Posted on 04/22/2007 10:27:58 AM PDT by MissEdie
The country was plunged into tragedy and despair this week after the savage killing of Virgina Tech students and staff. All the emotions now familiar to us after similar incidents rippled across the country, but were particularly acute on the campus. It couldn't get any worse could it? Yes, unfortunately, it could. It seems almost inconceivable that anyone would want to try and gain political capital from such a tragedy. But step forward Democrat Liberal Senator Barbara Boxer, who less then 2 days after the shooting was using the butchery to call for stiffer gun laws. What an obscenity. If you didn't believe that Liberals have no conscience when it comes to pushing their agenda, believe it now. Stunningly, there was not one word of condemnation except from one of the victims families.
It got worse. Katie Couric did the same thing from her position as Liberal activist posing as journalist. Then of course, somewhat unsurprisingly, Tehran Rosie O'Donnell chimed in her with her ten tons worth. Simply a disgrace. An unconscionable effort to play politics with the suffering of young, innocent people and their grieving families. Liberal publicity arm NBC made things even worse by giving the murderer the oxygen of publicity for his sick mind. The killer probably chose NBC because he knew they would be low enough to publish the material. In case anyone hadn't noticed, it was evidence in a murder enquiry and charges should be pressed against them for copying the material, let alone airing it.
Of course the Liberal talking heads are already mumbling about, "well maybe it wasn't his fault. He was sick." So the two main Liberal reactions to an incident like this come to the fore. It was the fault of the gun, and it wasn't the perpetrators fault because he was sick. Liberals will always try and absolve humans of responsibility for their actions. The firearms were sitting in a showcase for probably weeks and then some scumbag bought them and killed a bunch of people. The relevant fact is that guns are inanimate objects that need human interference to become lethal. Don't blame the firearm, or its presence, blame the shooter. But for Liberals, it's the guns fault.
The only saving grace was that the scumbag killed himself. It would really be heartbreaking for everyone, especially the parents of the victims and the survivors, to listen to some scumbag Liberal lawyer try and get this guy acquitted on some technicality. Because that is what would have happened had he not killed himself. If anyone deserves the death penalty it would have been this guy, but the Liberals would not be calling for that. They would be trying to blame his old school mates for bullying him and blaming everyone else but him.
We all know that these arguments are specious, but that is Liberal ideology. They're already trying to point the finger at the police and the Virginia Tech administration for not warning students after the first shooting. Trying to create an argument for some scumbag Liberal lawyer to go in there and encourage the families to sue the college. Again, no mention of the perp being the only one to blame.
One thing the Liberal media are studiously trying to ignore is that Virginia is one of the easiest states in which to get a carry/conceal permit if you are over 21 and a law abiding citizen. The Virginia Tech Board of Trustees recently voted to forbid carry/conceal permit holders from carrying their weapons on campus, even though it would be legal. There is a very good chance that a permit holder could have shot this scumbag before he killed more than 30 people. Liberals do not want you to know that. The Liberal media never mentions incidents in which carry/conceal permit holders all over the country have prevented massacres from happening by either shooting the perp, or forcing the perp to give up his or her weapon. It happens very often, although you will never find it reported because it does not fit in with the Liberal agenda.
Only one thing has ever deterred potential rampage mass murderers: the presence of someone else with a weapon. When the potential victim can shoot back. It is a fact that states that have carry/conceal permits see a 60 percent reduction in multiple shooting attacks and an 80 percent reduction in death or injury from such attacks. You won't ever find that published in the mainstream Liberal media.
The bottom line is that Liberal views on gun control and law and order in general, gets people killed. They want the criminal to have a free shot at you and deprive you of any means to defend yourself. Then when the perp gets to court, they will support all manner of sophistry to prevent the perp from being punished. If that were not bad enough, they will then go on TV and try and use your misery to disarm you even more, and create a target-rich environment for criminals.
Boxer and the Liberal media should hang there heads in shame. At least let these poor people bury their dead before you start telling them it was really their fault.
“Boxer and the Liberal media should hang there heads in shame.”
I think they deserve another kind of hanging but I will digress.
The Followers of ISMAIL By David J. Jonsson (04/20/07)
In recent weeks we have seen resurgence in the followers of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam. Libyan leader Mu'ammar Qaddafi called, in a speech in Niger to Tuareg tribal leaders, for the establishment of a second Shi'ite Fatimid state in North Africa, after the model of the 10th-13th century empire that ruled North Africa, Egypt, and parts of the Fertile Crescent. It is worthwhile to review some of the background and origins of this sect and also to see how it may be impacting current events. The Ismailis are the followers of the seventh caliph Ismail and are know as seveners vs. the followers of the twelfth Imam or twelvers as Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Ismaili Students’ Association operates on many campuses.
Your idea of stiffer gun laws is interesting from an execution perspective.Follow up question:Taking the guns away from ordinary citizens should not be difficult at all. Force could be used if necessary.
But please give me the details of your plan to take guns away from criminals? Seems to me that be a bit more difficult.
Do you believe all criminals will gladly give up their guns to comply with the law?
It even pops up in seemingly unlikely locations -- reference the minister's wife who convinced the jury that it is really not all that bad to shot your husband in the back with a shotgun.
It is important to keep your eyes on the media obsession like Anna Nichole and the excessive coverage of the inner thoughts of the VT murderer just because this coverage has major impacts on our society and beliefs. Moral absolutes have gone the way of the Dodo Bird.
Frankly, I think this tragedy can be attributed entirely to the liberal/leftist attitudes toward mental health, that have been enshrined in our laws. Gun laws of any sort had virtually nothing to do with this. He was going to kill as many people as he could by what means he could manage to. If he’d had trouble getting a gun, or had just chosen a different method, the basic outcome would likely have been the same: lots of innocent people dead. Imagine if he’d chained all the exits to a dorm shut in the middle of the night, and started tossing gasoline-fueled fire bombs through the windows? What were the rudely awakened students going to do if they had guns? Shoot the flames?
Don’t forget to ask them to have the security people they hire to protect their families to give up their guns. I’ll never forget O’Reilly pegging O’Donnell on her hypocritical gun stance; being that it was ok for those protecting her and her “family” to have guns, but no one else.
And that was just one of hundreds of opportunities over the years where people could clearly see he was mentally incompetent and unstable, and chose to be “understanding” and “nonjudgmental”, instead of taking control of him and getting him into a situation where he and everybody else would be safe from him. Before he turned 18, certainly his middle school and high school teachers and administrators and counselors could have drawn the line. For crying out loud, this kid wasn’t even put in a special ed program!!! And Va Tech was under no obligation to keep passing an English major for almost 4 years, when his work, at least in his major, consisted of rude and violent garbage presented with a technical level of writing that was barely at middle school level, and zero class participation beyond physical presence.
Any crackdown on this kid’s academic career would have woken his parents and sister up, and I’m sure they would have been cooperative with the recommendations of people in positions of authority. It’s little wonder his family didn’t realize how bad his condition was, when they got 15 years of non-stop signals from Virginia schools that everything was okay, and that their strange son was progressing along the academic ladder at a normal pace, and that he was perfectly welcome in a multi-student suite in a normal college dormitory.
I REALLY REALLY feel awful for this family. I keep having the urge to write them a long letter spelling out in great detail why it’s not their fault, but OUR fault, that this happened. When I hear about the Korean community, both hear and in South Korea, feeling a sense of shame about this, I want to scream “NO! it’s Americans who should be ashamed!” Imagine all the other developed countries this family could have chosen to emigrate to in search of a better life — can you think of any other one that would have allowed a kid in this condition to slide through high school and a very respectable college as if nothing was amiss?
Do as I say not as I do! The typical hypocritical Liberal A holes stance when it comes to protecting yourself and your family. When are we all going to realize thier against us not with us! There is no reasoning with them because they are void of reasoning. I was hoping for change in the form of student anger against Liberal Academia but they to have been lulled to sleep convinced this selfish murdering bastard was a victim too. Change can only come thru anger and determination for change! Something I feel has gone soft as time passes!
The University of Virginia was way ahead of these guys. Citizens have been forbidden from carrying weapons on Grounds since before I arrived here.
It's a pity, because now the local criminals occasionally come on Grounds to commit crimes against our community.
Your scenario justifies the University mandating the installation of fire-extinguishers, sprinkler systems, and window fire-escapes. Similarly, the University should mandate self-defense classes including qualification for concealed carry permits. After all, "its for the childrun".
All nice measures, but I have to think it would more effective to refrain from admitting students who are obviously suffering from severe mental illness, or toss them out if they somehow slip through the admissions process, and stop filling the curriculum with garbage courses like “Contemporary Horror Films” where students get academic credit for reading and talking (though Cho didn’t) and writing (though Cho did so only incoherently) about fictional gore and mayhem.
Prior to the crisis event, I don't think there will clear indicators as to who is so dangerous that their lives must be controlled by the government, and those who are simply outside the norms.
For example, how many students do you think are attending Virginia Tech today who have had counseling sessions for reasons of emotional instability? Five? Ten? One hundred? I would bet it is closer to the latter.
The truth is that the vast majority of people with extremely serious mental problems never hurt anybody, including themselves. They just live very troubled, dysfunctional lives.
The purpose of college is to impart a college-level education and to prepare students for lives as productive members of society. Cho’s mental illness was clearly inconsistent with either of these objectives, and so he shouldn’t have been there. According to people who knew him in middle school, high school, and college, the videos he sent to NBC were the first time they’d ever heard him speak in complete sentences. His written work for college English classes that have been publicized or described were not only violent and disgusting, but largely incoherent and full of non-sequiturs, barely on the middle school level in terms of technical writing skill. And this guy had been allowed to become a SENIOR English major at a pretty well-regarded college. As a taxpayer, I’m not interested in forking over the huge sums that are currently devoted to post-secondary education, so that each and every profoundly mentally ill young adult who isn’t absolutely, unmistakeably “dangerous” can enjoy a 4 year stint of full-time wallowing in their fantasies, fears, and confusions.
If intensive intervention had been started back in middle school (or earlier) and continued throughout high school and college, it’s possible that his condition could have been improved and stabilized to the point where he could do college level work and graduate as an employable adult. Being “dangerous” is not the only reason to impose involuntary mental health interventions on a minor, and he was clearly in urgent need of this for many years before his 18th birthday. This is clearly what should have happened, but given that it didn’t, no college should be letting people like this in the door until and unless their mental health has improved to the point where they can meaningfully participate in a college curriculum.
I don't think the government should be in the college business to begin with. Privately run universities can choose their students and policies as they see fit.
Having worked a full career in engineering, I can assure you that it is impossible to weed out the people that MIGHT commit such crimes.
I don't know what event "triggered" CHO to act when he did, but expelling him from the University could easily have been such a trigger. By the time somebody like CHO is in the University, it is too late to be protected from being the target of his irrationality.
And I don't believe that CHO exhibited anywhere near enough dysfunction prior to his being admitted. Isn't that the case?
I agree that government shouldn’t be in the college business, either operating them, or providing financial aid to students (with strings attached that end up controlling even “private” colleges. But that’s not really the issue here.
The issue is that we have young man who graduated from high school with apparently none of his teachers or fellow students ever having heard him speak in full sentences. That’s pretty dysfunctional all by itself. Especially when he chooses to major in English, in which class participation in discussion is normally a required part of upper level courses. Hard to say if his writing in high school was as technically deficient as what was posted online from his college assignments (we’ll leave out the issue of content, which certainly may have gotten much worse as he got closer to snapping, though there was at least one report from fellow students in middle or high school of some papers falling out of his folders and being full of “hate-filled” writing). But it seems unlikely, given his behavioral history as reported by everyone from relative back in Korea who knew him only as a small child, to fellow students in middle school and high school, that he was producing well thought out and well written work.
He was presumably doing okay in math and science classes, where just getting the right answers on homework and tests is generally all that’s required for a good grade. And presumably he was being given at least average grades in humanities classes in high school, partly out of pity, and partly out of the values-free, judgement-free standards that have infected these academic fields for the past few decades. But his speech and overall behavior (e.g. not responding at all, verbally or with eye contact, when people greeted him), not participating in class at all, etc., was plenty of cause for thorough psychiatric, speech pathology, and learning disability evaluations way back in grade school, and placement in an appropriate special ed program, at least until he was able to function marginally normally.
Completely apart from the issue of predicting his likelihood to become violent (certainly always difficult, when there’s no record of previous violence), his complete inability to function in the normal activities of college made it inappropriate for him to be there. It was back in 2005 when only 7 out of 70 students showed up for an English class, because most were too afraid of him to come to class. The English department responded by taking him out of class and having a professor tutor him one-on-one. She (Roy) reported being unable to get more than monosyllabic utterances from him, and being sufficiently afraid of him to set up a secret code with her secretary to alert her to call police when he was in there with her. All of this is WAY, WAY, WAY outside the most elastic margins of what is regarded as acceptable behavior in a college. Why was he allowed to continue to be enrolled as a student there, and to live in a dorm there?
It’s likely that part of the stress that ultimately caused him to snap was that he was being expected to measure up in an academic, social, and life program which he was totally unequipped to handle. I doubt it’s a coincidence that this happened very shortly before the end of his senior year — though it’s not clear if he was still actually expected to graduate in May, that was probably the expectation at the beginning of his senior year, and his parents’ expectation. He was either going to graduate or flunk out. He was obviously completely unemployable, and was about to be tossed out into the world, with an ordinary degree, or at least a few years of an ordinary college program behind him, and expected to get a job. There was just no way this could happen, and he probably couldn’t see any real options for his future. On the other hand, if he’d been handled appropriately for his significant mental disabilities and speech pathology, he would have been in some special ed type program, from which graduating students are transferred into sheltered workplaces or special positions in regular workplaces, with everyone understanding that they aren’t expected to perform like the regular employees. I have to wonder what the heck his professors and parents and sister were thinking he was going to do after college. Unfortunately, I think he understood all too well that there was no place in the world for him after college, so he checked out and took a lot of people with him.
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