Last week, a kid fired shots in a nearby high school, injuring ten students forcing the school into lockdown. Suffering from some typical problems (teachers called parents about grades or something like that), he was reportedly inspired by a documentary about the Columbine shootings. Two thoughts occur to me: #1: how very impressionable this shows him to be. #2: He would have had to have been about eight years of age when that happened, which is a shifted frame of reference of what is remembered. Time processes forward. This, therefor, goes down as a sort of time lapsed “copycat” school shooting, which was all the rage of suspected back in 1999.
Yesterday, a massacre happened at Virginia Tech which has surpassed Columbine and is now the largest one, though I suppose I can mention that if not for some faulty wiring, Columbine would have had upwards of 400 dead. (The shooters had a cinematic aesthetic in mind.) What strikes me, as it did then, is how meaningless the news coverage is — and it’s difficult to say whether the overviews in a couple months will be more significant or deficient in a different manner. At the moment, it is a four line story — which is to say there are about four sentences that we know that are relevant to everyone in America. Beyond that we have a strange gun control debate, and I will point you to the wacky contrarians of lewrockwell and prison planet .com for articles on how Gun Control was responsible for many of these deaths because it stopped the victims from being able to Pack Heat.
The basic problem is that any commentary made about the Virginia Tech shootings is that it will be small. If I say, as occurred to me, that this is something like every day in Iraq — moving on to snuff the frequent comparisons of death rates between, as so happens misleading geographic areas between Iraq and the United States — by pointing to the natural reaction of this shooting, I feel like I just cheapened myself. But there you go.

I don’t know what made the Korean student do this. Supposedly a dispute with a girlfriend, which makes sense for the first two deaths (the girlfriend and the RA). Beyond that… we can only assume he has holes in the brain.

Your schools are still statistically safe. Your kid will come home at the end of the day, or I guess to their dorm-room.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 8:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.