Upon hearing of yesterday's tragedy at Virginia Tech, all I thought about the subject was how unimaginably horrible it must be for the students and their families. I certainly couldn't have thought of anything to say; any sentiments would fall well short of the mark.
But that's me, I guess; as Roy and TBogg ably chronicle, there's never any shortage of moral (not to mention mental) cretins who can't even wait until the bodies are counted to start propounding their obnoxious, ghoulish theories.
It was a dry run for a terrorist attack; it's an argument for everyone to carry concealed weapons; it's (most revoltingly) God showing how much He loves us; it's an opportunity for the "lie-beral media" (get it?) to conceal the killer's true Islamojihadi identity; it demonstrates the urgent need for us to become even more of a nation of finks and drop a dime on every weirdo we see or think we see; etc., etc.
Maybe -- and here I am perhaps going out on an epistemological limb -- but maybe this was just another crazy asshole with a gun and too many emotional problems. I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but this seems fairly simple to diagnose. There are 300 million people in this country; the law of averages necessitates that many of them are potentially dangerous, and emotionally volatile. And in a country -- and, in the case of Virginia, a state -- that is resolute about having and providing easy access to firearms, people and politicians seem to think that this sort of thing is the cost of doing business.
I am not being snarky about that; I am a big believer in the Second Amendment, but let's recognize these things for what they are. If you don't want background checks, and you don't want waiting periods, and you do want Cletus to be able to sell anything he wants to anyone he wants out of the trunk of his Buick without The Man looking over his shoulder, then these awful incidents are bound to occur from time to time. It's not that complicated.
Except apparently it is, because it's given a swath of troglodytes just cause to recklessly speculate about anything and everything, propose jive-ass "solutions" that directly contradict their self-righteous loathing of all things big-gubmint, and generally get their usual two minutes of hate on. Everybody's a genius in retrospect, pointing out the violence and misanthropy in the plays Cho wrote for his classes. And? What sort of mechanism do you propose to deal with this sort of thing? How about a "Violent Plays" unit that sifts content and busts offenders? That sounds like a splendid idea that couldn't possibly fail, especially with the current crew of ass-scratching nitwits in the executive branch.
It's natural, when one is wringing their hands in the aftermath of a tragedy like this, to wonder what could have been done to prevent it. Well, lots of things could have been done. But all of them require government funding, and government interference, and idiot bureaucrats that every one of these sanctimonious mooks usually professes to hate, stepping on a variety of toes, some perhaps potentially guilty, most of them likely not.
Ordinarily, human decency would have once required people to at least wait until the bodies were cold and actual information was known before launching into moronic theories and diatribes and transparent psychological projection. Maybe that was just a quaint bullshit notion our grandparents bamboozled us with when we were little.
[Update: Turns out, rather inconveniently for our poorly prognosticating brethren who are deeply pondering the reckless tolerance for weirdos on college campuses, that Cho in fact had been red-flagged -- repeatedly -- by students and faculty alike as a seething angry-loner type with a troublesome proclivity toward gratuitous violence in his writing assignments. All attempts to mobilize the Thought Police failed, sadly, though Cho's poetry professor threatened to quit if he wasn't removed from her class, after many other students simply stopped showing up.
Also, um, Cho had been warned by the court about his stalking behavior and committed to an outpatient psychiatric facility. Strangely, none of this came up either time when Cho went to purchase his guns, a month apart. Could this be part of the problem here, that the only place Cho was really under the radar was at the gun shop? Talk about an inconvenient truth. Not as much fun as giving the overly-tolerant college pussies the ol' what-for, but facts are seldom as much fun as wild speculation.]
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