Hard News: Awful in more than one way
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Top Gear s09e03
is that the one where they paint the slogans on their cars? It gets very frightening very quickly.
All on YouTube, naturally:
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merc,
We have had a schoolyard shooting, no death, one badly injured.
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The real problem is the constitution and the culture.
More the latter, less the former. One of the points of the inexplicably-despised-by-gun-nuts Bowling for Columbine was that US firearms ownership isn't that much higher than Canada - but argued that there is a culture of racism, fear, and violence in the US that is far worse than anything north of the border (one statistic which was waved about in the doco was that the non-firearms murder rate is higher in the US than the total murder rate in Canada, per capita).
I've seen little to convince me that the main reason for their second amendment was less to do with self defence or shooting prarie dogs with assault rifles or whatever, but to keep the government in line, something the NRA is remarkably uninterested in when there's a Republican administration in Washington!
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I also wonder if it's the type of gun - Canada has very few handguns and laws against concealed carry while the US has about 80 million handguns, concealed carry laws and 14.5 times the number of gun deaths.
I suspect Canada resembles New Zealand and that most of the guns are rifles owned by people living in rural environments.
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Thanks rodgerd.
I have been thinking the same thing as you.
Saved me from having to post anything. -
3410,
That's the one.
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Just as a thought experiment, does anything this this would have received the same level of media attention if (say) Cho Seung-Hui had been a totally screwed up engineering student who'd killed thirty four people by planting a fire bomb in a residential hall? And if not, why not?
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Just as a thought experiment, does anything this this would have received the same level of media attention if (say) Cho Seung-Hui had been a totally screwed up engineering student who'd killed thirty four people by planting a fire bomb in a residential hall? And if not, why not?
Probably - someone mentioned the Oklahoma bombing earlier and that sure got a lot of attention.
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3410,
Sadly, I think we've hardly begun to see how much attention this will attract. Columbine was not a cultural touchstone (or whatever you call it) in the immediate aftermath, but grew to be so over subsequent months and years.
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Similar incidents in Iraq, Darfur or just about anywhere in Africa would not have raised much attention in media however.
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Bombings get plenty of attention, at least when they affect people to which the western media can relate (e.g., the tourists killed in Bali).
That was a rollicking good Top Gear wasn't it ... I think of the show in a slightly different light now. Though clearly what sounded like a great lark in theory turned out to be rather scary in practice. It's all good fun until you're being chased by a pickup full of angry rednecks as the saying goes.
I thought the "Nascar sucks" was particularly clever.
What would be the equivalent in NZ? Driving through Christchurch with "Crusaders Suck"?
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no i think the equivalent would just be driving through hamilton.
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I don't think anyone cares enough to get het up over silly stuff like that. It's true though, Crusaders suck but not as much as rugby sucks overall. Sad excuse for a national sport, that.
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This would get covereage regardless of the actual means, just because Virginia happens to be in a hugely competitive media market with ready access to airports, hotels, and a high degree of safety (lol?). So it is easy to cover, to send reporters to. Then it spreads rapidly because other media sources are hungry for ready made, self publicising news stories that have plenty of human interest + horrible glossy photos.
Call me cyncical but people prefer to hear news stories about people they can empathise with easily, and english speaking kids at a university in a western country is familar, at least compared to say a mine explosion in China.
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Just as a thought experiment, does anything this this would have received the same level of media attention if (say) Cho Seung-Hui had been a totally screwed up engineering student who'd killed thirty four people by planting a fire bomb in a residential hall? And if not, why not?
Because the story of the blank-faced, stalking shooter is a more compelling narrative. It plays out of a longer period, during which TV can go live to the scene, and survivors have more interesting stories to tell. Hostage situations are especially good.
It's also part of an established story arc. School shootings happen a lot in the US - three in one week last year - and school bombings hardly ever. Every time, people say "but he equally could have used a bomb!" but it actually never happens. (They don't do their assasinations that way either.)
But the suicide bombing at the (wow!) Edgar Alan Poe Elementary School in 1959 is a fairly horrifying story.
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duh repetition, teach me to scroll up and read
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I have done something entierly good for the last two days...
I have not turned on a televison.
I have missed what can only be called pornography if its anything like previous tragedys.
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This would get coverage regardless of the actual means, just because Virginia happens to be in a hugely competitive media market with ready access to airports, hotels, and a high degree of safety (lol?). So it is easy to cover, to send reporters to. Then it spreads rapidly because other media sources are hungry for ready made, self publicising news stories that have plenty of human interest + horrible glossy photos.
Also, VTech has highly-wired students who do stuff like setting up survivor clearing houses on Facebook. That story got a lot of coverage, and the student cellphone video (which was made compelling by the steady series of gunshots echoing on its track) was aired on CNN.
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Ugh, sometimes the net freaks me out a little. I swear there must be a whole group of people on Wikipedia who race to be the first to amend a biography when someone famous dies.
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Elsewhere on the internets, some news organisations got the wrong armed-to-the-teeth Asian guy, [link]
Thanks for the link RB, quite a fascinating blog that Wrong Asian Guy keeps actually. I PREDICT he will actually become a guest contributor on Fox News. They'll get him on The O'reilly Factor, have a bit of a 'chuckle' about him being mistaken by the media (always the media in general ie not just Fox) and then encourage him to share his gun lovin' pro republican thoughts.
Also, VTech has highly-wired students who do stuff like setting up survivor clearing houses on Facebook
I was puzzled to read on one website a news outlet writing up a story about a mother in Maryland who rang her daughter at California University to tell her about the massacre. So daughter went to Facebook to find out who was dead and who survived. Never once did the story explain why - it was all "wow! new technology angle in age old story of gun killings"
Also, if anyone needs a humour break then scroll back to RB's YouTube vid - definately worth the 9 minute watch
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This is from the story I was referring to in my post above:
Every tragedy now seems accompanied by an outpouring of grief and solidarity on the Internet — a torrent of news, rumor, photos, cellphone videos and instant opinion. So was the case Monday, as the death toll climbed to 33.
For many college students, this could become their defining tragedy. Most were only in grade school or middle school during the Columbine High School massacres of 1999 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks two years later.
You can link to it here: LA Times
Gee - I wonder what today's grade schoolers can look forward to?
[correction - I should have reread more carefully before my earlier post. It says the Californian student had friends at VT]
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I have done something entirely good for the last two days...
I have not turned on a televison.
i gave up tv entirely six months ago.
best decision i've ever made. people look at me like i'm crazy when i tell them that.
damn junkies...
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merc,
Kids in TV land, you been duped.
Bart Simpson -
You guys are going to hate this, espcially the "all guns are evil crowd".
But worldwide, there has not been a single school shooting prevent by police or law enforcement.
- Most have ended in suicide
- Beslan was stopped by the military, after a sustained gunfight
- Peal Mississippi was stopped when a teacher, exited the 1km radius gun free zone, retrieved his handgun from the car and disabled the shooter.In this time, the killer had more time to kill innocents.
- The Appalacian Law School shotting was stopped when two students, both left the 1km gun free zone, got their guns and disabled the shooters. In this time, the killer had more time to kill innocents.Make of this what you will.
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gnngghh!
I've just started reading one of the Kiwiblog comment treads on the shooting.
Here's tim barclay
The shooter is a socialist going on about rich kids. This is not the first time that despicable philosophy has been acted out at the barrel of a gun.
[still lost for words, gives up and presses the 'post' button.]
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