My Two Cents on Violence
So I spent the better part of my “work” day watching ABC’s live coverage of the Virginia Tech Massacre at my “work”station (including Bush’s live statement). I’m the second youngest employee there, and a couple of the other employees made their way by to watch the coverage which, despite being broadcast by a TV station, I was somehow channeling onto my computer screen through this newfangled “internet” thing.
The overwhelming response to the situation (as is ALWAYS the overwhelming response from the older generations during crises like this) was “What is this world coming to?!” My dad also went off on a short rant about “what this world is coming to” when I told him the news.
I’m desperately envious of these people. I’m sure life was grand in this conflict-free utopia of yesteryear before, in the late 70’s, violence was invented as a marketing tool to sell video games. I’m not exactly sure where old folks get this idea that things were better or simpler when they were alive, but my theory is that they’re getting their actual childhoods confused with the shitty sitcoms they grew up watching (not to say that modern sitcoms aren’t shitty — quite the opposite; sitcoms are inherently shitty). Perhaps the world of my own childhood isn’t so heavily romanticized because current events were taught in grade school, rather than ignored. I was aware of the Waco Siege, the World Trade Center Bombing, the Gulf War, etc etc. This doesn’t mean my childhood was robbed of any innocence or wonderment; I was also aware of several other widely-accepted facts: Superman is a mama’s boy, T-Rex is the most awesomest thing ever and could probably eat any other dinosaur in a single bite, girls are host to all sorts of seemingly ineffective yet highly contagious diseases, and your funnest sibling is Mario. Who knows? Maybe when my own childhood is clouded by an additional 15-20 years of experiences, my brain will also begin to make up idyllic shit about “how things were”.
Fact: Violence, and the nutjobs that commit it, have always existed, and always will. The second worst shooting on a University campus occurred in 1966, people (second only to the Virginia Tech massacre. That’s right, Columbine comes in 3rd). The WORST school massacre in US history occurred in 1927, in which a nutjob bombed a grade school, killing over 40 people. Just so you don’t have to do the math yourself, this predates the release of Doom by 66 years.
Fact: Violent crime has been in steady decline for a number of years. However, media saturation of violent crimes has gone up from “ridiculous” to “annoying”. This creates the illusion that the world is “going down the tubes” or “going to shit”, etc.
Fact: President Bush is praying the SHIT out of this incident, announcing on live TV that he is working very closely with God™ to ensure that all parties involved in this tragedy are satisfied with the outcome. God™ must have dozed off for a second when this happened and accidentally let it occur. It has already been nominated for inclusion on God’s Xtreme Bloopers 2007 DVD, tentatively slated for release in the first quarter 2008.
April 16th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I think that a question like “what is the world coming to?” is just putting a happy face on the implied question “what the fuck is wrong with people?” which is exactly how I responded to news of the virginia tech shooting. I don’t think people really believe things were better in the “good ole’ days”, they just ask questions like that to say out loud that they, like you, me, and everyone else, don’t understand why something like this happens. Just because we responded in a present-tense sense and they rocked past-tense… ish sounding questions doesn’t mean they REALLY believe that things were somehow different, they either just A) used a cliched question that happens to be past-tense, or B) use a past-tense question either on purpose or subconsciously in order to make senseless acts seem like a “newfangled idea” and thereby partially absolve themselves from the responsibility of trying to comprehend or think about something unpleasant.
“These kids today with their (insert anything inexplicable here, i.e. Bigfoot, school shootings, Paris Hilton’s celebrity status, etc…), I just don’t understand it, but now that I’ve attributed it to a generational gap I’m free to go on with life as usual and bar further contemplation.”
As for Bush praying… whatever. What’s the other way people deal with something incomprehensible, other than writing it off as a sign of the times? Oh right, enter religion. In this case though, there’s really nothing more you can do right? *Cough* Oh, right, besides finding out why students were still in class two hours after the first barrage of gunfire happened.
April 17th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Just a couple hours after posting this, I was watching the “news”, and this bald doofus was chatting with this insane woman who was claiming that this tragedy could have been averted were ALL students allowed to carry concealed weapons (at least, that was the gist of her argument, as far as I could gather). The bald doofus then exclaimed, more or less, “What is this world coming to?”, following that up by saying “I don’t remember this sort of thing happening when I was a kid!” Well, I guess you just weren’t paying attention. This was exactly my point.
He THEN brought on a sane man who actually had a point. This guy said that more effort should be put into getting children to wear helmets on bicycles than on trying to find ways to keep colleges in continuous lockdown, as bicycle accidents claim hundreds of children’s lives each year, whereas school shootings…well, they don’t. He then started to go off on a tangent about how the media shouldn’t encourage tragedies of this sort by sensationalizing them. He started mocking the media’s insistence in mentioning “Worst shooting EVER” every chance they get, saying “America looooves their records”. Since the guy had a legitimate point (don’t give the NEXT gunman to walk onto a campus a number to top), the bald doofus interrupted him and they went to commercial. He was not on the show when they returned.
Tragedies of this sort cannot be averted. Once again the gun control debate is in full swing, and it’s bullshit. The answer isn’t “gun control”, and it sure as hell isn’t “more guns”. There is no answer. If a crazy kid wants to murder a bunch of people, he will get his hands on a weapon if he has to steal it or purchase it illegally. That said, I will say that this kid came pretty damn close to killing as many people in two hours by himself as there were total gun homicides in Britain last year. People are fucked up and do fucked up things. Is Bush going to start a “War on Crazy People”?
A quick aside on the gun control thing: I saw a report with comments from the chairman of Gun Owners of America, a think-tank of liberal intellectuals, who was ALSO claiming that students should be armed. He then claimed that “all major school shootings in the past 10 years that have ended abruptly have done so because an armed civilian stepped in to stop it.” What? Unless by “armed civilian” he means “the gunman” and by “stepped in to stop it” he means “turns the gun on himself”, I think he’s making shit up.
As far as defending Bush over the praying thing, I wasn’t attacking the guy for his bullshit. It’s just a formality. When people don’t have anything nice to say, they just say they’ll “pray for you/them/their families/whatever.” It sounds marginally better than “There isn’t shit I can do.” I just get a kick out of watching the guy on live TV any chance I can get. He looked just as confused and lost as ever. However, I don’t think that as President, Bush has any responsibility to do ANYTHING about this tragedy. Well, except to get the ball rolling on this War on Crazy People thing.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Oh and Chris, I got a kick out of listening to your discussion of the event over XBox Live with your Gears of War buddies.
“Yeah, I don’t understand why classes weren’t stopped immediately after the first shooting. Cover and I’ll Torque him. Shouldn’t the college have some sort of procedure in place to…sniper, top left. In the event that…BEHIND YOU!” *Guy is blown in half*
I had no idea Live also served as a forum for such heated debate.
April 17th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I think we agree about everything, I was just making conversation… Watch your 6 ZHX.
April 17th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Not everything you Nader-voting, vegetarian, agnostic bastard. Watch your 3.
April 17th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
I’m just trying to picture what would have happened had the students been armed: bad guy comes in, starts firing; student fires back, misses, hits friend; another student notices 1st student shooting friend, pulls gun & shoots at 1st student, misses and hits another student; cops come on scene, several students have guns drawn, cops take them all out.
As for “locking” down the campus, sounds good but hardly practical. Where would the students go? To their safe dorms? (where shooting no. 1 took place) Oh wait, even if the dorms were safe, the student have now been locked out. Where do they go? Possibly to the “safe” environs of one of the classrooms? See, once you start thinking about what locking down the campus would have actually accomplished, you run into all kinds of problems. I agree there should have been a warning that there was possibly an armed man on campus but then again, what good would that have done and how many people would have gotten even that warning in time?
As for Bush and religion, yesterday he sounded just like a preacher at a funeral: “and we lift up our prayers to comfort them and ask a loving God….” As Bill implies, the same loving god that let it happen in the first place? hmmmmmmm
April 17th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Yeah, my jaw dropped when he whipped that one out.
On the “more guns/concealed weapons on campus” debate, it doesn’t take a genius to figure this hypothetical situation out: Through the university’s instantaneous emergency information dissemination program *cough*, all students that subscribe to this program receive a text message on their cell phones that a gunman is loose on campus. Immediately, all your 2nd Amendment fanatics pull out their perfectly legal concealed weapons to take the lunatic down. How are you supposed to tell who the badguy is now? Anybody with a gun is going to be firing at anybody with a gun. I can’t imagine the ensuing chaos, but I can imagine the headlines: “57 Gun-Toting Would-Be Heroes Slaughter Each Other in Confusing College Firefight”
April 17th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
I was wondering if you read up on the Jack Thompson spin yet, because guess what, he already weaseled his way onto National TV and blamed this all on video games.
I thought this was a good read earlier today, and the part I like best is that this guy got on FOX news before they even knew the shooters identity, or anything about him, but good ole’ Jack does.
http://kotaku.com/gaming/feature/feature-dissecting-jacks-lies-252914.php
Their is video of him and a dissection of his “facts”. Someone always has a spin on tragedy. How it could have been stopped, how it happened, why it happened. Why can’t it just be that. A tragedy. Yes, it was fucking horrible. Yes, the dude was fucking batshit. Yes, it was fucking horrible.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to be the family of a victim, and instead of having to deal with being told that your son or daughter or mother or father was killed by some asshole, you have someone else in your face saying they could’ve prevented it with THEIR gun, but it was a video games fault, so he got bad grades, and learned how to kill with a video game. Could you do this interview? How are you feeling? Do you need a second to cry? Can you sign this release? All this fucking bullshit.
How can someone say that it is alright to have a gun concealed to take down the bad guy with a gun? Bill was right in that guns don’t kill people, it just makes it really really easy, and it’s fucking pathetic. Guns are fucking pathetic useless tools. I figure if humans made it as far as they did before guns were invented, we could probably do without them now. I have no problem hitting people with sticks. I guess someone, somewhere will always just want a bigger stick if it came to that. Humans are disgusting.
April 17th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
If you’re on the internet and that link above doesn’t work for you, I would suggest adding the hyper part to the address.
April 17th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I also just got to thinking. How fucking glad I am that I no longer work in the media. I always felt so fucking dirty being responsible for having to get those numbers out there. Sitting in a control room on 9/11 throwing up numbers on the screen all day. Death tolls, probabilities, percentages, all sorts of statistics on anything those lucky enough to be alive can give to everyone else lucky to be alive. Is it a scare tactic, or just the public starving for facts? Is it the media’s fault for getting it out there, or the audience for tuning in? I don’t really know, I just know I always felt guilty and dirty.
Nothing like sitting next to your friend breaking the story on his brother that just died. Nothing like reporting to everyone else in the state that this guy did this thing wrong, here is his family, here are the victims, here are their names, here are some numbers, let’s get something out of it by shoving cameras in their faces. Ugh.
For the most part I think Bill can agree it was a bullshit job where you tell people in Wyoming about the new traffic light that got installed at the one intersection in Shoshoni. But then there is the day when we go to war for no reason, someone kills 30+ people, 2000+ people get blown up in a building, Bush chokes on a pretzel. The day when it makes you one of the people I mention above. Throwing more bullshit in a victims face, or a victims family’s face. And that’s the part that makes you feel like shit. How many of those reporters and experts covering this thing do you think feel ANYTHING?
April 18th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Oh, and just for the record, I just read that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church are going to protest the funerals of all the shootings victims. Rad! So there is that now too.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Yeah Chris and I were watching the news and were discussing the integrity of the reporters covering the shooting. We wondered how many of them were actually concerned for anybody involved or were just drooling over what this could do for their careers.
It’s tough to take them seriously when they’re probably much more worried about how their hair looks. I mean, the whole world is watching, right?
Tried to access Fred Phelps’ page but apparently it’s under really heavy strain right now. I also fixed your link for you.