The following leader in The Economist is likely to raise the hackles (yet again) of the gun lobby in the US.

“In the aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech university on April 16th, as the nation mourned a fresh springtime crop of young lives cut short by a psychopath’s bullets, President George Bush and those vying for his job offered their prayers and condolences. They spoke eloquently of their shock and sadness and horror at the tragedy. The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives called for a ‘moment of silence’. Only two candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them.

“The Democrats have been the most disappointing, because until recently they had been the party of gun control…Mr Bush, however, has done active damage. On his watch the assault-weapons ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. New laws make it much harder to trace illegal weapons and require the destruction after 24 hours of information gathered during checks of would-be gun-buyers. The administration has also reopened debate on the second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Last month an appeals court in Washington, DC, overturned the capital’s prohibition on handguns, declaring that it violates the second amendment. The case will probably go to the newly conservative Supreme Court, which might end most state and local efforts at gun control…”

For more please click here…

Composed and sung by NanaKojo Adu:

Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post, Dry Bones

Olle Johansson, Sweden

It was 10:10 a.m. Thursday morning and I was 15 minutes away from finishing my second performance with a No Bullying theme in my non-blogging incarnation at an elementary school in Torrance, California. The kids were laughing because I had just gotten five volunteers up to the stage and the students had just put on ratty wigs and were JUST about to lip-sync “Tutti Frutti” while I would provide nutty voices using ventriloquism.

Then, in the back of the room, I could see a teacher grimace. She raised her hand and went out the door and rushed back in as a voice came out on the loudspeaker: “Teachers. The school is now in lockdown.”

Teachers were asked to take the kids to their pre-arranged positions. The kids looked puzzled, not terribly alarmed. (”What’s this lockdown for?” “What’s a lockdown?”) I stood there in the auditorium as they filed out. A teacher rushed in.

“Come on,” a teacher told me. “We’re in lockdown. You can stay in the office until this is over…”

And so it went. Even though I joked with the staff (”I didn’t think my jokes were THAT bad so all of the kids had to rush out! I prefer they lock people IN the room when I perform!”) what was going on was this:

The horrific Virginia Tech massacre had once again put law enforcement into mega-prevention mode.

It was clear that there was a fear of copycats. (A hypnotherapist yesterday told me it was a truly understandable fear..) And, I was told, the sheriff had been after some guy who was “circling the neighborhood,” getting too close to the school for comfort…and no one wanted to take any chances.

We talked about what we would do; I offered to do the remaining programs in the afternoon. But, in the end, the lockdown was lifted after 20 minutes…and I could do the final show at 11:15 a.m. as scheduled.

But my experience was not an isolated one.

Schools from coast to coast have reported lockdowns:

At a conservative estimate, lockdowns have occurred in seven states.

I’ve seen this kind of response before and the question is going to be whether vigilance is sustained or is a kind of faddish response to a high-profile security catastrophe. Law enforcement and school officials have to strike a balance between overreacting and reacting to protect students (and themselves). The students at the school I visited weren’t terribly traumatized by the security lockdown.

But when there have been events in the past (such as Columbine or here in San Diego when a schoolgirl died after not wearing her seatbelt) where law enforcement and officials clamp down but then as time goes on it gets back to “normal.”

The problem: no one should let their guards down since “normal” may never be “normal” again…

AP via MSNBC:

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The family of Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui told the Associated Press on Friday that they feel “hopeless, helpless and lost,” and “never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”

“Our family is so very sorry for my brother’s unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us,” the family said.

The massacre of 32 students this week at Virginia Tech University was not the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history.

That long-forgotten distinction belongs to the Bath Township (Michigan) Consolidated School, where 45 people were killed and 58 injured on May 18, 1927 in a dynamite explosion set off by school board member Andrew Kehoe.

Kehoe was upset that a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building and blamed the additional financial hardship to foreclosure proceedings against his farm.

Click here for Hell Comes to Bath, a lengthy account of the incident.

Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

Cam Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

Larry Wright, The Detroit News

For a critique of Michelle Malkin — specifically her argument for concealed weapons — see here. It deals with the Virginia Tech shootings and addresses issues raised in this post. From a different perspective, and with a different tone, Heraclitus looks at these issues in a separate post here.

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As expected — because it is always so — a media event has become a media orgy. I’m talking, of course, about the Virginia Tech shootings, but that hardly matters. In search of sensationalism, the media have no shame. Any story will do, pretty much — but the media play particularly well off stories like this one. Everything about it, after all, seems so juicy. The media do so well with death and destruction, but they also like a human side to the mayhem. Hence the mainstreamization — if I may coin a term — of weather news. (Hurricanes are sexy.) But there’s more. There is also pain and suffering. And it’s all happening right at home, in English, with so much mystery to unravel — who was he? why did he do it? — and with so many hot-button issues lingering on the periphery — gun control, immigration, education.

Why the media do this is beyond the scope of this post, but there are a few points to make: Obviously, the media need to fill up the empty space that follows the reporting of the facts. That was done — the facts are known, more or less, and so all that’s left is repetition and speculation. There is a fine line between journalism and exploitation, and that line has been crossed. Just turn on your media outlet of choice. You’ll see what I mean.

On this, see Taylor Marsh, who asks the right questions: “Have we lost all sense of dignity? When did our pain become something we’re so proud of we need to broadcast it… never mind. We are a therapy nation now, televising our grief for all to see. It’s what we now do best. But did the community of Virginia Tech need our prying eyes? It likely never occurred to anyone to ask.” Taylor compares this to the media’s coverage of the Iraq War, which has been abysmal. But, then, an Iraqi life is hardly worth an American one, we are left to conclude from this imbalance, and Iraq is way over there, and we don’t want to think too much about it, lost cause that it is, and it’s not nearly as sensational as what happened in Virginia. (More on Iraq below.)

Americans — media and media consumers alike — need answers. They cannot imagine that what happened in Virginia was just some senseless act of violence. There must have been more to it. And so the media orgy revolves around trying to answer the existential questions as well as the factual ones — not just the who but the why — that is, to unravel the seeming mystery of it all. Americans do not seem to want such answers to similar questions about the Iraq War — it is far too remote, it would seem, for there to be needed any such effort — but we are Virginia Tech and Virginia Tech is us. Even here in Canada, the media have focused disproportionately on the one Canadian who was killed, as if that death is somehow more significant than the others, but so it goes. This isn’t about them, the victims, it’s about us. We need to soothe ourselves, to have our existential upsurge pacified. We cannot and will not accept meaninglessness. To stare into the abyss is one thing. To accept that the abyss is all there is would shatter our fragile shells of civilized self-understanding. There must be a God.
Read the rest of this entry »

Philadelphia has an out-of-control murder rate, but that didn’t keep the editors of my former paper from pandering.

Will Bunch, the Daily News’s pre-eminent blogger, was justifiably horrified by the front page, which he said needed words like “Pathetic Loser” in huge letters.

Without those words, I worry that something like this image merely becomes a poster for the locked bedroom wall of every deranged Travis Bickle-style loner who’s out there, or even that Cho’s message of hate — that the only way to deal with an inequitable society is to slaughter rich kids (which most of his victims were not, by the way) might resonate with someone out there.

Instead, citizens of a city that is unable to control its own awful gun violence will, when they walk into their corner bodega or Wawa today, stare into a cocked and loaded handgun. It’s not what Philadelphia needs right now.

More here.

Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

A court ruled in 2005 that the Virginia Tech Killer, Seung-hui Cho, was mentally ill and potentially dangerous. “Then let him go.�

Cho also sent a package to NBC - containing videos and photos.

It is all very shocking I have to say, should NBC have aired this?

Please click here to read more.

Our famous linkfest offering readers a wide variety of links from blogs representing varying viewpoints. But this time, due to the worst mass killing in American history, we’re offering links from a cross-section of blogs (most of them randomly selected after hours of looking at blogs). In this edition, we offer you links and a few quotes.

GRASSY KNOLL DEPARTMENT: Read the UPATE of THIS POST on Crooks & Liars. And you thought grassy knolls were reserved for the JFK case? NOTE: One of the glories about blogging is that it is done quickly, almost stream of consciousness. The danger is that supposition can override opinion. We each make our choices, but we’d rather take a deep breath and think most bloggers have on this tragedy as well.

Could More Lives Have Been Saved At Virginia Tech? Sam Smith is MUST READ on this at his new, content-heavy weblog. And he has SPECIAL expertise to address this question (READ IT ALL).

Recovering From Traumatic Stress Syndrome: Mark Daniels (one of the most thoughtful blog writers) has done a lot of work on this issue over the years. These info-packed links are here.

The Debate Over MSNBC Extensively Airing The Self-Justifications Of A Murdering Madman: Believe it or not, it is a complex issue (despite our headline here). Ed Morrissey looks at it extensively. A tiny taste 4 U:

NBC made the right decision to go public, and to work with law enforcement to determine which material to release at the time, as they apparently did. They unfortunately overshadowed that correct decision with the very incorrect decision on marketing the materials. They sensationalized material that absolutely required no such effort — and degraded their credibility as a result.

AGREED. Anyone in the news business would have to hang up his or her hat if they didn’t broadcast or print part of that info. But then it goes into the area of a “get” and NBC seemed to be shifting into hawking its “get” and slipping into “Why, look at the exclusive stuff WE HAVE and the others don’t!” territory — which opens them up to criticism. A little more restraint could have saved NBC from what is sure to be some grief from new and old media critics.
Read the rest of this entry »

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch

(Lithograph of the June 27 Union charge on Confederates at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Published in 1888 by Louis Kurz and Alexander Allison.)

I find the American obsession with guns intriguing/fascinating. Whenever there is a major killing the pro and anti gun control groups clash and an emotional, almost violent, debate sweeps the US landscape/mindscape.

Yet another interesting Reuters story on this issue:

“The Virginia Tech killings have set off calls for tighter U.S. gun laws but anyone wanting to know why those demands likely will make little headway should visit Kennesaw, a town where owning a gun is both popular and mandatory.

“The town north of Atlanta had little prominence until it passed a gun ordinance in 1982 that required all heads of a household to own a firearm and ammunition.

“Kennesaw’s law was a response to Morton Grove, Illinois, which had passed a gun ban earlier that year as a step to reduce crime…”

Read on…

In one of my posts earlier, one commentator gave me a friendly advice which amounted to something like this…”OK you fella! You live so far away from the US in a different world and have no clue about our ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’. So why do you waste your breath/energy writing about us?”

Point well made…and taken!!!

I made the following comment on the subject earlier in The TMV…
“Violence cannot be stopped by just banning guns. A majority of Americans seem to lean on arms owing to a fear psychosis that can be perhaps traced to the memories of being the settlers in an alien land not very long ago in history.

There are those who have, consciously or unconsciously, developed a macho trait to overcome this fear. These traits become more visible whenever the nation responds to a major crisis, such as the present shocking killings in the American campus, or when muscle power is used outside the USA.

There is no easy solution when fear and violence take possession of one’s mind and thought. Banning this, or having more and more strict legislation, alone would not help much.

9/11 has further complicated things for an average American. The past four years have clearly displayed that violent response to violent acts creates more fear.

Now add to all this the growing confusion in the minds of the people when things don’t work out in the ‘desired’ fashion despite having all the muscle power.

And we have the heady cocktail of fear, macho trait and confusion. A deadly combination that can sap the strength of the mightiest person/nation.

Violence (or fear or greed or whatever) is in the mind…and it is from there it has to be healed or removed. Otherwise a person/nation continues to suffer, and makes others suffer.”

“The Roots of Violence: Wealth without Work, Pleasure without Conscience, Knowledge without Character, Commerce without Morality, Science without Humanity, Worship without Sacrifice, Politics without Principles.� — Mahatma Gandhi