maybe a little dignity
The shootings at Virginia Tech prove nothing about anyone's politics. Gun control would not have stopped the shootings, anymore than the gun ban in the District of Columbia has made that city a peaceful place. Concealed carry laws would not have helped against the sudden appearance of a gunman who shot quickly and fled. Only in fantasyland do people successfully quick-draw their concealed weapon at the sudden appearance of a gunman who rips open a door, weapon at the ready, and begins pumping bullets into a room.The police and the campus administration were not at fault for the later round of shootings; officials do not typically respond to a shooting at one location by placing every other nearby location under armed lockdown, and there was no good reason to think that a shooting at one place on campus would lead, two hours later, to another set of shootings somewhere else. People routinely shoot other people without going on extended rampages at other locations; this is the norm, and it was reasonable for police to make the assumption that they were facing a normal act of violence. Only in fantasyland does an institution immediately and correctly assume that an act of violence on their premises will be a precursor for a later and related act of violence somewhere else on their premises. (Somebody's been shot on Third Street -- quick, close down Seventh Street, Fourteenth Street, and the corndog stand at the mall!)
The violence at Virginia Tech proves that there are violent human beings on the planet, and horrible violence will sometimes happen. This is why we have police and paramedics, who did their jobs in this instance at great risk to their own personal safety.
And that's it. No lessons about anyone's ideology. No politician to blame. The shooter did it, and either the police appropriately killed him or he killed himself. Let us be spared the other week of televised pollution that will surely follow, in which it will be proved by screaming idiots that Bush or Pelosi or the liberals or the gun nuts killed those poor kids.
Let's for once blame an action on the person who took that action, and leave it at that.
ADDED LATER:
Related.
posted by Chris Bray @ 7:20 PM
5 Comments:
You're no fun....
"Gun control would not have stopped the shootings, anymore than the gun ban in the District of Columbia has made that city a peaceful place. Concealed carry laws would not have helped against the sudden appearance of a gunman who shot quickly and fled. "
Given that we don't even know the identity of the shooter, you can't really say either of those things with such certainty.
I agree. Someone HAS to be blamed. An idiot shot people; apparently he can't be the one at fault here.
Even within two hours, police, administration, students and parents couldn't know every little detail, much less inform everyone. In a burglary, within two hours do the police, victims and neighbors know everything? Is the entire block locked down? Yes, this example doesn't anywhere near compare, but the point is still the same. In a crime, all the details aren't known immediately, much less a reaction determined and executed.
So now people complaining that there wasn't enough notification. How can you notify someone that doesn't get up and watch the news? What about people that don't check websites or look at their email? What do you do for people that are on the road, blasting their favorite CD?
You can't notify everyone. I think they did a great job getting it on the website and sending out a mass email. Other students pitched in and put it up on social networking websites. People "in charge" can only do so much in a time of mass chaos.
You can basically order whatever you want online. So gun control really doesn't even have to come into the discussion. [insert my thesis for documentation on this]
But someone HAS to be blamed. Republicans or Liberals or the mayor or the governor or the president of the school or video game makers or his parents or President Bush: someone has to be blamed; sensible or not. But of course, not the media; who has to find someone to be at fault for their ratings.
(sorry for the novel)
Total,
Fair enough -- but uncertainty is an argument for withholding blame, so I think the larger point holds.
Thanks for a great post.
(I think you're being a bit too kind to Total, though. In what way could the identity of the shooter affect whether or not concealed carry laws would have helped? And, at the time he posted his comment, we did indeed know the identity of the shooter.)
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