I haven't spent much time perusing the blogosphere nor listening to talk radio in the wake of the VaTech shooting. I've heard enough to see that the engines of blame are revving into high gear. The anti-gun people are yelling that the problem is too many guns. The pro-gun people are yelling that there aren't enough. People are blaming the cops, the university and the students.
Enough already!
Whatever the guy's motives were for shooting the first two, whether it was a love triangle or something else, when he came back to get the next 28 or so, it showed he was crazy. The key feature of crazy people is that they're crazy. Who knows, maybe he had psychotic episodes and heard voices or saw things no one else saw. Whatever it was, he wasn't sane.
Dealing with crazy people poses incredible problems for the sane. All that nonsense you see on TV about "getting inside the mind of the madman" on CSI shows is just garbage. They're just freaking nuts and expecting your average set of cops or school administrators to predict their actions is expecting miracles.
For the anti-gun crowd, if your dog, Fido, is telling you to kill everyone and you don't have access to a gun, you'll run them over in a car at a bus stop. When Fido talks, you listen. A while back there was a fellow here in San Diego who commandeered an M-60 tank and drove around crushing things.
He had no gun and he was nuts.
For the pro-gun crowd, I don't think that someone who thinks Fido is telling him to kill everyone is doing reasoned cost-benefits analysis about how many students might be armed.
And is there a worse idea than arming the student population? What you'd end up with when rumors of a shooting started would be every 19-year-old running to his dorm room to grab his gun to look for the killer. The campus would be filled with armed kids creeping around looking for an armed kid creeping around. Imagine a massive, on-line first-person shooter being done for real.
Some people go crazy. Sometimes they become violently crazy. Sometimes you draw the short straw in life and you or someone you know ends up hurt or killed. Being enraged that the rest of the world didn't protect you from statistically anomalous insane maniacs in an efficient and clever manner is fruitless.
The officials and students and general population is just as helpless and flummoxed as you are. Give them a break. It's not like they wanted the guy to kill all those people. They'll be agonizing about what they could have done differently for the rest of their lives. So lay off the criticism and blame. There's enough agony already.
Dean Barnett posted a good take on this as well.
I typed in this long paragraph of thoughts then erased it. There's just not much to say that hasn't already been said and thinking about it hurts.
ReplyDelete*pats KT* Yeah, I know how annoying it is-- I'm very pro-gun, but even the ones I agree with which were in response to folks saying "Look! Make guns illegal!" make me feel ill. Folks died. A loonie did it. Can we let the blood stains fade BEFORE going all political? (Not that I expect folks who wish that the prez and VP were assassinated to have any class at all.)
ReplyDeleteI would like to point out that I don't know of anyone for arming the entire student body-- just against making it harder to have a gun on campus than off.
Reminds me of a news story I saw the other day... a criminal broke into a house, got into a fight with a friend of the renter, had his gun wrestled away from him and was fatally shot. (now that is an anti-gun message you seldom hear.....)
I'm kinda tired of the folks that are saying that the shrinks should have caught it-- there are a LOT of flat out nuts folks who don't kill people. I *would* like to make it a bit easier to check back on crimes the perp committed, but that's about the only safety thing I can think of. (one of his teachers spoke to the higher ups, worried because he had some very violent writing. This is *after* he was convicted of stalking, I think. Nothing came of it.)