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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
An earlier Salon post: "I'm almost 21. Should I buy some guns?"
Was this earlier Salon story a 'little' peek behind the curtain??? In it, you have the 'musings' of an obviously disturbed adolescent -- or was this like the old Penthouse Forum kind of deal -- a contrived letter by someone with some real problems?
"With at least 33 dead and 29 wounded, some ask why the campus wasn't shut down after an early-morning killing."
Jaysus, in an ordinary country, the city would have been shut down. Not that America is an ordinary place.
Guns, idiots, a domestic situation that went out of control -- and the same-old all-American solution -- you have a problem, take it out. Waste it. I dunno, "Guns Don't Kill People -- Gun Freaks Do." Question Number One. Why do people want guns? Or rather, what kind of a person believes they need a gun. The same old cliched answers -- from the wingnut's "it's my constitutional right". The coward's "to defend myself". To the Elmer Fuddish "I'm a sportsman -- I need a semi-automatic weapon to prove I can outsmart a duck". Whatever. The result is always the same. A disturbed individual. Access to not just a firearm, but to a highly powered, high tech killing machine.
Sorry, but I really do believe that 'when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns'. Let's make it so. You wanna keep your gun? Then let's consider you not only a freak with some adequacy issues, but also an outlaw. I hope it doesn't come down to having to pry your shoootin' iron from your cold, dead hand . . .
In 1967, there was a high school shooting at my school, West Leyden, in Northlake, Illinois. One student was killed and at least one teacher wounded, and the gunman, a student, ran off but was quickly taken into custody--If I recall correctly, he was grabbed by the teacher who was shot, but I'm not sure I remember those details accurately and I can't find any reference to it at all on the Internet except one scholarly paper that you can't read without a subscription. That's it. No big deal, apparently. It didn't make the newspapers at the time at all.
Almost immediately after the shooting happened, certainly within 10 minutes, our principal got on the PA and calmly told us what had happened, and to stay in our classrooms until further notice. And that was that. Maybe we were jaded, but we weren't mad at the school, weren't anxious and scared, just sad and disturbed that someone our age would do such a horrible thing.
I have no idea why society is so much more fearful now than when back then I was growing up. Just a year before that killing, Richard Speck had killed 8 student nurses in a horrifying bloodbath. We read about terrible murders in the newspaper all the time. Yet throughout my high school years, ever since I was a 70-pound freshman, I took the bus and el to downtown Chicago a few times every month all by myself, often coming home after dark, and was never scared. Fearfulness, and a belief that we Americans are somehow entitled to safety despite our own record for endangering people in other countries, are new phenomena. I never had a gun, and the only time guns were ever in our house was after my brother returned from Vietnam--that felt like the most dangerous time of my life since he kept a loaded pistol under his pillow and would wake up screaming every night for months. We didn't dare wake him or go anywhere near him, that was for sure. Since he was the only one I knew in the NRA, and since his gun ownership, at least until he got over some of his PTSD, seemed risky at best, I've always had mixed feelings about the idea that guns make people safer.
It was tragic that the police and the VA Tech administration didn't realize that the murderer in today's situation was going to commit additional murders. But to rip off Tolstoy, unhappy mass murderers aren't alike. The 30+ deaths two hours after the original killings were certainly avoidable in an alternate universe. But in this universe, where police and college administrators aren't prescient, outrage should be focused on a horrifying crime and ways we can prevent similar crimes. Lashing out at the administration is unfair and counterproductive.
Sounds good to me. Let's get started making it so.
"Isolated shootings in general are not unusual." Well, since when? I'd love for someone to pull the numbers on that.
I understand that you don't want to alarm people unnecessarily. And perhaps once we have more facts, we'll find that the university really did all it could to prevent this.
However, it's a poor argument to make that a single shooting in a dormitory is an event common enough to not warrant some kind of campus-wide action beyond sending out a mass e-mail. This doesn't happen every day at Va. Tech -- or even every year, as just a cursory look at the stats reveals.
I can't believe we're actually telling ourselves that isolated shootings in a campus dorm room aren't unusual...
Shootings ARE unusual, here in the US. But they happen. And as someone already noted, shooting 50+ people, killing over 30 of them, is HIGHLY unusual--not the sort of thing administrations, or police, expect hours after the shooting of two people in what appears like an isolated incident.
That's it! Your first impulse in reporting on this tragedy is to start blaming people?! I get it - you're Salon and your role in life is to stick it to the man, but geez, have a little patience. I'm sure there will be plenty of administrators and authority figures that you can pin this on, but maybe get a few facts first?
The tone of this article is really unmerited. It seems to blame University officials for having less than perfect knowledge in a very confused situation. I think it will be a while before the full story is known. And starting things out by casting blame before all the facts are in is not something that any journalist should do.
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
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