The shattered light of Virginia Tech

[elfs]

Like everyone else I've been following the news at VA Tech. Probably the single most reliable summary of the incident is the Wikipedia page, VA Tech Massacre, and it's doubtless the best place to go if you don't want to wade through the low-bandwidth nonsense of Fox or CNN.

It took me a while to process the tragedy. I tend not to automatically "get" things like this, and my initial reaction was that we were in for another round of grief pimping by the media and finger pointing at gun owners. It wasn't until a day or two later that I started to process just how horrific this must be for the survivors: classmates, parents, and children of the victims. The Lebrescu shooting was particularly painful to read. The grief is real now.

Everyone is now processing this event through their broken prisms. What disappoints me is that the prisms seem to be even more fractured than usual. I mean, sure, there's the usual pimping: Jack Thompson blamed video games, the psuedonazi wankers at Stormfront blamed multiculturalism (no link; I'm sure their roboposter will get me eventually) (why yes, I did just put Jack Thompsons and white supremacists on the same level). Barack Obama misstepped badly when he tried to claim the violence was bad but the violence visited upon families by outsourcing was even worse. Fred Phelps announced he would picket the funerals. The Huffington Post blames Iraq; the creationists blame Darwin.

This morning while flipping through the AM dial I stopped on Kirby Wilbur's show. Wilbur is a local conservative talk show host. He's pretty firmly in the FOX camp but in all the years I've been hearing him he's never been viciously stupid; he may have been shallow but he never struck me as the sort of man who turned his brain over to Karl Rove's machine.

This morning as he was talking to a caller he said that Sueng-Hi's suicide note was filled with "complaints about rich kids and debauchery, just full of typical liberal things."

I always thought complaining about debauchery was a conservative pasttime. Isn't it liberals and the left who supposedly have no morals or family values?

I was disappointed to hear this tripe this morning because I realized just how far apart this country has been driven: normally sensible conservative (and liberals) will now say absolutely anything they can to vilify and demonize the other side of the aisle. I could understand if it was members of the meritocracy of the mediocre, but to want to join that group willingly just disappoints me: even in the age of the Internet, we abandon our American principles for tribalism and strong man politics, and this incident has made it clear that this has become even more acceptable than usual.

(Oh, yeah, Kirby also called this "The worst mass murder in American history." Uh, no, that happened on September 11th, 2001. History is another weak point in our collective knowledge.)

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

(Oh, yeah, Kirby also called this "The worst mass murder in American history." Uh, no, that happened on September 11th, 2001. History is another weak point in our collective knowledge.)

The worst mass murder in American history that wasn't an act of war, perhaps? That gets rid of battles, sneak attacks, etc.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that we need to rank them at all. What's the point?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

We don't necessarily. Humans are naturally heirarchal in their thinking, this incident included, sad to say. Even if we resist that impulse, others won't. When they're wrong they need to be called on it.

9/11 wasn't an act of war. It wasn't conducted by a national entity. It wasn't even put together by a "well-organized group." It was a bunch of pathetic losers who managed to hold themselves and their "mission" together long enough to make one heck of an impression, but that's all it was. It was mass murder, on the order of the Jim Jones massacre, but still just mass murder.

Were the Crusades wars?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Or the Muslim campaigns that prompted the Crusades?

Both sets of conflicts were religious in nature, not fundamentally "national," but they were still wars. Don't we translate "jihad" as "holy war"?

Wikipedia rightly gives the purpose of "jihad" in this context as "the expansion and defense of the Islamic state." There needn't be any nations involved, just Muslims doing what they're told by their religious leaders.

The 9/11 attacks were certainly directed by an Islamic organization, and I don't mean al Qaeda alone. Osama bin Laden may be its most famous leader, but he may not be its most important leader; there may be others to whom he defers. I don't even know if this organization has a name for itself, and you're probably right that it can't be called "well organized," but it exists nevertheless. Its purpose is to unify Islam under a Caliphate spanning the entire Middle East, restoring to Islam the power it held during the Abassid dynasty-- and greater, since such an achievement would certainly include a nuclear capability, giving the new Caliph far greater power than any Abissad Caliph ever had.

The 9/11 attacks were specifically intended to help bin Laden and others establish such a Caliphate. As such, how can it be viewed as anything but an early battle in a possible fourth World War?

Murder, even mass murder, is done without political intent. We could call the 9/11 attacks a "mass assassination" except that the victims had no political position. No, this was an act of war; no other description fits.

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[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Yup. (http://syndicated.livejournal.com/slacktivist/314637.html)

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Oklahoma City and Bath, Michigan come to mind right away. It's the worst mass shooting in American history, easily, unless you count incidents like Wounded Knee, where 300 Lakota Sioux were massacred, but since it was on tribal land I guess it doesn't count. >_>

[marketeer]

There's a very palpable sense of grief here in Northern Virginia. Everyone knows someone who went to Virginia Tech or is there now. My husband is a Tech graduate. Several of my co-workers are graduates. My next-door neighbor's son attended high school with one of the victims. It shows us all how easily those were killed could have been people we knew.

I finally made my husband turn the TV off last night (he's been glued to the 24-hour news stations since it happened) because of many of the issues you raised here.

[wyrdone.livejournal.com]

I would like to itterate a point.

People snap sometimes under stress, this was one of those times and unfortunately this person chose to go on a shooting spree. Regardless of the politics of gun control, violent video games, or the debasement of society, at some point this was likely to happen due to the nature of humanity and our democracy. Yes, it was a tragedy, but the finger pointing needs to stop.

I recently moved from Blacksburg to the DC Metro area after having lived there since 1995 (attended VT from 95-98).

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

No kidding. Everyone seems to want to blame their usual least favorite group. liberals/conservatives/guns/videogames/atheists/jews.. In reality the blame rests squarely on one Cho Seung-hui.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

There's a rush in the media to wonder why, if all of the kids they've quoted on the TV knew how scary Seung-hui Cho was, nothing was done about him? I bet if the press tried hard, they could find groups of students who had other bogeymen in their classes, ther people they were (are?) sure were gonna snap someday. The press is cherry-picking those familiar with perpetrator and not seeking out the bigger picture of mental health care on college campuses, especially not involuntary care.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The two big gun massacres in the UK, Hungerford and Dunblane, both involved lawfully-owned firearms, used by people whose behaviour was already odd enough to have justified their firearms certificates being withdrawn. It was only afterwards that people put together all the warning signs.

I wouldn't be surprised if acting on a similar level of oddness turned up a lot of false positives. And, with all the stories about schools being stupid (like this one (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/16/daylight_saving_error/)), you might trigger more violence than you prevent.

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

As it's know known that in 2005 Cho was declared mentally ill and a danger to himself or others by a Montgomery County, Virginia district court, one could easily see where including official declarations of mental health like this in the criminal background checks run before purchasing a firearm may have helped.

That would require intercommunication between different government agencies though, and we know how well THAT works.

[fallenpegasus]

As a matter of fact, official declarations of the lack of mental health are *already* part of the NCICs check that every citizen who buys a gun has to go thru.

(By the way, just in case anyone reading this wonders, there is no such thing as a "Gun Show Loophole". Dealers who sell guns at gunshows have to NCICs the buyers just like they do at their own shop.)

The BATFuckers and the Virginia district court screwed up, which is par for the course for both of them.

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks, I wasn't sure about that. So it's something that SHOULD have been caught. Not very comforting.

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have some callous thoughts about this myself, but my first moment of Go-Agog-And-Back-Slowly-Away-From-The-Fanatics moment came when a young, liberal, college-student friend of mine immediately blamed it on a White Middle-Class guy, because, you know, poor, disenfranchised non-whites kill people they know in gang wars. Only disenchanted, but still basically spoiled, white people without problems go nuts and shoot up schools.

A second friend pointed back to Columbine and said the shooters could NOT be blamed for their actions after being persecuted by their peers the way they were.

Before we even knew (do we know yet?) what happened, every response I saw was people taking their favorite axe and trying to hone it on Va. Tech.

I'll come back to this later and follow the links. Thanks for culling out some of the weirdness for me.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Not even the worst school killing either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_school_bombing

Just the most recent.

Yeah, the media reactions have been rather tiresome. What bothers me the most is that I can't even turn on npr without the same school-shooting-non-update being spat out at me every ten minutes. I expect that from the really crappy news sources, they have nothing better to do than hype sensationalist crap. There's other news out there, though, and i'm getting tired of hearing "BREAKING NEWS! NOTHING NEW HAS BEEN FOUND IN THE SCHOOL SHOOTING CASE, HERE IS SOMEONE ELSE TO TELL YOU WHAT YOU'VE ALREADY HEARD A DOZEN TIMES THIS HOUR. COMING UP NEXT, A PSYCHOLOGIST INTERPRETS THE SHOOTER'S FINGERPAINTINGS FROM KINDERGARTEN FOR POSSIBLE CLUES."

It makes me want to find a cave on a mountain somewhere, where i can be a hermit, and take up the hobby of lobbing the occasional pebble at people turning this incident into their pet cause before all the facts are even known.

A few centuries back, something like this would have been blamed on demonic possession. Three decades ago, rock music. last decade, rap, now video games. The overwhelming societal need to find something to blame for any tragedy is kind of appalling. People sometimes snap and do horrible things. I guess that people aren't comfortable with the idea that there's not so much different between somebody who does snap, and somebody who doesn't.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's an unhelpful implementation of a natural strategy: When introduced to something dangerous, an animal tries to make a search image of the dangerous thing to avoid it in the future. There's no relevant thing of which to make a search image, so people fill in the blank with their favorite demon.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

supergee reminds us of this, posted on Sept. 12, 2001:

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Speaking of the forgotten history of mass murder in America, more people died on the Trail of Tears than died in the 9/11 attacks.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the blankets and the smallpox, et al.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Yeah I was wondering whether, after elfs' reference to history, anyone would remember those. Thanks for showing there are some who do.

[fallenpegasus]

The blankets and smallpox thing was done by the English in what is now Canada.

If someone is going to try to zing with that, I can zing right back.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Why "zing" at all?

[woggie.livejournal.com]

See, this is the reason I no longer watch the news. TV news is just a circus these days, and worse than the Internet for misinformation and conjecture at times like these. I knew this kind of reporting was going to start being the norm when Network TV followed OJ in a white van for thirty minutes or more without anything happening.

I don't see that this Virginia Tech incident is any worse than Columbine, really. It's more recent, true, but I see the same things happening -- everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else, and no-one will take responsibility for it, right or wrong. Nobody's learned anything since the last time something like this happened.

The culture of fear in this country continues unabated. It's depressing.

The URL has Changed

[(Anonymous)]

New URL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre

[maureenlycaon.livejournal.com]

Gnosos (http://gnosos.blogspot.com/2007/04/reflections-on-mourning-for-virginia.html) on Blogspot is a former VaTech student and has a very moving account of the memorial. No axes ground, just humanity.

The other Virginia college shooting, five years ago

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shooting

In 2002, another Virginia college was attacked by a madman bent on mass murder. That time, only three people died-- because two legally-armed students intervened before the local police could arrive.

Virginia law allows college students to carry guns just like other responsible adults, but Virginia Tech's rules left its students defenseless.

It's time to face facts in the gun-control debate. Gun control doesn't protect people. Guns protect people.

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Re: The other Virginia college shooting, five years ago

[fallenpegasus]

I've seen going around the blogosphere already statements by off-duty cops and by vet MPs/soldiers who were students at VTech that day, but who had left their personal firearm at home because of the local school ban.

There were people who were already trained, and some of them even sworn, who where there, who may have been able to do something, if it weren't for the the "feelings" of the hoplophobes.

Re: The other Virginia college shooting, five years ago

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

I have no problems with guns being in the hands of responsible, rational people who can keep a clear head in a a crisis... it's having guns in the hands of people who don't fit this description that concerns me.

In any case, on incident is hardly iron clad proof of anything...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

even in the age of the Internet, we abandon our American principles for tribalism and strong man politics, and this incident has made it clear that this has become even more acceptable than usual.
Sickening, isn't it?

Makes you wonder how longer the republic will last before sliding into dictatorship.