Okay, I give up, I give in.

[Matsubara]

Thanks to the wisdom of our megacorp media and some posters here, I have realized that it's foolish to try to understand

what was going on in this young man's mind, what could have motivated him to do something hideous.

Why doing that is the same as condoning his acts, right?


So, I'll just push aside all the abuse that the kid probably REALLY DID ENDURE at the hands of his classmates,

and forget about the condescending and patronizing, or just indifferent way that so many school counselors have of talking to kids,

And ignore the fact that our society in its endless quest for more STUFF and ENTERTAINMENT (the more crass and ugly the better) and THE BOTTOM LINE,

creates legions of disaffected lonely people lacking in social skills so that it's a miracle that this doesn't happen on a daily basis.



And I'll just sit back in my comfy easy chair and look at the TV all smug and just HATE the kid, and congratulate myself on how

skillfully I would have taken him down if I had been there, and know that capitalist society couldn't possibly have done any better,

because capitalism is a perfect system, and that boy was just plain BORN EVIL. End of story.



Boy I feel better now, all shiny pink and clean. I'm starting to get bored of this massacre coverage. What else is on tonight?

[patrice]

1. You are hereby also granted justification in the fact that Cho was

also, apparently, a Classist and anyone who ever felt and spoke out about economic oppression is also hereby deemed a potential mass murderer.

[LearnedHand]

2. I think you're right to wonder how these things can happen

I've been thinking about this all day: the news articles this morning said the kid had been recommended for mental evaluation several times over the last couple of years. He'd been reported to the police for stalking people. His teachers had recognized that he was scary-disturbed. In other words, the many people who noticed his mental state HAD tried to intervene. But it came down to that old saw from the police: "We can't do anything until he actually does something."

So here's the rub: maybe we need to change our laws such that when concerned people DO the right thing, there are more avenues for intervention. Obviously the kid needed serious help. Obviously many other people saw that and tried to do something about it. We MUST have intervention provisions in our laws and, more importantly, in our mental healthcare provision system.

Which reminds me. We can lay the blame for this one squarely on Ronnie Ray-Gun's shoulders. He decimated and closed the public mental health institutions back in the 80s.

[Erika]

7. Yes, Ronald Reagan decimated the mental hospitals

Michael Weiner Savage tonight said we should get out of Iraq and speend the money building mental hospitals.

This is after he said the shooter was the devil incarnate?

[Catherine Vincent]

3. I'm listening to his video tapes on CNN right now and wondering...

who was he talking to. :shrug:

[mzteris]

8. all of us.

(Not that I've watched/listened to the video, just heard references to it on the radio.)

[TomClash]

4. Cho directly killed 33 - Bush has indirectly killed 655,000

Cho is a madman, a serial killer - we can never understand him.

But what does that make Bush?

[bonito]

5. I hear ya

;(

[sandnsea]

6. It happens on a daily basis

Just not with 30+ victims. We've got to change this culture.

I'm not advocating banning video games - but seriously - we have GAMES about KILLING. How and when did we get to the place where we could wrap our heads around murder games??

[pocoloco]

9. Pre-training for the military,

[mzteris]

10. yeah, too bad he didn't enlist

he'd be hailed as a hero now for gunning down people, eh?

[eleny]

11. Why do so many want them?