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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What would they have waited for before re-opening? For the perpetrator to be caught? And if he wasn't caught immediately (he could easily have hidden his two handguns), how long would the campus have stayed closed? A day? A week? Until the gunman's capture? Foreseeability is not as easy as hindsight, but in any situation, you have to proceed on the information you know. The headlines say it all: the single deadliest gun massacre on American soil ever. How are the police supposed to predict that?
After losing 33 men and women this morning, I hope that some small sliver of awareness will come out of this tragedy. It is my sincerest hope that this terrible event and the attendant wall-to-wall media coverage will at least give some Americans pause the next time they see a bland and depressingly common headline buried in the coverage of their local newspaper stating 33 or 53 or 67 or 71 or 102 IRAQIS KILLED IN SECTARIAN BLOODSHED.
The fact that we lost 33 people today should not obscure the fact that in Iraq, this would be a commonplace, almost weekly occurrence. To be sure, these college students do not live in a combat zone -- neither they, nor we can readily be expected to blithley accept this kind of violence -- but much of the sectarian violence in Baghdad is in fact eerily similar to this event, marauding gunment kidnapping, brutalizing and executing civilians.
I hope that this tragedy and our national response to it will at least give those on the right some sense of empathy as to why the Iraqi people are not overjoyed with the "gift" we have given them. Imagine if an event such as this were repeated again and again, day in and day out, here, in America, for four straight years.
...they chose to play the blame game.
We'll hear from Joan Walsh. She's the giant cartoon figure that has a blog. She'll say, "We were simply reporting the truth."
But a previous poster got it correct: blame game headlines should have been left to Fox. This is a horrific tragedy. Let's gets some facts straight before we start pointing fingers.
Shame on Salon.
I went to Virginia Tech for undergraduate and graduate school, so I'm pretty familiar with the layout of the school (in fact, I lived in the dorm where the first shooting took place). As others have pointed out, isolated shootings in general are not unusual, and even if the university had acted and shut down classes, where would the students have gone? Back to their dorms, where someone just got shot? The campus is huge, spread out over a large area with over 20,000 students. Even if university officials thought there was possible danger of another attack, what would they have done with all those people?
My first thought on hearing that two were shot in a dorm, followed by a rampage several hours later, was that this was probably a spurned lover or cuckhold who "went postal". Going postal, whatever else it might be, is also a regularised model of behaviour that Americans learn about through news and entertainment media and in their own oral traditions. The angle taken by professional journalists, faux and others, is to hint at dark motives and promote the idea that the U.S. needs more authoritarianism. On Fox just now there was criticism of VA law that bans students carrying guns into the classroom. If only this senseless law didn't exist, the students in the engineering building could have protected themselves by plugging the bad guy. Goddamn liberals. Astagfirullah.
This is a sad day for Virginia Tech. A close friend works in Norris Hall a floor above the classrooms--finally by mid-afternoon we learned she was "carried out" but is OK. The shooter had chained the doors shut--can you imagine the terror? She said some in their building had to step over victims. Her husband waited several agonizing hours before he could talk to her.
I lived in Blacksburg for fifteen years, received my Masters' from Tech and taught in the College of Arts and Sciences for six years. My mom still lives in Blacksburg and heard the sirens that are usually used for weather emergencies. Virginia Tech IS Blacksburg--it's a huge campus in a very small town. The campus and local police are far more competent and professional than you might expect for the setting. The area is well-patrolled, with emergency call boxes in many, many locations. I always felt safe leaving campus any time, day or night.
This could happen anywhere--the workplace, a shopping mall, a crowded street. It doesn't help to jump to conclusions about what "should've happened," what the University "should've done." Every campus will re-evaluate their emergency plans, as well they should but let's withold criticism until we get the whole story.
I'm not saying it wasn't an excellent post.
It just strikes me that some editor is reading this and instantaneously deciding who gets recognized with the little bauble. Perhaps the, pardon me, 'hair-trigger' response is the problem with the headline and the story's breathless, not-yet-verified tone.
Slow down. Get it right. No hurry, editor.
My tech-savvy high school junior is considering Va. Tech for college, so this really hit home to me. But already I'm disgusted at the television media's response. I turned on the tube for a few minutes and got the usual crap that Jon Stewart mocks them for: scary music, anchors trying to look earnest while hiding their glee at such a "great" story to cover, and the fear-mongering graphics like : IS ANY STUDENT SAFE? and WHAT'S TO PREVENT THIS FROM HAPPENING ANYWHERE? (from MSNBC) and "This will certainly put all colleges on notice!" (from CNN)
To be clear, I have cried on and off about this since I heard, mainly b/c I keep imagining the parents who are getting those awful phone calls--and putting myself in their place. I'm actually glad at the stupidity of cable, so I can be outraged rather than sad. But what I'm worried about is the overreaction that will inevitably occur like it has in elementary, middle, and high schools since Columbine (locked doors, closed main offices, security officers).
The truth is, we CAN'T prevent this sort of thing, at least not with a bandaid security approach. I'm not saying there isn't some threshold of security that works on some level, but really the main reason this won't happen much in the future isn't b/c of whatever million-dollar security systems are put in place; it'll be b/c there aren't that many people wanting to shoot up schools. It's an awful, complicated blend (I think) of circumstances that gets someone to this point, and there just aren't that many times those stars will align. I hope we all keep our heads about us.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
