OmegaMom

I have no words to describe this.  (”Did the Devil Make Him Do It?”.  Seriously, folks.)

It goes nicely with this.  (Fred Phelps and his gang of true-love Christians think the people who were killed were killed because they “weren’t Christian enough”.)

Excuse me while I go roll my eyes right out of my head.

Folks, this was a sad, sick young man, filled with a persecution complex and violent fantasies, who decided to go out in a blaze-o-glory, and made sure he sent his “manifesto” to NBC before he did it so that he was guaranteed that blaze-o-glory.  We don’t need supernatural demons to explain why people do bad things.  We don’t need people telling grieving families that their kids and parents were killed because they didn’t do the right religious things in the oh-so-proper fashion.  For that matter, we don’t need people telling the grieving families that their kids and parents were killed “because God was teaching us a lesson which we don’t understand” or equally pompous idiocy.

I am also here to tell you that the administration at Virginia Tech did mighty damned good to get word out to the campus about the first shooting as soon as it did, and they acted blazingly fast getting the news out when they realized there was a guy out there with a gun randomly shooting people.

The second-guessing that’s going around just makes me want to scream.  Doctors should be mind-readers, and fortune-tellers, to boot, so that they know that a young man referred to the hospital for depression is actually going to blow up and shoot the world up a year from their visit.  College administrators should know–like some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing psychics–that the domestic violence case the university police dealt with in the early hours of the morning is going to explode into random shooting a few hours later.  Well, dayum, of course they should have known!  Everyone knows that domestic violence cases–rather than typically being done by upset spouses/lovers–are actually the first symptom of psychotic killers on a rampage.

Of course university police should be able to close off a 2700-acre campus as soon as they hear of a random shooter.  We all know that the people who are second guessing the university police wouldn’t be up in arms about the UP sending their small forces to close off the campus, rather than trying to deal with the gunman. 

Yah, right.  Small Mountain University is 730 acres, a quarter the size of VT.  The thought of having to cordon off SMU within minutes of hearing about a crazy shooter makes me howl with laughter.

Don’t get me started on the media.  First off, the sanctimoniousness of the various networks saying they would never have used the video footage or photos from the manifesto is laughable.  NBC’s ratings soared through the roof when they aired that stuff, and other networks’ ratings tanked.  Oh, there might have been a bit of debate at various networks about using the material if they had gotten it instead, but my cynicism makes me doubt that they would have stood fast against the lure of Ratings.

And some blogs I have read that talk about the presence of the media afterwards at VT make me just sick.  Intrusive, insensitive, obnoxious, omnipresent…

We’ve got people arguing that it makes a case for more gun control.  We’ve got people arguing that it makes a case for arming students on campus.  We’ve got people arguing that the tragedy is the result of immigration.  We’ve got people arguing that it’s the lack of community…the inability to involuntarily commit people…violent video games…the culture of violence in the U.S.  Pick a favorite hobby horse, and someone is arguing that that is the reason for this young man going berserk and being able to kill 33 people.

All I can say is that my heart goes out to the families of those 33 people dead–including the family of the killer.

Technorati: Virginia Tech