"You don't want the king of England coming here and pushing you around, do you?"

Rob here...

I think Jim is out making some tamales and Chris is out making some tomato sauce. But I wanted to chime in here about the recent school shooting. Right now they're saying that over 30 people are confirmed dead from this new shooting.



The Austine massacre was before my time. The Columbine shooting was during my sophomore year of college. And I remember my Macroeconomics professor at the time, a Nobel laureate, was distraught because of the events. He said, "what's the point? what's the point of me teaching you, you working hard to get the house in the burbs, and to have your kids come out to become homicidal maniacs?" I'm not sure why his reaction was so strong, but we spent 3 hours talking about it during our class time.

The ease of getting a gun in America is astounding. I know the NRA and the like will say that the guns used to commit crimes aren't legal weapons, but if no one had them (by theory), it should decrease the incidence of such events.

Also, I don't know about you, but there's a bit of an attenuated effect related to this shooting. As if it were just another news story.


Chris, checking in...just finished shoving in my sausage and my meatballs...

I say this happens anyway...guns are simply a means...if not an assault weapon a homemade bomb...if not a bomb, a fire in the middle of the night. Nothing can get in the way of a truly determined individual. 9/11? Boxcutters.

Access to guns is not that issue that disturbs me those most here. How much sympathy will be espoused over this? How much of it is real? How many students at VT will embrace this as some sort of self-aggrandizing 15-minute fame opp? Seriously, would you go on camera? It's just vulgar...what's the point? Some kid saying "hey, yeah, we were already saying this is like a college columbine" Gee, come up with that on your own Tolstoy?

War, what is it good for?

The word tragedy begins to lose it's meaning when applied to every death in public view. Is this shooting? Yes, of course, many innocent kids had their lives snuffed out...but is it any more tragic than most of the other 152,000 deaths that occurred yesterday? I know too well the pain these students' families will feel for the rest of their lives, but it's no greater than the profound loss thousands of others will feel for their loved-ones who died today. All death, whether sudden or prolonged, seems senseless and beyond comprehension. Is it not an affront to the memories and lives of those not fortunate enough to have caught the media's attention to have such a public outpouring of emotion for people who happened to die in a unique, certainly stunning manner? What is it about high-profile deaths that provokes these rare expressions of sympathy? Why as the same society are we able to walk into a super-gluttonous supermarket and not be pained by the millions of people, mostly children, who are starving while we load our carts with doritos, bacon, and ice cream? Who will actually take time to PERSONALLY reflect on this event, rather than patronize themselves and their acquaintances with exagerrated claims of sympathy and heartache?

If 9/11 couldn't change us, why should this? We surround and insulate ourselves in these impenetrable bubbles of self-importance and influence, and sadly, only personal tragedy has any lasting effect.


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