There has been a lot of hand wringing from the hippies lately about the attention given to the deaths at Virginia Tech, despite the fact that more people died in Baghdad on the same day. Quite frankly, those people need to put down their megaphones and pick up some common decency. I’m not saying that deaths in Iraq aren’t tragic, the ongoing war in Iraq is a horrible thing which we should be endeavoring to end to prevent the further loss of life. Context, however, is important.
These supposedly bleeding heart types are ignorantly pissing on the collective sorrow felt by many Americans and trying to make us feel guilty for the worry and anguish that these killings have caused us. But we aren’t the ones who should feel guilty. The context is important. Just as we would grieve more over the loss of a family member or close friend, than we would over the loss of soldiers in a far away war, so too do we grieve more for the deaths of people we or our close friends know than we do for Iraqi civilians. It isn’t callous of us, it is natural. Grief hits harder when those who die are closer to the those doing the grieving.
Just as NBC has trampled the memories of those slain at Virginia Tech by airing the atrocious final wishes of their brutal killer, so too are certain segments of the Anti-War camp committing horrible crimes against the dead by trying to make us feel guilty for our grief. That we as a country grieve more for those young men and women with whom we share closer bonds, than unknown civilians in a country far away, is only natural. We should feel no shame. We are after all, only human.
-Angry Midwesterner
The 12 Angry Men Blog 
April 23, 2007 at 7:02 pm
The value of life increases by proximity. It may sound cold but it is true. Anyone who says that they value every single human life equally is lying to impress someone.
April 24, 2007 at 8:20 am
Also, it seems that many people these days (on all sides of every question) get caught up in oddly binary thinking. Everything becomes a zero-sum game. If I’m honoring the dead at VT, I must be slighting the dead in Baghdad.
And people seem to forget that we get used to situations. If there were a tragic shooting at VT with dozens dead every week, you would see people lose interest eventually. Not because they’re heartless but because the shock and impact would be reduced to a constant drumbeat. After a while, horror and outrage give way to grim acceptance.
April 24, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I’m not going to even mess with “zero-sum honoring” when we’ve had the likes of major media coverage of the something as fundamentally irrelevant as the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
No, the thing that’s bugged me out of the whole episode is the desire to “figure out the lesson of VT”. Unfortunately the actions of a lone gunman are pretty darn hard to predict. Did Cho slip through the cracks? Absolutely, but we have to remember that the system has a HUGE false positive error rate, which means that the vast majority of effort is spent on people who aren’t going to go on a rampage, ever.
Could we do better? Probably, but probably not a lot better.
Is gun control going to work? At this point when there are hundreds of millions of guns in the country, probably not. And instruments of mass death are eminently substitutable, especially for someone who’s not planning to survive the trip, as very creative killers in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Jerusalem prove every day, unfortunately. For instance, making a homemade car bomb and driving it onto a busy quad between classes would probably manage the death toll of Cho quite quickly.
An armed campus would help against the Chos, Klebolds and Harrises of the world, but of course we’d be open to the non-trivial number of times when someone decides enough is enough and draws. (Imagine the line outside your favorite rowdy campus bar, lots of Jager bombs and a nasty breakup.) In other words, we will probably be trading the likes of Cho for smaller batches of quite likely more deaths.
A heavily closed campus is unlikely to even be possible.
Getting in touch with nearly 50,000 dispersed people in a short time is nigh-impossible. Maybe the best thing to try would be the ever popular low-tech solution of the tornado/air raid siren…. It’s used to communicate to a large group of people quickly and by and large the system works. A certain siren pattern that says “lock ALL doors NOW” would be as good as it gets.
April 24, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Yeah, as Angry Political Optimist pointed out, it’s just a fantasy to think that we can somehow prevent things like the VT massacre.
Personally, I think the best lesson to draw is the old standby: life is dangerous, and you should be prepared to meet that danger. Making sure that we raise happy omnivores and not docile sheep is probably the best we can do.
Will that always save people in these situations? No. But it will give them the best possible chances, which is all you can do. Flight 93 remains the model: figure out the situation and take the best possible action, even if the odds remain stacked against you.
Of course, teaching courage is hard, and teaching complacency is disturbingly easy…
August 3, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Believing that classrooms should be ready to lock against those coming in is subjecting a portion of society to being locked in against their will and hopes. When in a situation where one wanted to kill many, a lock could have kept him out, the same lock could under other circumstances trap a woman student who entered before a male student or professor. My bets are that the latter circumstances are more common and frequent and I vote “no” for locks on the inside of classrooms at VPI. Women should not have to defend themselves after beng locked in by males.