33 dead in 'horrific' campus shooting in Virginia

CBC News

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Sep 26, 2006
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At least 33 people are dead and several others wounded after a gunman opened fire at a Virginia college on Monday in what is being described as the worst campus shooting in U.S. history.

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MikeyDB

House Member
Jun 9, 2006
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CityTV airs a program titled “Legal Briefs” and in keeping with the international coverage of yet another senseless slaughter, the evening program was devoted to examining the genesis of these kinds of events. As always, the guest invited to pontificate on the “evil” behind this senseless violence by the media mandarins was a representative of the anti-gun… gun-control” camp….

I certainly don’t expect many (or anyone here at Canadian Content for that matter) to be available to examining the issues and this tragedy beyond the visceral response to guns and gun-ownership as the harbinger of mindless anti-social behavior that firearms ownership and use is painted as being.

It won’t make any difference to the anti-gun camp to consider that the availability of firearms of all kinds has been relatively easy throughout the United States for decades and yet the incidence of school-related violence involving firearms use…has become an issue of interest and focus in only the most recent few.

What’s difficult to comprehend and perhaps beyond the readiness of many to admit is that the world has changed in the past fifty years and the pace and nature of change has accelerated steadily. Modern media has cultivated our appetites for violence. Part of the regimen of conditioning to consumerism relegates values and frameworks of morality to objectification with situational interpretations of morality now the rule among western societies.

We don’t call making war on those we fear or those whom we’ve targeted for ‘regime-change’.. “War” anymore we call it “pre-emptive defense”. We don’t mourn the thousands killed in the name of “progress” and identify them as victims, we mourn our own lost on this downward spiral of greed as the victims of actions we initiated and deny any responsibility or culpability for the outcomes our greed produces.

We’d rather find anyone else to shoulder responsibility for global warming or deny its existence because if we did anything else we’d be faced with confronting our choice to exhaust the resources of an entire planet in the name of supporting a life-style and cultures beyond the limits of sustainability and for that matter, common sense.

Our inability to adequately address social ills like poverty and racism are exacerbated through a willingness to adopt the sound-byte mentality of modern advertising in combination with a general “dumbing-down” when it comes to ferreting out the truth behind everything from who killed John Kennedy to who was actually behind the foreign policy of the United States with respect to the invasion of Iraq.

While we hear warnings about a dramatic increase in childhood obesity and obesity in general, and simultaneously confront the rise in eating disorders among young women who’ve embraced the wispy boniness of modern fashion runway models as the ideal….leaving many youngsters bulimic and anorexic in their efforts to mirror the “ideal” of post modernity’s re-definition of the term “sexy” if not indeed the very nature and quality of “beauty”…

It’s far easier and compatible with the notion that brevity is the key to clarity to identify guns and every associated “gun” behavior as the ill that’s crippling our society. In fact, precursors to any social plague like eating disorders and poverty and racism and firearms violence is much more complicated and demands an objectivity that postmodernism seeks to undermine.

Our modern coliseums of the hockey arena the basketball court and the racing circuit model the male ideal of ruggedness and preparedness to settle differences with violence. The culture of “maleness” and the structure of attributes deemed appropriate in expressing this “manliness” is only slightly removed…or perhaps if I may…..only slightly ‘evolved’ over the past thirty thousand years of human occupancy of this tiny orb. Our media saturated world lionizes the pursuit of wealth and power through any and all means as the appropriate…and expected behavior for “success”. Our culture has taken the bizarreness of people prepared to put themselves in harms way in pursuit of money….from “Fear Factor” and “Survivor” to morphing of values and concepts of morality to game show status with Donald Trump, Bill Gates and the fabulously wealthy as the models who ask that decisions be made absent of any other consideration than what’s in the best interests of pleasing the boss and making money. This of course includes promoting competition that while in earlier times when mankind was much busier “competing” with nature for his survival, he now has the time and luxury of abandoning ethics and morals in pursuit of competing with everyone and anyone else for the opportunity to acquire the modern symbols of success and popularity….

A sub-current within the developing zeitgeist is the overarching necessity for acknowledgement. Acknowledgement buried within the “status-hierarchy” built around consumption and the possession of the accoutrements and expressions of wealth and power. Many believe that variety is the hallmark of freedom of choice…so we’re eager to debate the superiority of the Chevrolet over the Ford, demand that even if we can’t afford the designer costumes of the filthy-rich that ‘designer knock-offs’ be produced in foreign nations for near slave wages and offered to the wealthy of the western egocentricities…so we can perpetuate the myth that possession and facility to flourish wealth and consumption are product of high-mindedness and superior moral acuity…

It is also entirely valid to acknowledge that our responses to events like the most recent horror in West Virginia are amplified by the nauseating repetition of “live-video feeds” and the endless droning on of the genuinely concerned….in the absence of solution and in acquiescence to the idea that because the underlying ‘reasons’ behind these terrible phenomenon…are simply too complex and too variegated in nature to comprehend and must be interpreted and fed to us by the talking-heads of the small screen emporiums.

Take a disturbed mind thrust into the maelstrom of postmodernism’s larger- than-life-as-necessity….mix with a boiled-down thin gruel of moral substance abandoned in the name of “making-ones-mark”, sprinkle generously with double-talk and artificiality as the ‘norm’ and the outcome to everything from firearms violence on America’s and Canada’s schoolyards and campuses…makes perfect if nonetheless disturbing sense.

But hey… “It’s guns that are to blame”….is an affordable recipe that anyone can readily apply to this madness…and then move along to more serious issues like….. well ?
 

s243a

Council Member
Mar 9, 2007
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Calgary
That was very well written and I think the only thing we disagree on is global warming but lets not make this another global warming thread. When Columbine happened it seemed sensible that guns might be the reason but we see this happening more and more, gun laws haven't changed and it has happened in countries with more strict gun laws then in the united states. Had perhaps the staff in the school been armed and trained and metal detectors been placed on the door then perhaps their would be less casualties.

So lets not argue weather tougher or weaker gun laws would of made a difference. That is an old debate and does not address todays reality. There is an old question, does reality imitate art or does art inmate reality. We have a problem. Kids are learning the wrong thing, either though their parrents, their peers or the media. It is not just vedeo games either. It is everywhere, TV shows, games shows, talk news, talk radio, music, advertisements, their peers and their parents and before we do anything we must accept this.
 

MikeyDB

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Jun 9, 2006
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S243a
We have lost touch with our humanity, and our costructs of socialization are unravelling around us. From international politics and global calamities....that we could do something about...to our domestic and local choices in how we treat each other and our preparedness to stand..'outside' our selves to examine the situation. Humankind is in serious trouble. There are no easy answers.
 

Vereya

Council Member
Apr 20, 2006
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Tula
Had perhaps the staff in the school been armed and trained and metal detectors been placed on the door then perhaps their would be less casualties.
The necessity of arming school stuff and placing metal detectors in schools seems sickeningly absurd to me. This will not solve the problem, I think. Unless you understand what lies at the root of such terrible happenings and try to cure the cause, things like this will happen again and again. I can't help wondering - what is so wrong with the society? What makes people do such things? What must have happened to that person to trigger his thinking into such a direction? I just can't even pretend to understand it.
 

MikeyDB

House Member
Jun 9, 2006
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Vereya
I taught at a highschool in Miami Springs....long long time ago...during desegregation...
There were armed guards all around the school.... We (our prejudices and our ignorance) create the reality that we all end up having to live with...
The nasty time in West VA. is exactly that.
 

s243a

Council Member
Mar 9, 2007
1,352
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38
Calgary
Vereya
I taught at a highschool in Miami Springs....long long time ago...during desegregation...
There were armed guards all around the school.... We (our prejudices and our ignorance) create the reality that we all end up having to live with...
The nasty time in West VA. is exactly that.

I'm confused. Your are using the present tense. We don't have segregation today. I've been to bars before that have metal detectors. I have no problem with them. Of course I believe, criss rock made a good joke. A metal detector makes you safe when you go inside but not safe when you come back out. Well, he said it much better then that.