Some quick thoughts on the Virginia Tech massacre:
- I read Cho Seung-Hui’s play Richard McBeef. Yes, it sucks, but it’s not as sucky as I had been led to believe. It’s also quite disturbing, but honestly, the play in itself isn’t the stinking, fetid hatebomb of a warning sign that the media thinks it is. I wrote some disturbing shit myself in college — there was one story I wrote in the form of an elaborate suicide note, wherein the protagonist vows to kill himself with a Rube Goldberg device he’s rigged up in his apartment to save everyone the trouble of dealing with his remains. Lots of young men vent their frustrations on the printed page, I don’t see why a fucked-up murderer should be any different.
- The shooting has reinforced the right’s belief that guns should be more readily available, and that in a more gun-tolerant society some citizen do-gooder would have taken this kid down. The left, meanwhile, believes that this is an excuse to enact stricter gun control legislation. To me, the irony is that either much stricter gun control or much looser gun control could have helped prevent this tragedy. Waffling in the middle helps no one.
- Another ironic thing about the brewing gun control debate is that the killer did not use weapons that would have been prohibited by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He used a Glock 19 and a Walther P22, and I believe both of these would have been legal had the Assault Weapons Ban been extended. (Someone please let me know if I’m wrong about this.) The extended gun clips Cho is believed to have used are another issue, but not having those wouldn’t have stopped his rampage.
- Blaming the Virginia Tech administration for failing to send timely warning e-mails to the students is absolutely, totally, completely, offensively ridiculous. If we tried to lock down the 2,600 acres surrounding each one of the 30,000 gun deaths in the U.S. every year, society would come to a screeching halt. Two hours is a perfectly reasonable period of time for the police to respond and get a mass e-mail communication out to the campus, and the e-mail they did send struck exactly the right tone under the circumstances. Besides which, even if everyone had hunkered down inside their dorms at 7:30 A.M. and not gone to class, Cho Seung-Hui was in one of those dorm rooms. He would have just gone on his massacre in a different building.
- The frightening thing is that, ultimately there’s nothing you can do to prevent this sort of thing from happening 100% of the time. There are a thousand different ways to kill large groups of people. Probably the best solution we have is counseling — which makes it so ironic that college counseling centers are so understaffed and underfunded throughout the country. The Scientologists better not try to ram any more of their anti-psychiatry crap down our throats after this.
- This dude was from Centreville, Virginia. I live about 10 minutes away from Centreville. I may very well have driven by this guy or passed him in the mall half a dozen times.
- One of the victims of Cho Seung-Hui’s massacre was Jamie Bishop, son of the science fiction writer Michael Bishop. This sucks on too many levels to even recount here.
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I’m going to be cutting back on the blogging for the next couple weeks so I can concentrate on getting MultiReal finished and polished by May 1. There are a few pivotal scenes that have to be done just right, and they’re not quite there yet.
Meanwhile, I’ll be attending this weekend’s Penguicon science fiction/open source software convention in Troy, Michigan. What will I be doing there? I really don’t know, because I couldn’t keep up with the con-related e-mail traffic and so I stopped reading it entirely. But if you’re looking to find me, the bar’s always a good place to check.