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To: Chairman_December_19th_Society

It also came out that a professor knew two years ago that the gunman had “issues”, wore sunglasses all of the time, never made eye contact and he made the PROFESSORS uneasy so she tutored him alone in her office. Why wasn’t more done to get him the counseling he needed?


5 posted on 04/18/2007 6:11:37 AM PDT by Holding Our Breath
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To: Holding Our Breath
Why wasn’t more done to get him the counseling he needed?

I think it is very easy to have 20-20 hindsight and to second guess how events occured on the way to "now". Humans take great pleasure in engaging in such activity.

The problem with the notion of "getting him more couseling", IMO, runs us down the road of the nanny state just a bit much for my taste. We need to guard very carefully against the authorities becoming just a bit too paternalistic.

The issue in all of that is, well, who's model do we use to define "normal"? And do we really want sameness? Besides being a bit dull, it's also dangerous--what if the unity points us down the wrong path?

No. I'd rather try and take a step back and put this into perspective, as hard and as extremely difficult as it might be at this stage of the game. Such an exercise is made more difficult by the very load rhetoric being voiced by a lot of agencies pursuing this or that agenda.

At the end of the day, however, as tragic as this event is, it is also, most thankfully, something that is very very rare. Look carefully at the media reports--comparisons have to be drawn with events of over 40 years ago to draw parallels. Years span between even other mass murder events on campuses in America, and yet we have had tens upon tens of millions of students roll through these institutions otherwise unharmed.

It is an extremely tragic event, but it is also a singular event.

Let's keep that in mind as folks try to use this to curtail our rights.

9 posted on 04/18/2007 6:23:47 AM PDT by Chairman_December_19th_Society (Don't blame me, I voted Republican.)
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