There's pretty rigorous coverage in the NY Times with the main story here, eyewitness here, and a map exploring slide show here.
Next we're going to want to know the story behind the killer, why the school didn't warn the campus after the first attack (2), two hours before the second attack (30).
Politics is already expected to intrude but you'd think with this, reportedly the largest such civilian gun slaughter in U.S. history, at least the White House would put out a message of pure shock and mourning, and not cheapen the tragedy with factional rhetoric, not in the very few hours after the incident:
Q Dana, going back to Virginia Tech, what more does this White House think needs to be done as it relates to gun issues? The President says current laws need to be strengthened, anything beyond that -- you had a conference on school violence with guns -- what more needs to be done?
MS. PERINO: I would point you back to the fact that President, along with Secretary Spellings, hosted last October -- October 10, 2006 -- a conference on school gun violence after the Amish school shooting and the other shootings that had happened, because the tragedies are the ones that just collectively break America's heart and are ones that we deeply feel, because all of us can imagine what it would be like to have been at your own school, your own college, and to have something happen. And those of us who are parents, or brothers or sisters of people at the schools have to take that into consideration.
As far as policy, the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed. And certainly bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting -- I don't want to say numbers because I know that they're still trying to figure out many people were wounded and possibly killed, but obviously that would be against the law and something that someone should be held accountable for.
A conference and the right to bear arms.
On a personal note, aside from my sympathies as an American and a father to so unfairly bereft families of the victims, I had two feelings about today's tragedy that were new to me, in the sense that they were different that just the same feelings of revulsion and sadness I had back with Columbine back on April 20, 1999.
On one hand, my sense of what those students must have experienced is vivified by having seen Elephant, the Gus Van Sant movie. His conceit was to tell a Columbine-reflective story with long real-time tracking shots through the corridors of the school and then rearranging the order to give a somewhat impressionistic puzzle of life and death that day, in those moments.
I do think that in a unique way, that film makes one feel closer to those students, their personalities, their lights extinguished by a soul-hunter, a demon in human dress, bodies until satiated, consuming, without empathy. On some sort of ultimate, revolting sadomasochistic trip -- kill them, then kill myself. Not soon enough.
There is also something very weird about reading of daily death tolls in Iraq, due to our invasion, both days this weekend being twice and four times larger than the toll in Virginia, college deans and policemen, the far coming near. It wasn't some terrorist who followed us home, but I don't think I'm the only one who finds it different than during a time of peace (as in 1999)?
Is there some way in which this sudden massacre is maybe too much for a country weary of its war, maybe too close to home?
I don't for a second believe that we would ever be able to legislate violence completely out of American life. You shouldn't have to go through a metal detector to get into every building on campus. But we do need to start an honest national dialog on hate and violence.
Already identified internationally with violence, today we as a nation, in a lacerating experience, became domestically identified with violence as well.
Is this the America we want to be?
6 comments:
The rage. The rage of the gunman, the rage of the parents. It's heartbreaking.
...and so video game.
As I strolled to my classes on the UC Berkeley campus in 2005 and 2006, I thought how easy it would for a 'terrorist' to just leave a backpack somewhere. I thought about how it was such a peaceful environment filled with hope and future and civility and I thought how totally psychologically damaging it would be for American that senseless violence take place there; at an institution of higher learning.
As a species we're mutating.
I wonder if mass murders like this are really us mutating into something new, or rather something atavistic reaching up from our collective past, which was undoubtedly as violent or moreso than our world today.
The biggest difference is that it is easier to kill more people faster with today's automatic and semi-automatic weapons, as well as bomb materials.
Maybe you're both correct; In order to progressively mutate we need to pull up and acknowledge the darkest memories and demons of our collective past.
When I saw the coverage taking up half this morning's Times, I felt sick. I haven't even turned on a TV or the radio. Every news outlet is so damn sure the public appetite to hear all the gory details is gonna be insatiable... and they're not wrong.
Can't blame them. It's their job to sell papers, airtime, whatever. It's their duty to rub our faces in this horror. But to a guy who's feeling pissed off and passed over and cut off from the rest of humanity, the chance to grab the world's attention and become a household name overnight has got to be a big part of the appeal of doing something like this.
Somewhere out there, the not-yet-infamous lonely teenager who's gonna do the next massacre is watching the coverage of this one on TV. And it's making an impression.
The Amish newspapers handled a similar tragedy by reporting the names of the victims and expressing sympathy to their families.. and stopped there. Their readership understood. They believe that to dwell on the particulars of an evil act is to glorify it.
I think they may have something there.
Terrible, terrible, unspeakable tragedy at the university, but I also believe the intense media coverage on all networks involved is ill advised and might hype a potential shooter of the future. This type of coverage should be going on for everything happening in Iraq and Afganistan, and every corrupt act of the Bush administration. That's where the pressure for change belongs.
DRinDelmar
I have mixed feelings about the coverage. While we may get that spate of copycat or glory-seeker crimes to follow, and the cable networks in particular just go 24/7 with whatever latest sensationalist story they can glom onto, I also think people need to deal with their grief, even those of us who don't know any of the victim but just have that measure of empathy the gunman was obviously lacking.
At some level the news coverage acts to help expiate that grief, at another it probably just feeds it. You can't just ignore it, and while I did want to know more about the killer and why he might have flipped into such horrific action (as Chris Rock said after Columbine, "Videogames? Whatever happened to just CRAZY?").
That said, maybe the Amish do have it right.
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