Hard News: Awful in more than one way
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I found this quite, uhh, interesting - Dana Perino at a Whitehouse press conference some 25 minutes after Bush was notified of the killings.
An awfull lot of time being dedicated to defending the US gun laws and Bush's stance on gun control, at a time when half the bodies were still probably warm.
Not particularly sensitive towards those still waiting to hear word on their loved-ones.
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"these killing took place in one of the very few places in Virginia that had a gun free culture "
I can't remember where I read this yesterday, but that touches on a very important factor in the US, namely that while individual jurisdictions may have quite tight gun laws, guns "leak" over borders easily. So you have areas where most law-abiding people have no gun but many criminals do. The gun-toting culture is always placing pressure on any gun-free areas to become gun-toting in self defence.
"they can't undo the firearms proliferation they have now. There are just too many guns already."
And the other issue is that you would have to do this at a federal level, and that would take an unachievable level of consensus.
The ultimate reply to the "if only everyone was armed this wouldn't happen" is "yes, that works so well in Baghdad."
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And in other breaking US gun news, from the Herald online:
Two Secret Service officers were injured after a gun held by another Secret Service officer accidentally fired inside the White House gate, according to a spokesman, Darrin Blackford.
Maybe the Secret Service could have been on campus to prevent the tragedy...
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I was watching Campbell Live when he interviewed Philip Alpers, who's in the gun control side of the argument (and Fair Go!).
Philip Alpers hasn't been on Fair Go for about 20 years.
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The ultimate reply to the "if only everyone was armed this wouldn't happen" is "yes, that works so well in Baghdad."
And at what age do you start to arm the students...do you start with flick knives for the pre-teens to keep those playground bullies in check, moving towards Ak-47s for the mid teens, and M-16s with grenade launchers for the under-graduates. Maybe a bazooka mounting on the Hummer just in case. Its a nonsensical argument that no reasonable person should need to address. That it has some traction speaks volumes about the culture it comes from.
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A blogger on Andrew Sullivans site has a useful response to the cries of 'why didn't they lock down the campus'?:
The overwhelming majority of murders that take place on campus (or anywhere else) are not a prelude to a mass killing. Should we really act as if they were, because it might prevent the 0.001% that are? Shutting down campus is not free; if nothing else, it absorbs a huge number of police resources that could otherwise be used to track down the killer in the vast majority of cases where the killer is still at loose, armed, dangerous, and not planning to kill himself. In this particular case, shutting down campus would have been the right answer. But in 99.999% of cases, it would have been the wrong answer, and would have placed the public at greater risk, as well as producing mass hysteria on campus. Castigating the administrators for getting it wrong, or rushing to enact legislation that ensures administrators do the wrong thing in most cases, is bad decision-making. Not that this will prevent us from doing just that.
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The phrase that terrifies me is:
The overwhelming majority of murders that take place on campus
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meanwhile, on the outer edges of the Lunisphere a blogger at National Review on line is wondering why the kids weren't brave enough to rush the guy.
He's not the only one either. What lovely people.
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I take it that those students with SWAT rifles trained at them were innocent & only being covered for caution's sake?
Let's imagine some of the bystanders or victims did have firearms on them & engaged the "perp" in a firefight. How would the SWAT guys know who's who?
I'd say that producing a handgun at the scene of a mass shooting would be faiuely counter productive to continuing one's studies in one piece.
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a blogger at National Review on line is wondering why the kids weren't brave enough to rush the guy.
my experience lead me to believe that isn't such a crazy idea.
i was in the building when a student opened fire on tutorial (a couple of floors up, the last thing i'd do is grab a pistol and go looking for the 'perp', too easy to get shot by another tutor thinking i was the crazed shooter...)
the only thing that prevented more that two dying was a karate guy grabbing the gunman, and the teacher in the room helping the student-karate-guy pin the gunman to the floor.
the teacher was shot in the process, but saved a lot of lives, including his own.
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I always thought that doing a Maharey is the only appropriate response to Tory dickheads.
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More troubling stuff in the wake of the massacre: the South Korean embassy and US officials are working on measures to prevent revenge attacks on Koreans in the States. For goodness sakes...
That Fox News clip posted by Wanusmaximus has the reporter speaking of a "horrible holocaust". Wasn't it bad enough without the Fox jerkoff having to hype it like that?
America is a country in fear and with a deep-seated mass neurosis (or is psychosis the better word?). While it's entirely possible to own a gun without having to shoot people with it, that - to kill and wound- is the only purpose of a gun.
The fact that large swathes of the populace feels it necessary to carry a lethal weapon while going about every-day business speaks volumes of how insecure the country is. It's at war with itself.
That insecurity manifests itself pretty easily too... I was warned to lay off "the Euro British sense of humour" in LA not long ago, because people might not find it funny and pop a cap in me. Must be great being a stand-up comedian in States... hope they give them bullet-proof vests at least. That experience made me realise that Sacha Baron Cohen is either incredibly brave or a complete idiot.
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Wikipedia, inevitably, has a comprehensive entry on school shootings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting
The majority (75%) of all school killings worldwide since 1927 are said to have happened in the US, but not always at the hand of students. Last year particularly sucked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_School_Shooting_Outbreak
I wonder whether it's not simply the availability of guns but some lowering of the social sanction on firing a gun at another human being. Most of us can't imagine bragging about it (although Whaleoil managed something of the kind recently), but it's not hard to find online discussions where Americans loudly testify to their willingness to blow away someone who threatens them, or even pisses them off.
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merc,
He's both.
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That experience made me realise that Sacha Baron Cohen is either incredibly brave or a complete idiot.
yup. that scene where he 'hangs with some homies' was pretty edgy.
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Sure Che: disabling a gunman with a roundhouse karate kick is a good way of stopping him (if you have one of those up your sleeve). But would you, in all seriousness, question the bravery (for this is what the chap at NRO is doing) of kids who were weren't quite up to rushing someone who is randomly killing them?
On the subject of bravery, (unmentioned in the blog post I linked to, I might add) Liviu Librescu, the 76 year old holocaust surviving professor, who lost his life barricading a door so his students could escape the shooting, was obviously plenty brave.
Something about his story makes me particularly, and irrationally, sad. Like there ought to be some sort of limit on the amount of evil that one person is expected to face in their life.
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meanwhile, on the outer edges of the Lunisphere a blogger at National Review on line is wondering why the kids weren't brave enough to rush the guy.
He's not the only one either. What lovely people.
That second one, from the guy at Human Events Online, is the most unspeakably disgusting things I have read in a while. WTF is wrong with these people?
It should be noted that this wasn't just some crazy commenter but a regular writer for a publications that bills itself as having been "Leading the Conservative Movement Since 1944".
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hat experience made me realise that Sacha Baron Cohen is either incredibly brave or a complete idiot.
Norman Gunston put a white sheet on his head and wandered South Central asking Afro Americans for directions to the KKK meeting. Most folks asked simply started laughing, but there were a few.....
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As poplicks and angryasianman point out with some of that handy Asian math-whizzkid 'subtraction' stuff, the shooter was 8 years old when he migrated to America. That makes him as American as Keith Ng is a New Zealander. Should Keith go on a shooting rampage, I don't have much doubt that he would be identified in the media as a 'Hong Kong migrant', although if he's winning international journalism awards he'd be 'Keith Ng, Proud Kiwi'. Still I don't doubt the Herald was just running with the editorial bias of their international feeds; the '1-month' mistake Juha referred to could have been a carry-over from when the US media was running with the idea that the kid was an international student from China. Fucking sloppy... I know what time the Herald gets put to bed, and every Asian-American blog had the information about the shooter's identity and American status well before that deadline.
Elsewhere on the internets, some news organisations got the wrong armed-to-the-teeth Asian guy, the Chicago Tribune couldn't tell the difference between Chinse and Korean, people flocked to GoDaddy to register VTech massacre-related domain names...
...And another email to me from 'wiremu5' with the subject header: 'This IS the Yellow Peril, smartass bitch' gets spam-blocked from my intray....
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but it's not hard to find online discussions where Americans loudly testify to their willingness to blow away someone who threatens them, or even pisses them off.
Not that hard to find anyone anywhere really - I recall late 70s, one of my wider group of friends & acquaintances (very much towards the acquaintance end of the spectrum) telling me that more than anything else, he'd like to "waste" a "black". And further, should he ever discover he is terminally ill, the first thing he'd do is get himself a gun & ... etc.
I went out of my way to avoid his company after that.
I presume he's either dead now, locked up for a long time, or has not yet been diagnosed with the big one.
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Many people are going to try and score points from this both from the left and the right such is the nature of politics.
I don't like guns never have, never will. But I reconise that some people do and nearly all of them are law abiding responibly owners. I am sure those people are just as appuled as we are and I hope one day that organisations like the NRA might say...
"look we are law abiding gun owners and we have a right to own guns, however there are to many criminals and unwell people who also have access to guns who shouldn't have them. We are prepared to make it harder for everyone including ourselves to get guns so that only law abiding people like us can have them"
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But can you point to any specific examples of this happening?
Timothy McVeigh? The Atlanta Olympic bomber? IRA bombings in the UK? Attempting to blow up a nightclub full of "promiscous women" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5016274.stm)? The nail bomb killings in the UK? That's just off the top of my head.
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Sure Che: disabling a gunman with a roundhouse karate kick is a good way of stopping him (if you have one of those up your sleeve). But would you, in all seriousness, question the bravery (for this is what the chap at NRO is doing) of kids who were weren't quite up to rushing someone who is randomly killing them?
nope, there's no way those kids could have. rushing a gunman standing metres away with a semi-automatic is simply crazy.
in the monash example i think the student was behind the gunman and threw himself on top of the shooter. the teacher was shot while they tried to pin the shooters hands.
i, OTOH, was locked in an office with half a dozen other staff.
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Damn, publicaddress ate my link.
Try http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5016274.stm for tips on dealing with "those slags dancing around"
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Edgy is the right word. There's always that feeling in the back of your mind when in the States that someone might just pull a gun at you. That doesn't come from being paranoid either: I walked a few steps on a concrete path on a beach (again in LA...) without realising it was exclusively for rollerbladers and cyclists.
So you have this nice big beach, there are people on it, and you can walk on the sand and you can walk on the footpath along the beach, but damn you if you set foot on the concrete path crossing the beach.
As I was walking on the path, a police siren went off and Officer Donut bellowed in his bullhorn at me to "STEP OFF THE PATH! STEP OFF THE PATH!"
Jesus nelly, I didn't step off the path. I jumped off it when I realised it was me he was loudhailing. The hugely fat cop was slowly driving along the footpath at the top of the beach in his black-and-white cruiser, glaring at me out of the window.
So I smile weakly and wave at him, and start to walk off in the sand. The fucker follows and drives up besides me - hand on his police issue shotgun in the car. I nervously apologise and explain that I'm a foreigner, a tourist, and that I had no idea that it was illegal to walk on the concrete footpath on the beach.
That was enough and I didn't end up getting ventilated or tasered or whatever; he drove off, and I went back to the hotel, feeling like crap. Back at the hotel, the Americans there didn't seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary however - "yeah, the cops can be real assholes like that. Don't worry about it."
Just the way it is, huh?
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