campus, Harper Hall.
In Centerville, Mr. Cho’s family lived in a small, two-level townhouse in an upper-middle-class development. Coincidentally, one of the victims lived less than a mile from the Cho family home.
The yellow aluminum-sided home was shuttered and police said they had removed the family from their home last night.
Outside the home, a local postman, Rod Wells, said that the family was “very quiet, very polite. They always had a smile on their face. I know they are a nice family. They have been very good to me.”
Mr. Cho was a 2003 graduate of Westfield High School in Clifton, Va., according officials of the Fairfax County Public Schools said, who added that other graduates from its schools might have been among those killed or injured in Monday’s shooting.
"He was very quiet, always by himself," Abdul Shash, a neighbor, said of Mr. Cho, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Shash said Mr. Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball, and wouldn’t respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.
This is just horrifying. More than 30 people killed. By one guy with one 9mm handgun, and one .22 caliber handgun.
For now, I'm going to keep my mouth shut until some more details come in about this abominable situation. I expect that I will have much more to say.
Right now though, my sincerest sympathy goes out to the family and friends of the slain. I cannot even imagine what you are going through right now.
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But you know what won't be blamed?
The fact that he thought he was a Martyr, like Jesus, whose innocent blood was wrongly spilled by his peers. Ya, the fact that the kid had a total Jesus complex hasn't even been mentioned on the US news, for fear that it might "offend someone".
It's not that it isn't right to say "So he was a Christian, the fact that he was a nut doesn't neccessarilly reflect on the larger religious community," because that's the truth. Heck that's a truth I'd like more people to note when they say "Oh look, he did some random activity, that shows what everyone else who does that activity is really like."
If only one, just one, of
If only one, just one, of the students or professors had been armed, the death toll might have been much less. When owning and carrying a weapon is illegal or villified, only criminals and outcasts will carry them.
however
However it was stated on the news that Cho obtained the weapons legally. If guns were banned he would have had to make do with a short range weapon, like a knife, and the death toll would also have been less.
In addition, although it would not initially reduce the amount of guns on the street, common sense tells us that if one stops supplying guns and destroys all conceilable firearms when they are found than eventually there will be none.
Nah
I don't think that it's common sense. Maybe if you destroyed all the guns and gun manufacturing plants in the world that would be the case. Until then though, it would just make guns a more valuable black market item.
And why would he have gone with a personal weapon like a knife when he could make explosives or a toxic gas? Both of those examples can be made with common household items. There will always be ways for people to kill other people in large numbers when they want to.
heh
Doubt he'd use poison gas. What he seems to have wanted was not so much to kill his peers as to hunt them cruelly, and Poison, although effective, does not really stir the hunting pleasure like shooting someone with a gun. As for explosives, that would work, but once again if you wanted to hit more than one classroom (which he seemed to do), you'd basically have to plant your explosive and leave before it detonated. If you were content to take out one classroom and knew you were going to kill yourself anyway suicide bombing is the best aproach, although you don't get to see your victims suffer and die, so once again no pleasure in that, just buisness.
I would also say, with any guns that come off the black market, that you don't have any real idea how things would transpire unless you look at how guns are distributed over the black market, in addition to their original source.
There are no simple answers.
When a tragedy like this (well, any violence directed against innocents is a tragedy, really) occurs, people naturally want to look for ways to curtail the threat in the future. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
In 1994 something like 800,000 Hutus were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and almost all of that was done with machetes. Almost 200 people were killed yesterday in Iraq, by someone using car bombs. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 with fertilizer and deisel fuel on this day a dozen years ago.
Guns do kill - something like 12,000 homicides and an additional 6,000 accidents/suicides each year here in the US. My father was one of those people in 1969, and my step-brother a little more than a decade ago. You never really get over that kind of personal tragedy, as I mention here.
But cars also kill. About 30,000 Americans a year, if memory serves. And about 18 months after my dad was killed, my mom was one of those people. But because it wasn't an act of violence, it is somehow easier to accept that. Which is curious, because we do seem to accept that level of death in our country (and others) relatively easily.
People are violent. It is part of who we are. Now in the UK guns are almost completely outlawed - yet gun violence is once again becoming a problem in some areas. In an effort to control the results of violent behavious, the UK is now increasingly becoming a nanny-state, outlawing the carrying of pointed knives, limiting their sale even for home use, forcing pubs to shift from glass bottles and drinking vessels to plastic ones because the others were being used to bash and cut others in pub brawls...you get the idea.
As I mention in that blog post cited above, I hate the facile arguments on both sides: that getting rid of all guns would solve the problem; and that if only someone with a legal CCW had been there they could have stopped Cho earlier. The best you can say is that it is possible that stricter gun control (even to extending to effective bans) *might* have stopped Cho from being able to murder so many so easily...or that someone legally armed on campus *might* have been able to stop Cho once he started shooting. No, there is a lot of slop there on both sides - no one knows the answer to 'what if?'
For me it comes down to a couple of different deciding factors. We have over 200 million guns in this country, something like 80 million handguns. So, getting rid of them isn't a practical answer for at least a generation. And prohibiting them will basically mean that you are telling criminals that they can count on law-abiding citzens being disarmed. Which means you either accept the increased power advantage of criminals, or you move towards an increasingly police-heavy state, with all of the implications that carries.
Further, the 2nd Amendment was put there for a reason: to control the worst instincts of wanna-be tyrants. The founders understood that humans being what we are, you needed to control the worst instincts of those who would rule rather than govern. They built checks & balances into the Constitution between the different branches of government - but knew that the real check and balance had to go further - had to go all the way down to the individual citizen. In preserving the right to keep and bear arms, they made sure that there was a final option available to curb dictatorship. Granted, my pistols and rifles will not stand up in a full-fledged firefight to modern military weapons - but that isn't the point. You only have to look at Iraq to see the effectiveness of small arms and improvised explosives to see what a population can do in resisting a military force. That alone changes the calculus of anyone - foreign or domestic - who thinks that they would like to impose their will on the American public by arms.
Lastly, having the *option* of carrying a concealed weapon legally means that you have more possible courses of action open to you when things go south. No, I would not claim that I would have been able to draw my weapon and stop Cho before he killed anyone. That's just macho posturing. But I carry a 9mm pistol - the same calibre weapon he used to kill most of the 32 he murdered. I *might* have had a chance, if everything had gone just right. Maybe only a small chance - but that would have been more of a chance than the poor bastards who didn't have that option open to them had.
Yeah, there are no easy or simple answers. I am willing to consider possible solutions - but we have to consider the entire issue completely and make a rational decision, not one based on the immediate emotions following such a horror.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Yup
Well said Jim.
virginia tech shootings
the sooner your government realises that gun control is a must the sooner these things will stop,you have a right to bear arms under our constitution but only against agression. we had the same thing happen in our country [port arthur,tasmania australia ] a gun laws prohibting the sale fully automatic weapons was immediately introduced.you do not have the killing power if you have to stop and reload afer each round
Blogs.
Its been less than 24 hours, and already in my morning blog-trolling I have seen my first three attempts at scapegoating. The first arguing that the shooting was directly attributable to 'liberalism.' The second arguing that 'if pupils are taught they are animals they will act like animals' and that only by 'putting God back into schools' can this be prevented. The third by stateing that if all the teachers and students had their own guns, fewer people would be shot. All of them are very poor arguments.
I have seen no attempts to blame violent games or porn yet, but its only a matter of time.
Oh, four, just found another - this one blameing a lack of preemptive prayer.
You demonstrate far more...
decorum, self-control, and class than the usual suspects already ranting about the underlying causes of the shooting being violent video games, porn, and the rejection of Biblical values for godless Naturalism. What a horrible, tragic waste.
Sig removed as it seems inappropriate for this thread