Tuesday, April 17, 2007

They're Always Loners

Yahoo News Headline on the Virginia Tech Massacre: He was a loner!
No shit. It's always a loner who goes postal and shoots everything that moves. I'm waiting for the neighbor to provide the old chestnut: "he was very quiet and he minded his own business and he didn't talk to nobody". (cf. Jeffrey Dahmer, the Columbine kids, the Unabomber, etc). Maybe they were quiet cause they didn't talk to you (so busy talking to the voices in their heads).
I hate that he was an English major (as am I). Just to clear our name, majoring in English doesn't usually create homicidal monsters, just frustrated writers.
He also had a green card and was a legal immigrant who arrived in this country in 1992. Like me!
Yikes, we're starting to have too much in common.
And, as a legal immigrant with no prior criminal record he was able to purchase a handgun, or as many as he wished, because this is the only country on the planet where people think it is some kind of God given right for regular citizens to own weapons. Which is also why we probably are the country where these kinds of awful events tend to happen with way too much frequency.
For those NRA loving people who have the audacity to say that had the teachers and students been armed, this would have played differently: 1. They don't know what they're saying. 2. I hope they never have to be on the wrong side of the barrel of a gun. Or rather, I hope they do, and maybe they will not be so enthusiastic about thinking that everyone should be armed to the teeth in civilian life and we can all act the sheriff. We are not Daniel Boone, this is not the Wild West anymore, okay? Civilization is not Frontierland. Frontierland is barbaric.
Imagine a society where everyone is packing heat. One diss at the traffic stop, one incident of road rage, hell one nasty look from behind a counter and people would be dropping like flies.
Regular citizens have no business with firearms. Period. Guns are for law enforcement: police and the army. That's it.
Also, what kind of police department learns there has been a shooting at a college campus, decides oh it was a domestic dispute and doesn't go in hot pursuit? They ASSUME the killer has left the premises, hey, if I killed two people, they surmise, I would leave the state. Were they even looking for the guy in the two hours that elapsed from the first murders to the other 31?
Obviously, this deranged guy was going to go out on a hail of bullets anyway had somebody come looking for him, but maybe more could have been done to try to catch him. Or is it that in Virginia it's sort of normal to end domestic arguments with guns?

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