A child attends the Virginia Tech vigil. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464192730/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
Permission: Daniel Lin geeknerd99@gmail.com
A woman lights a candle near the main memorial site during the Virginia Tech vigil. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464192946/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
Permission: Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin geeknerd99@gmail.com
Several cadets attend the Virginia Tech Vigil and participate in one of the various cheers that erupted from the crowd. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464193182/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieria of the Today Show broadcast from the drill field. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464203561/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
Permission: Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
A student writes a message of support and love at message board near the main memorial site on the drill field. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464205173/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
This photo was captured at the Virginia Tech convocation in Lane Stadium. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464201110/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
LETTER: Gun violence is what needs to be controlled
By:Daniel Ross Posted: 4/24/07 "The Changing Gun Debate," an article written by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in response to the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, can be found in the April 30 issue of Newsweek. I applaud his insight and his efforts; Mayor Bloomberg is leading an uphill battle against gun crime. For as long I can remember, the gun debate has been about special interests -- on both sides. Our political leaders remind us that they are concerned about guns in America and either passionately advocate or decry gun regulation. Our two parties are entrenched in this opposition. Sadly, this debate is far more about ideology and not at all about restoring the peace and safety of American homes, businesses and schools. Mayor Bloomberg proposes a middle ground that sidesteps the dogma of regulation. He intends to stop gun crime, and he is making measurable progress doing so. In the past six years, murders in New York City have dropped 40 percent. Specifically, Bloomberg wants to stop crime perpetrated with illegally purchased guns. Although the Virginia Tech shooter legally purchased his weapons, most criminals do not. Most criminals who use guns purchase them illegally. "FBI statistics show that violent crime is on the rise across America," writes Bloomberg, and the weapon of choice is an illegal gun. Unfortunately, our federal government is doing little to help the fight against illegal guns. In fact, Bloomberg says federal regulations prevent his police department and cities across the nation from using the resources they need to bust illegal gun dealers. "Statistics show that 1 percent of dealers sell more than half of all illegal guns," Bloomberg said. In order to stop the sale of these weapons and keep them out of the hand of criminals, Bloomberg started a coalition called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Now, more than 200 cities participate, sharing information about the sale of illegal guns. Our national debate on guns must change. Following Bloomberg's example, our Federal government should aggressively combat the sale of illegal guns in America. It should share the information that local and state law enforcement officials need to stop gun crime. Ultimately, a debate on gun crime cannot be one of ideology, but must be one of law enforcement. No matter how stringent or lenient the regulations our society places on legal gun ownership, the majority of criminals will still use illegal guns. Bloomberg supports law enforcement because he wants to stop gun crime. Our leaders should stop concerning themselves with whether or not an average American citizen should be able to own guns: Our Constitution explicitly provides for gun ownership. Instead, our leaders must stop gun crime. The only way to stop gun crime in America is unequivocal, uncompromising support of law enforcement from the federal government and its agencies. Let's follow Bloomberg's lead. With support for law enforcement, we can end the epidemic of gun crime in America. Daniel Ross CFA '10 -- Original Source:The Daily Free Press - April 24, 2007
VT tragedy requires look at gun control For too long this country has refused to take a realistic approach to gun control legislation, often pointing to the debatable phrasing of the Second Amendment. This negligence has led to the horrifying events that unfolded at Virginia Tech Monday, capping a disturbing trend that the American public has largely chosen to ignore. Demonstrating this, an article covering the shootings in the London Times contained a "Timeline in U.S. School Shootings," something that would be impossible for an American paper commenting on a similar story in Europe to include. Although the timeline detailed only the last 10 years, it contained 15 massacres at the cost of 72 lives and many more injuries. Lawmakers have to date been content to be bullied by the gun lobby into an inculpable submission, but they remain blameless no longer. If Columbine and Enoch Brown weren't enough to catalyze change, then Virginia Tech must, for the sake of schoolchildren across the country. Daniel Witt wittdd@muohio.edu -- Original Source: The Miami Students - April 17, 2007
"Skotzko, Stacey Nicole" <skotzksn@muohio.edu>
Memorials are a positive force after tragedy
Published: Thursday, May 3, 2007 Opinion articles Danielle Tumminio Guest Column 4/17/07. When students from Virginia Tech struggled to make sense of the horror that struck their campus last week, they erected a banner on their student center with the date of the massacre. It provided a reminder of a time and a place, a way to express a trauma through white lettering on black canvas. It was an attempt to remember. Theirs is not the first — nor, unfortunately, will it be the last — commemoration of a tragedy. This desire to remember seems built into us. We sing, sculpt, hold one another, dance, write poems and pray in order to find solace in our most tumultuous moments. Using these forms, we try to incorporate trauma into our lives so that we can give meaning to events that feel meaningless. If we're going to move forward from the horrors we experience, this process seems essential. Otherwise, evil becomes something like a dangling participle not properly integrated into a sentence. It hangs there, and it has, quite literally, the last word. There's no hope in a worldview like that. So through our memorials, we try to find meaning. Perhaps that's why our nation's capital is peppered with commemorations of wars and those who represented our country in them. Through carved stone, we remember our history. Likewise, after the Columbine shootings, students draped flowers over Rachel Scott's car and sat on its hood, sobbing in grief. Leaning against red Acuras, we remember our loves. Or following Hurricane Katrina, memorial services were held in worship spaces across the country. In our religious homes, we remember the possibility of hope. But if there are right ways to remember, there are certainly wrong ways to remember as well. "Just move on" and "It's time to get over it" are common phrases in our culture, and they imply that the only way to recover from a traumatic event is to forget it. The trouble with these cliches is that they conflate remembering with reliving. Reliving traps us in the past, keeps us from existing in the present and building hope for the future. But remembering is different: It is the means by which, again and again, we try to defeat pointless horrors by giving them some perspective. That's the transformation that must occur if we are to prevent the dangling-participle problem. This power of memorializing is something I've experienced in my own life. I was a junior at Yale on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember that the phone lines were down, and I couldn't call my family. When the trains were running again, I returned to the New York suburb in which I grew up. I felt isolated and frightened. When the Amtrak drew near Manhattan, the train slowed and passengers huddled near the windows, gazing upon a skyline that had changed forever. It looked tilted — just like my reality — even though rising grey smoke held the place where the towers once stood. Then the conductor asked us to keep a moment of silence, and it became our memorial, our remembrance of a horror that shaped our lives. They were strangers on that train, but they shared something with me — they were mourning, too — and they became my community at a time when I felt profoundly protected. In that memorial, I was offered a sign of hope that I was not alone. I will never forget that, nor should I. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, I, and so many others, observed endless memorials. Some were noble, some bittersweet and some gut-wrenching: signs for missing people in Grand Central Terminal, military planes that kept watch over Manhattan with their deafening drones, chaplains for the cleanup crews and the putrid stench from the pyre of the Twin Towers. Those memorials challenged and changed our understanding of a horror. The same goes for the students at Virginia Tech. As they wear their school colors and attend candlelight vigils and invite a nation to mourn with them, they bear witness to nightmare. That experience will transform them, in their grieving and their remembering, in their hope and their search to make sense of the insensible. To forget the tragedy would be to forget who they were, who they are and whom they will become. But how they remember is their choice. 9/11/2001. 4/20/1999. 8/23/2005. 4/16/2007. These are the dates that form us. These are the dates that are seared into our memories. These are the dates we cannot — and should not — forget. Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio is a 2003 graduate of Yale College and a fourth-year student at the Yale Divinity School. -- Original Source: Yale Daily News - May 3, 2007
Yale Daily News, Editor-in-chief - Sarah Mishkin <sarah.mishkin@gmail.com>
Massacre of 32 at Virginia Tech shocks alumni in MetroWest
By Danielle Williamson/Daily News staff GHS Tue Apr 17, 2007, 12:07 AM EDT NO DATA - For Bill Saam, the slaughter yesterday at his alma mater resurrected the shock, sadness and anger he felt when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. "On a personal level, the feeling I had today was very much the way I felt on 9/11," said Saam, a Northborough resident and 1992 Virginia Tech graduate. An active member of the college's alumni association, Saam was in touch yesterday with other classmates who struggled to comprehend the news. "It's very much a tight-knit community," he said. "I hope no one from New England is directly affected by this." Saam described Blacksburg as a "small, rural area." "You don't hear about crime down there, never mind shootings," he said. For Milford native Jim Pyne, a 1993 Virginia Tech graduate, yesterday's murders are a sad reflection on the state of society. "We have people who fly planes into buildings ... and screwballs who have guns and shouldn't have them," said Pyne, a former professional football player. "It's the society we live in, and it's just despicable." Pyne, who was an All-American at Virginia Tech and played nine seasons in the NFL, said he watched much of the news yesterday but "couldn't keep watching it. It doesn't seem real." "I've been in all those buildings. I took classes there," Pyne said. "I feel for the parents of the 33 kids and I'm horrified about what happened and what it's like for them." Peter Darby of Charlestown, who leads the New England chapter of Virginia Tech's alumni association, said the Boston area has 1,300 alumni, many of whom were in contact with each other yesterday. "We're stunned just numb," Darby said. For Waltham native Marcus Ly, the shootings were particularly difficult to comprehend. "I called a lot of my friends in Blacksburg. They're all OK," said Ly, a Virginia Tech grad student speaking by phone yesterday from Minneapolis. "But it's just a lot of confusion, they don't really know anything more than we do reading the headlines." A 1995 Waltham High School graduate, Ly finished a graduate school program in industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Tech last winter. "It's really the equivalent of something like this happening in Weston," said Ly, trying to describe the town of Blacksburg, home to the 2,600-acre Virginia Tech campus. "It's one of the safest cities I've ever lived in and I've lived in a lot of cities." Natick's Chris Mitchell, a junior at Virginia Tech, never imagined such horror could occur on the campus. "It's a small town and a university where everybody knows everybody," Mitchell, an economics major, told WCVB-TV. "It's the last place where you'd think something like this would happen." Newton resident Theodore Fritz recognized the buildings photographers captured throughout the day. "I'm certainly transfixed here," said Fritz, a 1961 Virginia Tech graduate who watched television reports throughout the day. A Boston University professor, the killings affected Fritz both as a college educator and a Virginia Tech alumnus. "I think this probably could have happened anywhere," he said. Danielle Williamson can be reached at 508-490-7475 or dwilliam@cnc.com. Daily News staff writers Albert Breer and Nicole Haley contributed to this story. -- Original Source:Framingham,MA - The MetroWest Daily News http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/local_news/x1298126656 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0.
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Shooting points to need for less restrictive gun laws
By: Danny Mistarz Posted: 4/24/07 After the tragic events that took place at Virginia Tech April 16, the anti-Second Amendment crowd has once again reared its ugly head. The usual claims of guns causing violence and the necessity to ban personal ownership have come out. But what if one person, a student, a professor, the RA in the dorm, had been carrying a gun? Would dozens of lives have been spared? The state of Virginia's legislature had a bill proposed last year, HB 1572, proposing that handguns be permitted on college campuses for those persons with proper permits and certification. The bill was shot down in subcommittee, never making it to the house floor. At the time, it was celebrated by a VT spokesman as a stride toward continued public safety. Was the wrong decision was made? Guns are used 2.5 million times in self-defense annually, saving approximately 2,575 lives for each life lost annually according to the Second Amendment Foundation; could HB 1572 gave saved thirty-one lives on the morning of April 16, or even just one? Let's assume that guns were permitted on campus at Virginia Tech, and that one student or one professor in the engineering building was carrying that day. This coward would never have been able to level a gun on hundreds of his classmates had he known there was the possibility of having to defend himself. What if a student on the hall of the dormitory had a gun, just in the room for protection? Certainly the first two gunshots, would have been heard and within a minute of the start of a rampage, 31 lives could have been saved. All it would take is one person, carrying one gun. No gun law could stop people who want to get guns from getting them any better than our current drug laws work. Perhaps the gun laws that need arguing against are the gun laws that limit us, not the laws that protect us. Danny Mistarz Pratt '09 -- Original Source: Duke Chronicle - April 24, 2007
sell.com donating all proceeds to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund
As a graduate of Virginia Tech, I wanted to do something positive in response to the recent tragedy. My web company (sell.com) will donate ALL PROCEEDs for the rest of April to the Virginia Tech Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. Go Hokies! http://www.sell.com/announcements/virginia-tech/
May 22, 2007 By Darren Franich Suicide is so much less embarrassing than homicide. Can you imagine the shitstorm maelstrom that would engulf our pretty campus if someone shot five people? Shot them so their blood splattered across the tables of Stern dining hall. Or their blood covered the pull-out desks in the chem building. Or their blood filled the fountains until the water sprayed dark bitter red. Five Stanford students dead. Hell, it doesn't have to be five. Make it three. Make it one. Think of the black cloud that would descend on our lives. Our own little Virginia Tech. The blood, damn it, the fucking blood! Pouring out of open wounds. Choked out of lungs that will never breathe again. On our campus. On our hands. Flowing out of pale bodies until the heart just stops pumping, tired, empty. Fortunately, people don't kill other people at Stanford. They just kill themselves. No one ever talks about the suicides, but everyone talks about how no one ever talks about the suicides. "Can you believe," we shake our heads, "four suicides at Stanford in one year, and nobody notices, nobody cares." Someone says, "I heard there were five." "That's what I'm talking about." Stanford is killing people. We shouldn't hold that against Stanford. There is so much joy here. There are thousands of students who live happy lives of quiet desperation, for whom suicide is never more than a passing fancy, the dream of an eternal vacation from one's own brain. But for a school that prides itself on its happiest-place-on-earth reputation, one suicide is a misfortune. Five is just awkward. To a high school senior, Stanford is the anti-Cornell: happy people living happy lives under the happy, happy sun. And now there is a suicide epidemic. Intelligent young people — who have worked hard their whole lives to get here, who have so much to look forward to — are eliminating themselves from the humanity continuum. Asphyxiation. It's not a good way to go. These people would have been great. Leaders of the world. And now they are memories tinged in eternal sadness. Take them off of Facebook. Cross them off your Christmas list. Destiny has clipped whatever wings they might have grown. Some people have expressed distaste for the University's handling of the suicides. A couple weeks ago, Hennessy wrote a letter to the editor. (In case you missed it, Boardman emailed you a link a few days later.) Half of the letter was about Virginia Tech. That event was a tragedy beyond all reckoning. But it has nothing to do with Stanford. Campus security is not the issue we should be debating. I saw eight police cars in twenty minutes last Saturday, and witnessed one brave officer fearlessly charging a dangerous minor for drinking quietly in public. A libertarian might argue that the overregulation on this campus is the problem. I will just point out that no one is killing us except ourselves. They're trying they're best, though, like bumbling parents desperately devoted to children they will never understand. They designed a cute Campus Climate Questionnaire with a stress tree and a stress quilt. They had a mental health fun day in White Plaza, with free massages. Everywhere you look there's a pamphlet for the Bridge. It's all utterly useless, but they're trying. It's the thought that counts, even if they appear to think we're in second grade. Our school's not to blame. It's us. It's who we are. It's the curse of our overworked generation. If you're here, then odds are you've spent the better half of your life attaining perfection. Extracurriculars, AP tests, trophies, student government, student newspapers, singing, dancing, studying, sleeping only when your body could hold out no longer against the dark unconsciousness. I always assumed that sort of life was over with high school; that once you got to college things slowed down. For most people, college is even more intense than high school: more work, more coffee. Our parents used science to make us the perfect worker bee study bots — but you can't just turn that off. If anything, you become even more type-A with age. We want it all. We binge on work, we binge on play, we binge. But it's never enough. We get to Stanford, which is supposed to be the fulfillment of all our dreams, and it isn't enough. We need a good med school, a good law school, a great job, the love and respect of our peers and our betters. My shrink described to me how kids like us — perfectionists, go-getters, workaholics — live our lives walking up an eternal slope without ever turning back. We never see how high we've come, we only see how much higher we still have to go. And we get depressed because there is no plateau; the mountain just gets steeper. It doesn't help that the whole world is going to shit. Or rather, that we are more aware than any previous generation of how shitty the world has always been. It calls to mind something AJ said a couple of weeks ago on "The Sopranos." How can you not be depressed? How can any sane person approach the world with anything less than horror and distaste and loathing? When AJ attempted suicide on the most recent episode, I found myself begging the Lord to spare him — as if he carried the fate of us all on his shoulders, as if whatever happened to him was going to happen to us eventually. The pessimism is everywhere. The '90s are seven years gone. Any dream of paradise on earth is gone with them. The planes flew into the towers. And that didn't even matter. Can you imagine? 9/11 doesn't even matter. It's a blip in the radar. People were suffering before; people are still suffering. Our world is broken, dying. We killed it. Global warming is God's next flood. Wipe the slate clean. Maybe the cockroaches will do better. Or so we think, sometimes, when the sunshine feels cold, when death feels so close. You know what? There's a way out. And you don't need CAPS or the Bridge or the Office of Religious Life. You have to fail, and you have to want to fail. Skip a class, or miss a meeting. Whatever you think you have to do, do the exact opposite. Try to become everything you're afraid of becoming: fat, stupid, alone. Admit weakness. Find someone who makes you happy and tell them everything that makes you hurt. Especially the stupid shit. Because suicide, in the end, is stupid. Living is the appropriate response to life. We owe it to our honored dead to learn from their mistakes. We owe it to them to live every day like it's the start of forever. And we owe it to them to try to change our life if our life isn't working for us. Darren Franich will be celebrating his 21st and 22nd birthdays on Friday and insists that his devoted underage fan base come and get illegally plastered. Email him at dfranich@stanford.edu. Comments on this article: Cat - 5/22/07 Wow, great piece! Just finished the Campus Climate Questionaire and found it hokey. L - 5/22/07 Cute rhetoric but you aren't taking the whole situation into account. It isn't necessarily Stanford or our parents or our type-A personalities that are, as you say so many times, killing us -- there are innumerable nuances to these situations, including unglamorous non-Stanford-related roots like clinical depression. Also, for some crazy reason I find myself unable to trust the guy who begs god to spare AJ Soprano to genuinely have all of our best interests at heart... J - 5/22/07 Darren, if you truly want to help then go out and fail, fail big, and write a column about it. Help show how to redefine success. Otherwise this really is rhetoric, as empty as the trees and quilts in the campus questionnaire. Eric - 5/22/07 Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and the headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Jason Kerwin - 5/22/07 This is exceptional writing. I've learned to expect far less from the Daily. L is right about the clinical depression angle. It's very common here, as on many college campuses. Most researchers think there is a direct link between depression and intelligence/creativity, so the high rates of depression here are no accident. David - 5/22/07 Darren's articles shouldn't have blogs after them because they just sap the energy out of what I always find to be exceptionally powerful and interesting writing. Next time I finish reading one of Darren's articles and I see that dreaded "comments on this article:" line, I'll stop, close my computer, think of the craziest and trite shit that I can to post, open my computer again, and sure enough, I'll find my work already done for me. s - 5/23/07 Just a quick note - The Bridge did not have anything to do with the corny Campus Climate survey. I wanted to kill myself 2 - 5/23/07 And it's not because of myself, I would have if I were able to do such thing. But it's because the way Stanford treats me every day (and especially the incompetence of student housing). So, since we're paying so much for health insurance anyway, they should include eutanasia for students. That way they wouldn't have to deal with usbickering after getting so much abuse from this university. Nicole D - 5/23/07 I think it's really easy to blame our parents or our high schools or our societies for making us into the "perfectionists, go-getters" and "workaholics" you seem to think everyone at Stanford is. It is my hope that students here are smart enough to transcend that bullshit and to realize for themselves that perpetually jumping through hoops will never yield lasting satisfaction. Instead of blindly climbing that slope your therapist so poetically described, we all need to completely reevaluate what we've been programmed by the afforementioned forces to think is important. We all need to ask ourselves whether the values we use to structure our lives are truly ours or not, whether they make us happy or not, whether the standards of achievment we had in high school are the ones we want cling to all our lives. It's a really uncomfortable thing to do, but it only this sort of continuous self-evaluation that can ensure that we're living the life we really want by standards we set for ourselves. This is where I think therapy comes in. I'm a huge therapy enthusiast. If I were president, i would mandate free therapy for everyone. My parents are both psychotherapists. Fuck, all my parents friends are therapists (I'm from Brooklyn, NY, okay)! I, myself, saw a therapist for a little over a year before I left for college when my boyfriend became clinically depressed and suicidal. I don't think therapy is a miracle cure, but it was certainly one of the best thing I've ever done. Not only did she help me deal with the stress of being in a relationship with someone who was depressed, but she also helped me rationally approach so many issues I had never even realized affected me so profoundly. I don't know if there's a stigma about seeking out mental help here at Stanford because, quite frankly, I've never really heard the subject discussed among students. I come from a family in which the offer to talk to a mental health professional about whatever I wanted has always been on the table, and I'm a firm believer that the majority of the American population needs to change its attitude towards mental health. I think it's important for people to approach their mental health in the same way they approach their physical health. You go for routine check-ups to make sure your body is working smoothly and get even small ailments checked out as a precautionary measure. People need to realize that chatting with a mental health professional regularly is not a diagnosis of insanity, but a normal and wonderful way to begin to straigten out the jumble of things that is in most of our heads. People need to understand that any issue, not matter how seemingly insignificant, is a legitimate reason to talk to someone. I say, if you can afford a private therapist, take advantage. If not, try out the Bridge Center or CAPS, Vaden's Counseling and Psychological Services. It's easy to demonize Stanford, or society, or the College Board and blame them for all of our problems. Ultimately, though, we are just as responsible for our own mental health as we are for our own lives. happy birthday and have fun getting shitfaced, nd -- Original Source: Stanford Daily - May 22, 2007
Permissions granted by James Hohmann Editor-in-Chief The Stanford Daily <jhohmann@stanford.edu>
Pundits wrong to blame society's woes on entertainment industry
By: Dave Arey Posted: 4/25/07 Hours after the Virginia Tech shootings, people were already looking for something to blame. Fox News had on lawyer and "school shootings expert" Jack Thompson, an infamous critic of video games. He gave the dubious statement that when looking at most school shootings there was a common thread, that being "the immersion of the perpetrators in incredibly violent entertainment, most notably violent videogames." This was before the killer had even been named. When it was found out that Seung-Hui Cho had little contact with violent videogames, other possible explanations were discussed. In a video sent to NBC, Cho can be seen holding a hammer in a pose reminiscent of the movie "Oldboy." As a result, many began wondering if the killings were influenced by that. In reporting on the story, Jake Coyle of the Associated Press wrote that, "Notorious killers are commonly linked to movies or music." Such an assumption is very dangerous, but sadly, it is also common. It is true that John Lennon's killer read "The Catcher in the Rye." It is also true that Charles Manson loved The Beach Boys and The Beatles. But they were very troubled people who did not need entertainment to inspire their actions. The killings at Virginia Tech have followed a never-ending string of cases where entertainment has been blamed for the actions of an individual. One of the more ludicrous recent examples was Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team. Ever since, many people in the media have blamed rap music as much as they have blamed Imus himself. Imus started the conversation by mentioning on his show that he was simply repeating the vernacular of rappers. Many others in the media picked up on this. In a column printed April 11, Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star wrote that, "I'm sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent's or Snoop Dogg's or Young Jeezy's latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos." Days later, he was on Oprah. I am not suggesting that violent videogames or rap music should necessarily get a free pass. There is certainly a time to talk about the role each has in society. However, in each of these cases, the people using these situations to advance their own views are opportunistic and wrong. Artists (and yes, I did just call rappers and videogame makers "artists") need to be given room to create. Both rap and violent videogames are representations of the society they come out of - a society prone to violence, racism and sexism. Using the misfortune of others to get on television is no way to make that society better. Dave Arey is a contributing columnist whose columns appear biweekly in The Daily Orange. E-mail him at dwarey@syr.edu. -- Original Source:The Daily Orange - April 25, 2007
Published by Dave April 18th, 2007 This past weekend was the middle weekend of April. That's the time universities put on dog-and-pony shows for students who have been admitted, to help them make up their minds. My daughter has been admitted to several universities, and she managed to narrow it down to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. Somewhat at the last minute, she decided she needed to see both campuses to make her final decision. So on Saturday she and my wife drove down to Blacksburg from our suburban DC home, about a four-hour trip. They stayed near Blacksburg and then spent Sunday in Tech's pre-orientation sessions. Monday they had moved up Interstate 81 to JMU, but my daughter had pretty much decided that Tech was the place she wanted to attend. Standing on the campus Sunday, looking around, she began to see herself as a student there. As I was walking back from the cafeteria in my high school on Monday, one of the Spanish teachers had his classroom TV on. There was a map of Virginia with the town of Blacksburg highlighted. I saw a graphic indicating "21 dead, 21 injured." It didn't take long for the news of the massacre to filter through, as well as the instruction from our administration that we were to keep TV sets off and not talk about the news in class. Many students from our area attend Virginia Tech. It is one of the more competitive universities in the Virginia system. Hokie loyalty is more intense than that of alumni of other places. Hokie pain is now intense. To see Virginia Tech on the front page of all the world's newspapers because of a rampage that wiped out 33 young lives is deeply disturbing. My daughter will probably still attend Tech next year. She realizes that Tech is the place she saw on Sunday, not the crazy-man-land it became on Monday. But it will always be unsettling to walk the campus where the worst shooting massacre in American history took place. -- Original Source: http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/18/blacksburg/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
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Published by Dave April 25th, 2007 I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven't really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling. In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun. On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us. Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing. In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren't sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session. After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that a man had opened fire with a handgun on the Empire State Building's observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws for the rampage. America's latest adventure in easily available firearms is, of course, the massacre at Virginia Tech. As I have mentioned, my wife and daughter, who had visited Blacksburg the day before, missed this one by about 18 hours. The world press paid close attention to this shooting for a long time. It was front-page news in just about all the newspapers of the world for four or five days. As I write this, nine days after the attack, major papers in Germany, Austria, France, and other countries are still reporting the aftermath. The one thing the world press has emphasized, without exception, is their absolute bafflement at the U.S. gun laws-or lack thereof. We are the laughingstock of the world in this department. People from civilized countries around the world look at the apparent American fascination with guns and cluck in disapproving astonishment. The unifying theme is something like this: how can a great country such as the U.S., the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, continue to allow this to happen? After all these years and decades, I cannot come up with an answer. The National Rifle Association seems to have our congressional legislators in a deathgrip. One mass murder happens after another, all carried out with handguns or assault rifles, and yet nothing changes. The morning after the Virginia Tech shootings, I heard Washington Post sports reporter John Feinstein on WTWP. I wish I could find a transcript of his remarks. Essentially what he said was this: when gun owners and gun fans complain about the inconvenience or unfairness of having to register these deadly weapons, he is sick of hearing about it. Since 9/11 we have been subject to a series of ever more humiliating and inconvenient searches of our persons and property at airports. Nobody really complains, because that's just the way the world is. Well, the world is also selling deadly handguns on the Internet to psychotic young men, who then commit mass murder. Couldn't we endure just a little inconvenience to combat such madness? I am very angry now at our American stupidity. I am angry at the weak will of the majority of Americans who want stronger gun controls, yet who will not raise hell with their congressmen or senators about it. I am embarrassed to have to try to explain to my European friends and colleagues why Americans are still allowed to buy and carry handguns. The cartoonist Pat Oliphant has captured my sense of befuddlement and rage. -- Original Source: http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/25/blacksburg-violence-and-america/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Dave Vogt / davedot.com I am honestly at a loss for what to say about the events that unfolded on the Virginia Tech campus this morning. I was walking across the Drillfield towards GBJ when firing broke out in Norris hall. I had heard nothing about the previous shootings in West AJ. While I recognize that the decision to go on with classes was an informed one, I still feel that it was the University's responsibility to inform the students of potential danger. I consider myself extremely fortunate that neither I nor anyone I know was involved. I spent the morning trying to touch base with as many people as possible until the phone network here became absolutely saturated. I hope that I was at least able to set up a cascade so that people wouldn't have to be worried about my safety. That being said, it's extremely difficult to place my reaction. Obviously I am not as heavily affected as those whose loved ones have been injured or killed. At the same time though, this is very jarring for everyone involved. I don't think I'll really know how I feel for a while yet. They don't tell you how to react to this sort of thing. UPDATE 17 Apr 2007 11:21p: I have been mostly disgusted by the media coverage of this event. I think that larger and more distant news outlets get things the most wrong, and locals do the best job. CNN's article is as sensationalizing as the rest, but if you scroll down towards the bottom, Gov. Tim Kaine's remarks perfectly echo my sentiment. "People who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them." I don't deny that there are questions that need to be asked, but there are more important things to deal with right now. On the other side of the coin, I am deeply touched by the outpouring of support from universities and individual students across the country and abroad. There has been a huge "We are all Hokies" movement, with students wearing maroon and orange to show support. That is probably the best response that I've heard about. I'm glad that the younger generation have a grip on what's important. We're going to need it going forward. This entry was posted on 16.Apr.2007 7:41pm -- Original Source: http://log.davedot.com/backlog/2007/04/beyond-words/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
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Saturday, April 21, 2007 "this is a lesson for all o. i think those American parents should learn a lesson or 2 from this. with the way their kids tease other people of different nationalities. i went to school abroad as well, and i can tell you that most people, even the adult students have no regard for others. if you aint speaking the language like them, or don't look like them, its hard to mix. i'm not generalizing, but its a pattern ive noticed. hence it leaves people feeling isolated from others. i think people should be taught these subtle signs and not to ignore others. no be by force, but at least make an effort to make other people feel welcome. this matter was a big issue in the school i went to. if you aint white, forget it. no-one wants to have anything to do with you, no matter how extroverted or social you are." - Soulpatrol (Nairaland) Being a foreigner myself set me thingking... what could have made a man shoot 31 innocent people before taking his own life? It's easy to plant flowers at memorials, write words we don't mean on tombstones and whiteboards, talk about how good people were on facebook. . . if only we did this when we each could appreciate each other perhaps such episodes could be a thiing of the past. How could a fellow not have any friends for 4 years?? Everyone is talking about him being the weird kid who never talked, some are busy posting his plays on the internet, professors are describing a disturbed kid they think they did a huge favour by sending to see a psychiatrist. Where was everyone when a simple "how did your day go" would have averted this problem? How many times was Cho abandoned in the back of the class with everyone sniggering at that "weird asian kid who never talked"? I find it so difficult to imagine me sharing a room with another individual and him having issues that warranted psychiatric evaluation and police questioning and yet doing absolutely nothing! Only to appear on CNN after the shootings to hug the limelights as the room mates of a weirdo!!! His family never visited and no one cared to ask why. He never went on holidays and no one bothered to invite him home even when they lived just a stone's throw from the school. He wrote scary plays and his classmates prefered to turn them into discussion points rather than reach out to someone who was clearly troubled. How many times do we push people away because they don't look like us, talk like us or think like us? How many times have we been so ignorant and selfish forgetting to help those around us who need just one person to make them feel loved and accepted? It is easy to talk about healing, fly flags at halfmast, cancel school, while pretending to honor the memories of those that died when we are merely reaping the fruits of our selfishness, rejection of others and inability to stretch a hand of fellowship. Of course this in no way attempts to justify Cho's act but it is a reminder to us that there are thousands of other Cho's around us. They may never pick up a gun and shoot their classmates but deep inside are living a life that is empty. Luxury can never take the place of love and acceptance, if one person cared for his neighbour perhaps much more than stricter gun laws, we may be able to save someone else from going the lonely road to perdition. I wonder what would have happened to Cho had he not carried out his act. Many of us leave college with healthy memories that would linger forever. What would Cho have left with? posted by david at 11:29 PM -- Original Source: http://davidylan.blogspot.com/2007/04/in-chos-defence.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
Blacksburg Mayor Ron Rordam being interviewed on April 18,2007, two days after the Virginia Tech Tragedy.
Thursday, April 19. 2007 As all of America mourns the deaths which occurred on the Virginia Tech campus, bloggers are drawing comparisons to the body count that issues daily from Iraq. See a particularly poignant post from Floyd Rudmin of commondreams.org titled "32 Senseless Deaths: A Chance for Empathy, Change of Heart, and Change of Course" which concludes: The tragedy at Virginia Tech was caused by lone gunman, probably deranged. It was a one-time event. It is finished. The tragedy in Iraq was caused by the US government, with the over-whelming support of the US Congress, most of the US media, and much of the US population. This war was planned and executed by rational men and women, none of them deranged. The US decided to start the war against Iraq. The US decided to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. The US decided to destroy the Iraqi government and to disband its police and army. The US decided to send too few soldiers to secure the nation after doing these destructive deeds. And the tragedy of Iraq is not a one-time event. It is not finished. It continues, apparently without end. By many reports, the US is now preparing to start another war, this time against Iran. Americans feeling the shock and grief of the tragedy at Virginia Tech should look into their hearts and realize that they through their government are bringing this same tragedy again, and again, and again, and again, and again, endlessly and needlessly, to other people in the world who also have hearts that can be torn out, who also feel grief and loss when family and friends are suddenly killed when doing ordinary things of life, like going to school. Tragic deaths force us to feel our humanity and to see we are similar to others in the world. The tragic deaths in Virginia might serve to motivate Americans to curb their militarism and to minimize the tragedies of sudden death that they have been bringing to other families in the world. Read the full article. It is heartening to witness a vigorous debate emerging online as people come to terms with these killings and their significance, not only for the victims and their families and friends, but for an entire culture. As Americans draw comparisons to Iraq, we who are not American are reminded that America is a house divided. I sometimes catch myself drawing hasty generalizations, styling all Americans as arrogant war-mongerers. But the comments I read online remind me that, in fact, those who share the president's world view stand in a minority. I must pause to recognize that most Americans grieve for the state of their country and fear for their safety abroad. As non-Americans, our generalizations merely implicate us in the sins we condemn. Perhaps a more difficult task comes in moderating the generalizations we make as we consider Cho Seung-Hui who was the perpetrator of these killings. Every account I have read thus far refers to him as "deranged." Doubtless a person who commits mass murder is mentally ill. But the use of this particular epithet continues the media habit of drawing a causal connection between violence and mental illness. This is an oversimplification, much like the suggestion that American troops are in Iraq to stabilize a country that has no infrastructure of its own. The media's continuing association of violence and mental illness perpetuates the stigma which haunts millions of people who suffer from major mental health issues. In fact, mental illness is not a significant indicator of violence. See this pdf document from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Indicators which are more significant include: youth, male gender, and history of violence or substance abuse. Let me make that a little clearer: if you are a male, that fact alone is a stronger predictor of violent behaviour than if you suffer from schizophrenia. A non-clinical list of indicators might also include such factors as availability of weapons and exposure to desensitizing materials (e.g. video games, movies, media that televise a killer's manifesto and cell phone video of shots being fired, etc). From the CAMH document comes this quote: "While it is true that some people who have a mental illness do commit crimes, public perceptions of mentally ill persons as criminally dangerous are exaggerated. In fact, 80 to 90 percent of people with mental illness never commit violent acts. They are actually more likely to have acts of violence committed against them, particularly homeless individuals who may also have a mental illness." (Italics added.) If the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent acts, then it is possible that Cho Seung-Hui only became a risk after he was, himself, victimized. Following the shootings at Columbine, it was revealed that the shooters, Harris & Klebold, were victims of significant bullying. The same is probably true in this instance. See here for a profile of Cho. Let's not perpetrate a generalization about mental illness. Let's seize this moment as an opportunity to put an end to a cycle of violence by putting an end to our fears of mental illness. I would invite Floyd Rudmin and commondreams.org to revise their post. There were 33 senseless deaths. To state that there were 32 reveals a stigmatizing bias that we must reckon with. Otherwise, our generalizations merely implicate us in the sins we condemn. Posted by David Barker in Health/Mental Health at 23:08 -- Original Source: http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5.