A thug, or a massacre?
I question the use of the word ‘massacre’ in covering this tragedy. This was a shooting, certainly, and murder. I imagine that any sane legal system will determine that the first girls killed will be found to be premeditated murder. The rest, though, was a grisly murder/suicide. Using harsher words, playing up the magnitude of the event, though, assures continued follow-ons to school shootings. The parents, friends, and survivors have to deal with their losses, due apparently to a troubled young man. Nothing less, certainly, but not really much more.
We find this tragic loss of live of national and international interest. But if these lives had been lost in 30 separate vehicle accidents, with 30 separate impaired/distracted drivers at fault, no one would look at anything for ‘answers’. We certainly haven’t made a lot of headway in over 60 years of senseless hightway deaths. Instead of profiling and identifying drivers with hazardous patterns, such as uncontrolled blood sugar anomalies (sleepiness), family habits of talking to passengers, even smoking and leaving distracting films of crud on the inside of the windows, we insist ‘seat belts save lives’. We overhear our senior drivers memorizing the eyecharts they can no longer read clearly, and ignore the hazard of letting them drive.
For every parent that you try to comfort and reassure with stories about Virginia Tech and the shooting, remember that there are young people watching, too, that will remember the notoriety, how the anger is revealed to everyone at last, how Cho’s message still got published by his actions. If we instead portray this as a criminal act, and a tragic loss, we begin to let the continuing sequence of school shootings fade into history with Old West shootouts.
Your impression and posting above is very disturbing and far from the mark. Perhaps you too should seek counciling–
Graham, the analysis that the school shooting pattern is expected to continue is not mine — I saw it broadcast, and it seems both accurate and a reasonable conclusion to me.
I am also not the first to denigrate the sheer amount of airplay and exposure the perpetrator gets. It seems obvious to me that he used the murder/suicide spree to get his statement published. And he did. As others have done before Columbine and since.
For the parents, family, and friends of the victims, it makes little difference whether the killer used a car or a gun, their loved one is now gone. It makes little difference whether there were others killed by the same person, their loved one is still gone. But national attention, the limelight of media crews publicizing and politicizing the shooter and ‘why’ .. and trivializes how their son, their daughter, their friend was lost.
I am as angry at certain members of the media, as I am at the shooter.