Sherry Chandler » Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech
I hate to say this but my reaction to the first news of the shooting at Virginia Tech was mixed. Yes, horror and sorrow. But also dread of the media circus that is sure to follow. The New York Times this morning captures the way in which these high profile tragedies have become ritualized:
There must have been a time — maybe back in 1966 before live news coverage was common and Charles Whitman opened fire from a clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and killed 16 people — when witnesses, officials and news announcers would find themselves at a loss for words.
The shootings at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., in 1999 defined how mass shootings are handled — and publicly mourned. There have been similar tragedies since then, too many. Now everybody knows the drill.
But I don’t want to hear the cellphone recordings of gun shots, the teary on-the-spot tales of escape and terror. I definitely don’t want to watch Katie Couric shed her crocodile tears all over everything.
We wallow in the emotion of it; we’ve become voyeurs of violence. But no one will do anything about it.
To quote George W. Bush’s press spokeswoman, “the President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms.” That trumps everything.
Update: I have been taken to task a bit by a correspondent for being too harsh about people’s need to talk after a violent incident such as this. I would like to clarify that it is not the victims or the survivors I’m talking about here. Nor is it even the straight news reporters in the immediate aftermath. It’s that element of vampirism, and it will go on and on… And it ramps up our paranoia and our fear of one another.
Anyway, after five years of war and devastation, I am just emotionally exhausted.
So I’ll let Todd Swift offer a little perspective on the situation:
Yesterday’s gun massacre at an American university is a terrible act of violence; it has certainly set fingers wagging in the UK, where many commentators in the media (and elsewhere) have been quick to blame America’s “gun culture” and its “history of violence”. While it is true that there are over 200 million firearms in the US, and each year over 3,300 teenagers are shot and killed there, it is not clear that America, or the gun, is the main or only problem. The central role of violence in human experience is too complex an issue to be simplified. The pointing finger of blame is also the itchy trigger-finger, too often.
Europe, too, is, and was, violent. Mr. Ferry’s recent exploration of Nazi iconography (for which he was pilloried, as if the glamour of evil, its dreadful beauty, was not half the reason for its force, and the reason to resist it) should remind us that the 20th century had its epicentres of violence based not in America, but in Europe. Europe, of course, brought violence to the Congo, and through the slave trade, to the wider world. Europe’s destruction of indigenous peoples, its genocides, was a violent slaughter of epic proportions.
Update 2: One more try at beating this dead horse. Because, I suppose, of the complexity of my reaction and the level of the noise, I keep getting off track about what is at the base of both that New York Times article and my sense of dread about what’s to come.
My discomfort is caused by the fact that the narrative is set. We have our stock characters, the innocent victims, the monstrous villain, the heroes. These are elements of melodrama and they do not require us to think beyond our assumptions about ourselves and everybody involved. All the players are turned to cardboard cutouts. All the right strings are pulled to evoke our hearts and not our brains.
And as I said yesterday, it ramps up our fear.
Update 3: Harry Shearer:
…what is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho’s self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? Cho’s pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from–in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it’s easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live.
Thanks to Poppysmatus for the link.
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7 Comments
1. Poppysmatus replies at 17th April 2007, 8:44 am :
The framers of our Constitution, being comprised in the main by Latin-speaking,-thinking and -trained lawyers, cast the 2nd Amendment with an obvious translation of an Ablative Absolute–”A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the Security of a Free State….” This type of Latin phrase has, since Cicero’s time, been understood to set certain conditions under which associated phrases are clearly limited and subordinate. Conservative twaddle which attempts to divorce the “Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms” from such limitations is just that– wilful pig-stupidity meant to curry political favor. If Americans wish to keep & bear military style weapons then they should bear them openly and in a well-regulated manner. Nasty little handguns of the type involved in the Virginia Tech killings are as beyond the pale as sawn-off shotguns–a type of weapon long decreed by the Supreme Court as illegal and unprotected by our Latin-literate Framers. The 2nd Amendment protects and empowers folk such as our Minutemen and the citizen-soldiers of Switzerland.
2. Tommy replies at 17th April 2007, 9:44 am :
First, a thought. They’re at a loss for words, but rather than saying nothing and being thought fools, they feel the need to say something and thus remove all doubt.
Snark aside, what they say about these events doesn’t mean anything; it’s just empty blather filling up air time. I don’t particularly want to hear it, I don’t think it’s very respectful.
Second, I agree that the first phrase of the Second Amendment has been largely ignored by the NRA types. I guess they get some fulfillment out of being able to fuss and yell and tantrum about being deprived and oppressed and “cold dead fingers!”
3. Terry replies at 17th April 2007, 1:01 pm :
A report in the Seattle PI says there was a receipt for one of the guns in his backpack. Looks like he bought it legally. Just like anyone else could.
4. sherry replies at 17th April 2007, 1:47 pm :
Poppysmatus, Tommy, & Terry, thanks for speaking out.. I am not articulating well today so I don’t know if I can make this point: I think it’s the legality that disturbs me.
Having been raised on a farm where rifles and shotguns were a fact of life, and having lived most of my life among hunters, I am not really anti-gun. But I see nothing in any constitutional right we may have to keep and bear arms that guarantees us the right to keep Glock 9 mm handguns. What right can we have to keep, without any kind of registration or tracing or even training requirement, a gun so powerful and automatic that it allows some one to shoot themselves several times in the head. And that is what I thought I heard yesterday.
5. Charles W. replies at 17th April 2007, 2:23 pm :
Who hasn’t seen a bumper sticker that reads: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Did anyone ever hear of a person getting shot where there wasn’t a gun involved?
Guns are tools, not toys. They should be used for their intended purpose and then safely put away until needed again. But now there are a lot more people just playing with guns and cheap military ammunition than anything else. Expansion of the gun culture fueled by misinformation from various groups made sure everyone could own these weapons.
Many times I heard from friends or co-workers, that I had better get my gun before Chuck Shumer outlaws them. I know men and women who never owned, or wanted a gun who ran out and bought handguns just to have them before Chuck took away all their protection from criminals.
I personally doubt the legitimacy of “playing with guns” as a sport at all. It is a pernicious, self-indulgent, and expensive activity that desensitizes its participants to the dangers of firearms.
Our son Josh, lived one summer in Colorado Springs. When we visited him he took me up a nearby mountain called Rampart Range. He took me there because there was a free and unsupervised public gun range where we could shoot our pistols. About a year after we were there, someone decided to make public the films of Columbine HS shooters Dillon Kliebold and Eric Harris practicing for their rampage. Sure enough, they were target practicing and playing with their guns at Rampart Range. Spooky, to say the least. Charlie W.
6. sherry replies at 18th April 2007, 7:00 am :
A little sidenote, Charlie. Here seems to be a case of a self-firing gun (from Reuters, dateline April 17)
Thanks for sharing your story. It is spooky. But then our whole relationship to guns is spooky. I don’t want to live in some kind of novo wild west in which I have to pack a shooting iron to protect myself from marauders.
7. sherry replies at 18th April 2007, 9:46 am :
And another sidenote, a Tom Toles cartoon at the link. H/T Poppysmatus.
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