Professor Librescu - A True Hero
Virginia Tech Students React to Professor Librescu:
“The morning after the shooting at Virginia Tech, the wife of professor Liviu Librescu e-mailed his students, asking them to tell her what happened in class during the minutes before her husband was killed. Here are excerpts of their replies, forwarded to the Tribune by Librescu’s son Joe:
“When the shootings started [nearby], everyone in the room just seemed to be dumbstruck by what was going on. One student tried going out the front door but as soon as he opened it, it sounded as if the gunshots started coming towards us. Dr. Librescu shut the door and stood guard after the student ran back into the classroom. Almost immediately students started jumping out of the window in sheer fear of what might happen.
“I was huddled in the back of the room when I saw people going out the window and, almost instinctually, I followed them. I feel guilty to say that I was one of the last ones out before the shooter entered the room. If your husband was not at the door, I don’t know what would have happened to me or the other students. … I am so sorry. I will always remember him and will be praying for him for a very long time. My heart goes out to you”………………..
“I cannot even begin to tell you how sorry I am for what happened yesterday. I know that he died trying to block the door so we can all jump out the window. We tried to get him to the back of the classroom with us, but he insisted on staying by the door. That is all I know about his last minutes. He was a great and caring man, and I feel honored to have known him for this past year……
Spotter: Newsbeat1
Posted: 21st, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Ode To Cho - Virginia Tech’s Nikki Giovanni’s Poem
NIKKI Giovanni, of Virginia Tech English Department, has written a poem.
Ms Giovanni is no angst-ridden teenage student. She is a University Distinguished Professor in literature and black studies. Does her poem capture the mood?
This is her poem:
We are Virginia Tech
We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does a child in Africa
Dying of AIDS
Neither do the Invisible Children
Walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community
Be devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking
For fresh water
Neither does the Iraqi teenager dodging bombs
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed
By a boulder
Dislodged
Because the land was destabilized
No one deserves a tragedy
Just to remind you - Cho Seung-Hui was not a boulder but something that passed for a human being who picked up guns and murdered 32 people.
Is it fitting to speaking of Cho as Aids, a rogue army, a poacher, a terrorist bomber and drought?
Posted: 21st, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (6) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
“Seung-Hui Cho. I Mourn Your Life and Loss” - VirginiaTech
EXPECT lots of nonsense on Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui. But will take something truly deranged to beat this on the Daily Kos.
“My heart aches. Of course I mourn the passing of the thirty-two Virginia Polytechnic University students, as do we all throughout the globe. Nevertheless, I cannot forget how my heart hurts for the thirty-third victim, the one the media never seems to count among those killed, Seung-Hui Cho. On April 16, 2007 thirty-three lovable and fragile individuals passed.
“Seung-Hui Cho, as he called himself, was a young man locked in Hades for decades. His death began long before the day of infamy. He longed for comfort and company. All he received was chiding. Even in death, Seung-Hui Cho is scorned. I am forlorn.”
As spotter LGF writes, “This is one of the sickest exercises in moral equivalence you’re ever likely to read.”
Until the next one…
Posted: 21st, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Virginia Tech And A Political Silence On Guns
AFTER Virginia Tech, the Economist notes that with so much talk of guns and the right to bear arms “only two [US Presidential] candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them”.
In an earlier article, the Economist writes: “The academic debate about whether guns save more innocent lives than they cut short, or vice versa, may never end. Most Americans are inclined to believe the latter. But politicians bow to the gun enthusiasts because their beliefs are much more likely to determine how they vote.”
Are leading, ambitious American politicians scared of tackling the issue of guns?
This from the article:
“Cho Seung-hui does not stand for America’s students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow high-school students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. There are estimated to be some 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.”
Posted: 20th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
They Show Cho Seung-Hui On TV But Not Streakers
VIRGINIA Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui gets lots of airtime on NBC, the BBC, Sky and more.
But one emailer on Salon asks “if NBC, when it broadcast baseball games, refused to show video of fans running onto the field. Most broadcasters don’t, on the grounds that it would only encourage more attention-seeking disruptions. … If that’s NBC’s practice, why is it OK in order to prevent the disruption of a baseball game but not to prevent mass murder?”
The BBC refuses to show streakers and pitch invaders. But you can see a ranting mass murderer. Why?
Don Surber writes: “NBC should not have shown it. This video was a peep show, not news. There was nothing to be gained in showing it.
And Howard Kurtz writes: “In all the years I’ve been chronicling the media, I have rarely seen the tidal wave of resentment that has washed over television organizations that showed the now-infamous Cho video. In the minds of many Americans, this was a horribly offensive act, and no amount of explanation about the obligations of journalism is going to change that view.
Should it have been broadcast?
Posted: 20th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Cho Seung-Hui Was No Suicide Bomber - Broadcast And Be Damned
WAS NBC right to broadcast the video to Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui ranting and brandishing weapons?
Was the broadcast not giving the deranged killer what he wanted – to be noticed and feared. Of course, he was already dead when the videos aired. But will others – copycats- be inspired by his message?
Is mental illness and the desire to commit mass murder contagious?
The Times’ Bronwen Maddox says NBC was right to show the tapes.
She asks if NBC resist the scoop “beyond its dreams”? And this is the footage that offers an explanation as to why Cho did it.
Says Maddox:
“Yet NBC, which says it broadcast only after fierce internal debate, and tightly limited the choice and repetition of the material, was surely right to go ahead. People’s shock this week is understandable. But that has brought a tendency to exaggerate the distress or danger of the broadcast, and to dismiss the useful conclusions from seeing it — and even the reassurance it gives.
“Cho was clearly mentally ill, not simply a troubled student in a bad patch, or someone who snapped under sudden strain; on its own, that is reassuring. Nothing was impulsive, from the purchase of the two guns in two months, to the obsessive assembly of pictures and speeches-to-camera in a digital collage. The paranoia, the sexual and religious metaphors, the flailing accusations at rich classmates and Jesus, the conviction that he had a cancer of the mind — these tell us that the quest to “understand what made him do it” is not going to take us far. ”
And what of that religious element?
Maddox says:
“He was not even much like Islamic suicide bombers, although his recording resembles their final messages, with the black terrorist garb and the weapons. But they spell out their jihadist cause with faux-military succinctness; his had the coherence of a bedroom stack of horror comics, ripped and pasted together.”
It is all the rantings of a murderous loon - who was only really noticed when it was too late…
Posted: 20th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (2) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Virginia Tech Killer Cho Seung-Hui’s Family And A British Connection
VIRGINIA Tech murderer Cho Seung-Hui continues to fascinate.
On the Sun, readers learn of student Colin Lynam Goddard. He was shot three times by Cho and survived.
Colin is talking to the Oprah Winfrey show from his hospital bed. In between Oprah’s staple fodder of dieting news, car giveaways and book-plugging therapists, her viewers get to see the victim in his hospital bed.
Says Colin: “I just looked on the ground and acted like I was dead. I thought if I looked at him, then he’d know I’m here, I’m alive.”
And this is not all. Colin’s father is British, he’s the son of a Leicestershire engineer.
This story has global appeal, enough reason for the Sun to cover it on its front page.
And in the Telegraph (“We saw our grandson being carried from the scene, say British couple”), Ruth Goddard, of Melton Mowbray, Leics, says: “We got a phone call from Andrew [Colin's father] telling us Colin had been shot but wasn’t going to die.
“We were so relieved when we discovered the bullets had missed every vital organ, although it had shattered his femur. We haven’t been able to talk to Colin yet.”
Oprah Winfrey has. They should give her a call, or tune into her show.
Meanwhile, over in the Mirror, readers get to hear from the murderer’s family in South Korea.
In the front-page story “WE ARE GLAD HE IS DEAD”, Cho’s grandfather, Kim Hyang-Sik, says: “It’s better not to have such a child in the family.”
“Son of a bitch,” says he. “It serves him right he died with his victims”.
Kim’s sister, Kim Yang-Sun, remembers the “very quiet” boy, the “loner” with autism who “never showed any feeling or motions”.
She goes on: “The reaction of my brother was that Seung-Hui was a troublemaker and it served him right that he died because he caused his mother a lot of problems.”
His uncle Chan Kim adds: “He wasn’t like normal kids. We were worried about him not talking.
“Both his parents knew he had mental problems but they were poor and they couldn’t send him to a special hospital in the United States.”
Readers are so turned onto a new area of investigation – the state of mental health care.
Which, incidentally, is not something that’s ever talked about when other mass murderers in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan are wrecking lives…
Posted: 20th, April 2007 | In: Tabloids Comments (8) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Virginia Tech Victims Of Cho Seung-Hui’s Innate Evil, Not Guns
IN looking into the reason why Cho SEung-Hui killed at Virginia Tech, Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, tells the New York Times:
“It’s long been in fashion to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born bad.
Researchers at King’s College London have recently determined that if one identical twin shows psychopathic traits, the other twin, who coincidentally shares precisely the same set of genes, has a very high probability of having the same psychopathic traits. But among fraternal twins, who share only half their genes, the chance that both twins will show psychopathic traits is far smaller. In other words, there is something suspiciously psychopath-inducing in some people’s genes.
What could it be? Medical images of the brain give tantalizing clues — the amygdala, the fight or flight decision-making center of the brain, may be smaller than usual, or some areas of the brain may glow only dimly because of low serotonin levels. We may not know precisely what set Mr. Cho off, but we are beginning to home in on the unusual differences in certain neurochemistries that can make people act in bizarre and dysfunctional ways.
Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.”
Posted: 19th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Virginia Tech And Lessons From Dunblane
Virgina Tech and lessons from Dunblane - from the Anorak Forums:
Michael North, whose daughter Sophie was killed at the mass shooting in the Primary School at Dunblane, Scotland, wrote the following comments in the Sunday Times [13th October, 1996] , writes AGW.
“It is time to turn the tide against gun culture. Hand-guns were designed for one purpose only -to kill. They weren’t banned after Hungerford (a previous UK mass shooting) because of the pressure of the gun lobby. Public safety was sacrificed to preserve a privilege for a minority who have had a disproportionate influence on our law-makers. Campaigning for a total ban on hand-guns will ensure that this country becomes a safer place.”
The campaign was successful and a shocked UK Government rushed through a total ban on hand-guns licensed for use by the general public. Restrictions were also introduced relating to possession and storage of rifles and shotguns which are still widely used in rural areas for pest control.
There are few reported incidents of these licensed rifles, or shotguns, being used in either personal violence or general crime cases.
Stolen guns and illegally held firearms are said to be freely available to criminals and youth gangs. Incidents of gang-related gun crime are soaring and the incidents of gun crime in the UK have more than doubled since 1997 (when the current Government came to power).
The harsh truth is we in the UK have a legally gunless society. No law-abiding citizen processes a hand-gun. Penalties for illegal possession are harsh but still people die.
The ban is in force but the tide of gun culture is still rising.
Michael North was correct; the only purpose for a hand-gun is to kill. Regretably he has been proved correct again and again in the UK in the eleven years since.
Do not be too quick to condemn the gun-owning culture of the USA; despite our very strong efforts to counter the problem here in the UK, the same risks exist.
Many of these gang-owned guns and the associated ammunition are believed to be held by gang members who still attend British schools.
Posted: 19th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Hair He Goes: American Idol Sanjaya Malakar Loses On Virginia Tech Night
ALAS, poor Sanjaya Malakar, I knew him. We all did who watched American Idol.
Tabloid Baby predicted the whispering wonder would be sent home from American Idol the week before the Idol Gives Back charity event (to clear the stage for a new wave of publicity).
But Sanjaya Malakar’s elimination was still a shock. After Antonella Barba and Sanjaya, the current cast is short on interest.
But might it be that his ejection was triggered by external forces? Tabloid Baby wonders if the Virginia Tech incident had at least something to do with his going.
As TB writes: “Chris Richardson’s position in the top three signaled that he surely won sympathy votes and saved himself with his words of encouragement to the survivors. And Simon Cowell’s ‘enough is enough - it’s not funny any more’ attitude toward Sanjaya on Tuesday night carried more weight because of the pall the tragedy had cast over the show.”
“My hearts and prayers go out to Virginia Tech. I have a lot of friends over there. … Be strong,” Richardson of Chesapeake, Virginia, said onstage after his song.
Cameras panned to Simon Cowell who rolled his eyes and raised his eyebrows.
But this had nothing to do with Richardson’s comments. Really. Says Cowell: “I didn’t hear what Chris was saying. I may not be the nicest person in the world, but I would never, ever, ever disrespect those families or those victims. And I felt it was important to set the record straight.” Cowell said his roll was founded in Richardson’s claim that he sang “nasally” on purpose.
So Cowell’s frustration is explained.
But over in the LA Times, there is talk of missed opportunity. This was Country Music night on Idol. The Virginia Shootings were fresh in the mind.
As the paper’s Randy Lewis writes: “Can you imagine the impact of LaKisha Jones singing Willie Nelson’s ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’? ‘Someday when we meet up yonder/We’ll stroll hand in hand again/And in a land that knows no parting/Blue eyes crying in the rain.’
“Or Jordin Sparks singing ‘I Will Always Love You’ (like Dolly Parton’s original, please; not the overwrought mess Whitney Houston made of it)? Or Melinda Doolittle putting those dusky tones of hers to Ralph Stanley’s haunting ‘O Death’?
And what did we get? Richardson’s nasally invocation of Rascal Flatts’ insipid ‘Mayberry’. And Sanjaya Malakar’s mushy prance through Bonnie Raitt’s ‘Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About’.”
Tug the heartstrings and woo the crowd. Is the show really that cynical?
Or did Sanjaya lose because he was the worst singer…?
Posted: 19th, April 2007 | In: American Idol Comments (9) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Guns In Tennessee Parks - Responding To The Virginia Tech Shootings
As Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui shows off his weapons via the media, Tennessee moves to permit guns in public buildings.
This in the Knox State News:
“NASHVILLE — In a surprise move, a House panel voted today to repeal a state law that forbids the carrying of handguns on property and buildings owned by state, county and city governments — including parks and playgrounds.
‘I think the recent Virginia disaster — or catastrophe or nightmare or whatever you want to call it — has woken up a lot of people to the need for having guns available to law-abiding citizens,’ said Rep. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains. ‘I hope that is what this vote reflects.’”
Read: People With Guns Stop People With Guns - Virginia Tech
Posted: 19th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
The Martyr And The Fame - Why Virginia Tech Killer Cho Seung-Hui Did It
“CRAZED killer Cho Seung-Hui poses with his weapons in a shocking photo sent to TV news chiefs DURING his university massacre.”
So says the Sun’s front page. After the cod tributes to the murdered, the paper leads with Seung-Hui and the headline: “TIME TO DIE.”
Cover you ears, eyes and mouth families of the victims as the Sun shows the “maniac” who brandishes his guns in a ready-made news package sent to American broadcaster NBC.
The Sun draws readers’ attention to the Walther .22 semi-automatic and 9mm Glock the “massacre madman” used to kill and maim.
What with spiralling levels of gun crime in the UK, readers need no telling which is which, only that these are Cho’s weapons of choice.
Cho is the Mirror’s front-page “KILLING MACHINE”. There are “MORE AMAZING PICTURES INSIDE”.
There’s “wild-eyed” Cho with a hammer. “The “callous killer” holds a knife to his throat. “IN HIS SIGHTS,” says a caption beneath a shot of Cho aiming a gun towards the camera.
“ARMED FOR A MASSACRE,” says the Mail’s front page. Once again Cho looms out. No head shots of the victims today. This is all about Cho.
“Words of mass murderer who retuned to his dorm after first shooting to pose for sickening self-justifying photographs,” writes the Mail’s teaser.
If sickening, why show them? Do we need to know? Do Mail readers need to be sickened?
The Express does feature the victims, albeit alongside the familiar shot of Cho aiming a weapon. Readers see Maxine Turner, Erin Peterson and Austin Cloyd. And Emily Hilscher, known to have been the fist to die, the girl Cho was believed to have been obsessed with.
But she did not date Cho. Hilscher’s close friend Tommy Pendleton says Emily was “not related to the shooter in any way”.
But now she is part of the story. Hilscher is part of the lead story that thanks to what the papers term a “madman” is now a thing shaped by Cho’s words and pictures.
“I’ll be a martyr like the Columbine two,” says the Mirror’s headline. “It hears Seung-Hui pay tribute to “martyrs” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They wanted to be noticed and to show their power and contempt for what they saw as their inferiors. They killed 13 people at Columbine High School.
Their murderous spree formed the basis for an Oscar-winning film. Cho made his own movie…
Posted: 19th, April 2007 | In: Tabloids Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
LONG gone are the days when an editor had the time or ability to weed out repulsive and wrong comments and letters. Now anything goes.
In the Washington Post article ‘Articles of Impeachment To Be Filed On Cheney’, a reader witers:
“It is too bad the shooter at VT spent all of his mojo on students and faculty.
Posted by: mmather | April 17, 2007 11:20 AM”
And this is one the US’s biggest newspapers…
Spotter: LGF
Posted: 18th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (2) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
People With Guns Stop People With Guns - Virginia Tech
As the Virginia Tech story rolls on the question of guns and gun use rages. Do guns kill people? Do people with guns kill people? Or do people with guns stop people with guns killing people?
This by David Kopel in the Wall Street Journal:
“The bucolic campus of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., would seem to have little in common with the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City. Yet both share an important characteristic, common to the site of almost every other notorious mass murder in recent years: They are “gun-free zones.”
Forty American states now have “shall issue” or similar laws, by which officials issue a pistol carry permit upon request to any adult who passes a background check and (in most states) a safety class.
Research by Carlisle Moody of the College of William and Mary, and others, suggests that these laws provide law-abiding citizens some protection against violent crime. But in many states there are certain places, especially schools, set aside as off-limits for guns.
In Virginia, universities aren’t “gun-free zones” by statute, but college officials are allowed to impose anti-gun rules. The result is that mass murderers know where they can commit their crimes.
Private property owners also have the right to prohibit lawful gun possession. And some shopping malls have adopted anti-gun rules. Trolley Square was one, as announced by an unequivocal sign, “No weapons allowed on Trolley Square property.”
In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him from carrying a gun on the premises and began shooting people who moments earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.
Fortunately, someone else - off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth Hammond - also did not comply with the mall’s rules.
After hearing “popping” sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire on the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other innocent bystanders from getting hurt.
He bought time for the local police to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.”
Join the debate
Posted: 18th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (8) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Virgina Tec’s Charles Steger’s Speechless Speech
CHARLES W. Steger, president of Virginia Tech on the senselessness of it all.
Quote: “I cannot begin to convey my own personal sense of loss over this senselessness of such an incomprehensible and heinous act.” Charles W. Steger, president of Virginia Tech, in Time.
Figure of Speech: adynaton (a-DIN-a-ton), the loss-for-words figure. Also spelled adynata. From the Greek, meaning “powerless.”
A senior on this quiet university campus killed at least 32 people with a pair of handguns, leaving the place — the whole nation — in shock. President Steger responds with an adynaton, a figure of thought that amplifies his language by proclaiming its inadequacy. His words express how poorly words express. (See another use for the adynaton here.)
You usually find the figure in demonstrative rhetoric, the speech of values.
That’s the rhetoric President Steger uses. But people are beginning to question how the university handled the crisis; that’s forensic rhetoric, the language of crime and punishment.
And soon, deliberative rhetoric will have its say — political speech that determines what’s best in the long run. If the student purchased those handguns legally, you’ll hear this rhetoric very soon.
Snappy Answer: None. We grieve with you.
Posted: 17th, April 2007 | In: Broadsheets Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Liviu Librescu’s Strong Moral Fibre At Virginia Tech
LIVIU Librescu survived the Germans and the Nazis and then was killed at Viginia Tech. He is now the totem the news agencies can rally around.
On Channel 4, news anchor Jon Snow has been having a conversation with Librescu’s son Arie Librescu, whose English is at best rusty.
Snow says that because the elder Librescu survived the Holocaust he was of “strong moral fibre”. How does Snow know this? Many Holocaust survivors would just say they were lucky. Did Snow meet Librescu? If he had he’d surely mention it. Snow would have the scoop.
Anyhow, this is the report on Librescu.
This from Israel National News:
“As Israel observed Holocaust Day, thousands of miles away, A Romanian-born Holocaust survivor gave his life in another senseless murder - and apparently in an act of heroism.
Among the 32 people killed by a lone gunman at Virginia Tech Monday is 77-year-old engineering professor, Liviu Librescu, a citizen of Israel. According to eyewitness accounts, Librescu ran to the door of his classroom and blocked it with his body – preventing the gunman from entering but getting shot to death himself as a result.
Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old student who had been in Librescu’s class in room 204, told a reporter that at 9:05 a.m. they heard screams and a loud banging sound from the next-door classroom.
When the students realized it was gunfire, he said, some hid behind tables, and others leapt from the classroom’s windows. Calhoun himself was among the last to jump.
“Before I jumped from the window, I turned around and looked at the professor, who stayed behind, maybe to block the door. He had been killed.”
Posted: 17th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (36) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
People Kill People - Virginia Tech
The debate on guns will go on well beyond the time when the Virginia Tech massacre has stopped making headlines. Do guns kill people? Or are people inherently violent?
“After last night’s news about a mass shooting in Virginia it was only a matter of time before people started talking about the right to bear arms being the reason for such things to happen, writes Dizzy.
Sky News is running a poll that suggest people think the gun laws are not strict enough in the US. However, in my knowledge and experience of gun laws in the US this view is jaded by misunderstanding of US gun control.
The vast majority of British people, I imagine, think that you can just walk into a shop in America, hand over some money, and walk out with a semi-automatic weapon or an assault rifle. That however is simply not the case. If you want a gun you face, quite rightly, background checks. If you want to carry a gun it is also the case in a vast majority of states that you must carry it on show and not concealed without a license to do so.
Knee-jerk gun control laws may seem like an appropriate measure, however, as we’ve seen in recent month in the UK, where we have strict gun laws, they are not holding back gun crime. The logic that strict gun laws will reduce gun crime is fundamentally flawed. I should say that I’m not advocating scrapping our gun laws here, more that the hand-wringing that will occur in the UK about these shootings in Virginia ought not be framed in the “stricter gun control would’ve stopped this” terms.
It’s a cliche of the pro-gun lobby to say “gun’s don’t kill people, people kill people”, but within that argument there is actually a subtle truth. For no matter what you ban, be it guns, knives, baseball bats or frying pans, if someone wants to kill people they will find a way to do it - by for example - purchasing acetone and some basic ingredients and putting them in a rucksack and getting on a train. In virtually every case of “mass shootings” the perpetrators turn the gun on themself, in that sense it makes them not much different to a suicide bomber only the bomb was bullets.
The next few day of British press comment will be interesting as I expect the usual suspects will roll out the column inches on how gun control is the only way to stop this. If the US chooses to take that route then that is of course their business, but if it does and then shootings happen again, you can guarantee that the answer will be “stricter gun laws” yet again. Knee-jerk banning is, after all, much easier than realising that human beings can be very nasty and will find ways to kill people if they really want to. The most interesting thing is that you never hear them calling for the ingredients of an acetone bomb to be banned.”
Anorak Forums
Posted: 17th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (6) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Guns Kill People - Virginia Tech
The debate on guns will go on well beyond the time when the Virginia Tech massacre has stopped making headlines.
This from Jane Smiley in the Huffington Post:
“SOME years ago, I was talking to a man about guns. At the time, I didn’t really know anyone with guns (still don’t), but he did. He had had guns himself. He said, “I gave my gun away, because when I had it, every time something happened that made me mad, my mind would start circling around that gun, and I would be thinking about using it.
So I got rid of it and I’m glad I did.” Right up front I will say that I am opposed to casual gun ownership, but I also realize that Americans will always have guns. Period. It’s a national fetish.
But the mental state my interlocutor was describing years ago is the price we have to pay, along with, of course, the accidental deaths of children and other unprepared and careless people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and in proximity to the wrong gun.
What I would like is for the gun-toting right wing to admit that there is a price we pay, that senseless accidental deaths and traumas are a national cost and that it’s not so clear that it’s worth it, but hey, we pay it anyway because so many guns are in the hands of so many people that there would never be any getting rid of them.
I would like the right wing to admit that guns are not “good” and that the right to bear arms is not an absolute virtue and that the deaths in the US caused by guns are at least as problematic, philosophically, as abortion. But I’m not holding my breath.”
Anorak Forums
Posted: 17th, April 2007 | In: Twitterings Comments (4) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Virginia Tech - Unbearable Truths
“THE VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE,” announces the Sun’s front page.
There is a picture of a victim being carted from the scene. Blood trickles down a bare leg. Four thickset police hold the victim’s limbs - two on the feet, two on the arms.
No stretcher. The victim’s body slums in the middle. The police are armed. One is wearing full body armour. Yet none of them are touching the bloodied parts. They take hold of the victim’s shoes with their gloved hands.
Are they squeamish? Is it against health and safety procedures for an officer to touch an undressed wound? Or are they uncertain of what to do?
More police carrying another body on the Mirror’s front page. And another on the Mail, this one a woman.
Then a statement and a question: “He lined the students against a wall, then the executions began. As 33 die in America’s worst ever shooting, what price the right to bear arms?”
Questions at a time like this? The Mail should gather the facts before the analysis can begin in earnest.
The killer is shooting. He is in the engineering department. Armed with two 9mm automatic handguns he enters the dormitory at West Amber Johnston Hall, housing 895 people.
Students are lined up. The firing begins. When the shooting ends, 32 are dead and 29 are hurt.
No newspaper goes into the rooms full of bodies. Not yet. But they imagine the scene, the weight of evil hanging overhead. The smell.
The Mail publishes a picture of students in a classroom at Virginia Tech. “A terrible toll in the country where the gun is still sacrosanct,” trills the headline.
And then the stories. There are lots of stories, and there will be many more and they will be told many times.
Engineering student Josh hears “screaming through the walls”. Panic. “Then I head shots down the hallways.” Forty or 50. He jumped from a window to escape. “Then I heard shots through glass – and that’s when it hit me that I had to get out of there.”
Matt Waldron sees a girl jump from a top-storey window. She hits the ground. She isn’t moving.
Matt Matoney sees “an ungodly amount of ammo” on the killer’s vest. “People were throwing desks and whatever they could to barricade the door to stop him coming through,” says he.
Student Suxanne Higgs tells the Mirror: “We’ve heard that the shooter was jealous over a girl who as with someone else.” This is the Mirror’s “jilted gunman”.
Student Kenny Nesselrodt says: “I understand the guy went to her dormitory first and shot his girlfriend because she’d broken up with him.”
Then nothing for two hours. The killer enters a French class. Nesselrodt goes on: “I’ve heard it was his own class. Maybe he figured ‘I’ve already killed so I might as well kill again.”
There will be much analysis to come. But perhaps this student has hit upon the answer to the many questions that will come - not ‘why?’ but ‘why not?’
Posted: 17th, April 2007 | In: Tabloids Comments (4) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
‘STEFFAN Jackson is addicted to smoking, or hooked on ciggies, as the Sun reports. Nothing odd in that - until you learn that Steffan is ten years old.
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‘Twenty Virginia Slims please. Shamo!’ |
Steffan started smoking when he was aged four and admits to getting through ten fags a day. He buys them on the black market for £2.50 for 20, funded by the £5-a-week pocket money his mum gives him.
Aged ten or not, we should not excuse the boys maths. Lets look at the sums, as we would a thoroughly modern maths GCSE problem.
Things do not add up. While the Sun showcases Steffan, and the boy poses for a photo with a ciggie in his hand, we sense that hes embellished the truth a little.
It is possible that Steffan is not quite giving us the true picture of his habit. If he gets by on a fiver each week, then he has enough to buy 40 cigarettes. Thats 30 less than the 70 he claims to smoke a week.
Sure he could be getting his smokes from another source, but since mum Teresa packed in her 60-a-day habit, he cant filch hers. Cigarettes might be made from dried leaves, but they dont grow on trees.
Neither are they supplied by a yellowy man called Nic OTeen, as they were in the 1980s, when kids watching TV were warned about her perils of the evil weed by Superman. The super hero would go up to the foul Nic and throttle the life out of his ciggies - taking care not to burn the fags with his X-Ray vision lest he inhale their fumes and drop to the ground stone dead.
This is no joking matter. This is smoking. It can be deadly. It earns the Government loadsa money through taxes although Tony Blair can rest easy in knowing that he earns not a penny from young Steffan who buys his cancer sticks from a man who, given his dissolute lifestyle, he might well meet in a pub.
Smoking is a filthy habit. It makes you smell. It costs too much money to make any sense, unless your other habits are setting light to fivers and golf. And it increases the chances of getting some pretty hideous diseases.
But such talk is wasted on Steff. Hes ten. And though mum Teresa says shes tried everything to get him to stop perhaps she should try stopping his pocket money? his smoking makes him stand out from the crowd. Smoking has got him into the national press. And how cool is that?
And better than that, smoking has allowed Steffan to feature in a BBC3 show called Honey Were Killing the Kids.
It might sound like the title of an Oliver Stone flick - Natural Born Killers for the pre-teen market - but its not. Looking at the Beebs website, we learn: Each week experts use cutting-edge technology to show parents how their children may look at 40 if they don’t change their current lifestyle.
Show any parent that their little loves will look like all grown up and middle-aged and theyll surely scream and cover their eyes, smoking or no smoking.
Little Armanis funny little way of playing with mummys earrings has mutated into her pierced eyelids. Introverted Jakes Bang-Bang! games means he is now a solitary type who wanders around the village dressed in Army fatigues and is not allowed within two hundred yards of the nearest school. Bossy Jamie who never wanted to share and told fibs is the Prime Minister.
Imagine the shock on Michael Jacksons mothers face had she been able to gaze into the magic box and see her precocious ten-year-old child at 40.
The point of this is, of course, to promote healthy living. So we get to see two morphs of Steffan, one demonstrating the effects of a healthy lifestyle and the other illustrating how the child would grow up if the familys bad habits continue.
Healthy Steffan looks better than unhealthy Steffan. Which is just great - so long as nothing happens to Steffan in the next thirty years; something the Beebs technical types failed to factor into their computer programmes.
The thing is that life is riddled with risks. Smoking increases the risk of getting some bad things, but not all of them. If Steffan gives up fags straight away, bad things may yet befall him.
Perhaps the BBC can show us what will happen to Steffan if the War on Terror is not won. Or if England fail to win the World Cup. Or if he gets a spoon stuck in his eye in a Turkish nightclub.
Steffan is a freak. His smoking is not the norm. Rather than the BBC holding him up as a warning to us all - the freak show that could be you he should be ignored.
Smelled but not heard…’
Posted: 12th, October 2005 | In: Anorak Says Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
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