After a point, I turned off the endless coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy as it kept repeating the same information over and over, yet totally ignoring certain salient points.
The relatively few quotes from the writings of the young man responsible for the tragedy seem to point to his having been victimized at some point in his youth. This does not excuse his actions, or shift the blame in any way, but there is something in that which needs to be looked into and addressed.
100 per cent of all shootings are commited by humans. This should make the Martians very nervous. That the alleged perpetrator of this tragedy was an immigrant overlooks that he had been in the United States since he was eight years old. Not even our Founding Fathers would escape the suspicious label of immigrant under those parameters. Timothy McVeigh was not an immigrant (unless you ask a Native American). Was it any more or less relevant that he was a suburban-raised youth? An English major?
A number of the security experts weighing in have called for the need to create barriers for campuses to define their perimeters. One expert even went so far as to suggest that there should be but a single entrance/exit for college campuses. It would appear to me that the majority of campus shootings have actually been committed by a member of the campus community, thus a barrier in most cases would not prevent a perpetrator from committing the act, nor address the root cause. Furthermore, the possibility of panic and number of casualties might very well escalate were there no easy way for people to evacuate easily..
I'm all for getting rid of guns... all guns. Handguns, automatic weapons, nukes, you name it. Everybody's. I'd like to live in a world where armies had nothing more than Rice Krispies to hurl at each other, yet humans in their ingenuity have even figured how to turn airplanes into weapons of destruction. And don't get me started on tobacco.
To exist, in and of itself, is a potential pre-existing condition for our non-existence. Yet it seems counter intuitive to be pro-active by preemptively non-existing in order to prevent our non-existence.
On an entirely different note, who'd have thought that in the end, Richard Gere would stick a metaphorical gerbil up his own butt? One would think that after all his advocacy on behalf of the Tibetan people, he'd be a little more familiar with Indian customs and etiquette.
The relatively few quotes from the writings of the young man responsible for the tragedy seem to point to his having been victimized at some point in his youth. This does not excuse his actions, or shift the blame in any way, but there is something in that which needs to be looked into and addressed.
100 per cent of all shootings are commited by humans. This should make the Martians very nervous. That the alleged perpetrator of this tragedy was an immigrant overlooks that he had been in the United States since he was eight years old. Not even our Founding Fathers would escape the suspicious label of immigrant under those parameters. Timothy McVeigh was not an immigrant (unless you ask a Native American). Was it any more or less relevant that he was a suburban-raised youth? An English major?
A number of the security experts weighing in have called for the need to create barriers for campuses to define their perimeters. One expert even went so far as to suggest that there should be but a single entrance/exit for college campuses. It would appear to me that the majority of campus shootings have actually been committed by a member of the campus community, thus a barrier in most cases would not prevent a perpetrator from committing the act, nor address the root cause. Furthermore, the possibility of panic and number of casualties might very well escalate were there no easy way for people to evacuate easily..
I'm all for getting rid of guns... all guns. Handguns, automatic weapons, nukes, you name it. Everybody's. I'd like to live in a world where armies had nothing more than Rice Krispies to hurl at each other, yet humans in their ingenuity have even figured how to turn airplanes into weapons of destruction. And don't get me started on tobacco.
To exist, in and of itself, is a potential pre-existing condition for our non-existence. Yet it seems counter intuitive to be pro-active by preemptively non-existing in order to prevent our non-existence.
.....
On an entirely different note, who'd have thought that in the end, Richard Gere would stick a metaphorical gerbil up his own butt? One would think that after all his advocacy on behalf of the Tibetan people, he'd be a little more familiar with Indian customs and etiquette.
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