One take on Virginia Tech

This is from a few days ago...

Man, watching the news come in today at work about the Virginia Tech shootings was sure, well, it wasn't shocking, that's for sure. Disturbing, but not shocking.

A few weeks ago, here in Seattle, a 40 year old psycho walked into the architecture building at UW, and killed his ex girlfriend, who he was stalking, with a gun, and then turned it on himself.

What makes this story even more local to me is that the same guy hounded a girl I know on myspace. She blew him off but what if she hadn't? It's a long shot that anything would have happened but certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

Once the dust (for lack of a better euphemism) begins to settle, there will be a lot of questions.

Why wasn't the campus evacuated? Why did it take the university 2 hours to send any kind of message to the students, a message that could have prevented perhaps all but 2 of the murders? Why did the police assume the first 2 shootings were isolated (especially considering that they thought he was after his girlfriend but didn't find her. Should have raised an eyebrow that he was out on campus looking for blood).

Sure, fair enough. The university fucked up majorly here. the university's policies, slow reactions time, may have allowed this to turn into tragedy. but campus security tightening up isn't going to prevent this from happening again.

There will be a lot of questions, and the answers may come in the form of the chief of the university police being fired (someone definitely has to take some responsibility), a changed policy about ordered evacuations in the event of violent crimes, or some other such measure that doesn't really solve the problem.

i think that problem is, here, it's a real surprise... GUNS!!!

...Well that, and the overall decline of civilized society.

But let's focus on guns.

This crime would not have been possible without a gun. In fact, if he'd gone in the dorm to kill his girlfriend with a knife, and not found her there, he might not have risked trying to kill anyone. With a knife, you actually have to demonstrate some skill or you'll get yourself killed. That is, when you're trying to kill someone, a deterrent.

Anyway, the U.S. doesn't have the worst murder rates in the world, but the countries that do are seriously fucked up, like places where near genocide is taking place, and we're not far enough behind to be proud.

The psycho that killed his girlfriend at UW, he stole a gun to commit the crime. He walked into her office to do it. Circumstances would have been more difficult without a gun.

Sure, America's a bit on the vicious side. Mainly, we have a lot of really really poor people and we have a fair amount of losers (since everyone's competing) and losers and poor people commit violent crimes. That's just what happens.

But these are really difficult socioeconomic type problems and they're not going to be solved.

Unfortunately, because literacy rates are so bad, no one can read the second Amendment, either, and so the gun problem will never be solved. (basically, the reason in the second amendment for bearing arms, the antecedent, to keep an army around in case the british come to get us, it doesn't exist anymore. the british are actually less likely to come and get us than just about any country on the entire fucking planet. for some reason, they actually like us, or at least their government.

Anyway... therefore, the predicate, the right to bear arms, doesn't make sense. this is called english grammar. we learned it in third grade).

So mainly because most of the people in the world are retarded, we should get used to seeing this kind of thing happening again. There are going to be more of them.