Opening...Va Tech

I'm a young reporter. I'm in my second job, my first at a daily newspaper. I'm at a small paper in Indiana. I was previously at a weekly in New Hampshire. My old blog is at http://www.everyjim.blogspot.com/.

I don't know how much I want to introduce myself, so I will just get started. For anyone who's watched NBC or MSNBC in the last few hours, you've seen the tape of the Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-hui, his press release really, where he tries to offer some explanation, to make himself a martyr. Obviously, he failed. Anytime you kill others to make your point; you've acted in a cowardly manner. When I think of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and now Cho Seung-hui, one can't help but turn to the Bard, the Antony's demagogic speech to the Roman mob after the assassination of Caesar, "The evil that men do lives after them," however, they seem to have no good deeds to inter with their bones, only their victims, and the heroes who tried to save lives in the process, and especially those that gave up their own, will have tangible living reminders of the good they have done.

My fear, and I think it's one that I am fairly confident will actually come to pass, is the rush to change everything. There's a reason that this was the first such incident since Charles Whitman, or at the very least, on this scale, on a college campus. Now there's going to be a rush to arm students or professors, conservatives have already made the point that since Va. Tech was a gun free zone, the only one who had a gun was the killer. The problem is, and since I myself am a non-gun owner, that even if they're allowed to have a gun, not all will choose to have it. Then you'll have people say that they should be required to have them.

Look, if we want to have the same system as many European countries, where all young men are have to fulfill compulsory military service obligations, it will take an awful lot, like a massive sea-change in culture. So that won't happen. We also don't want to turn campuses into police states. Glenn Beck mocked the idea that Cho wasn't stopped because of his disturbing plays and stories because turning those things over to authorities or using them against him would violate free speech. The problem is, it would, and frankly, unless the student has a history of violent, sociopathic or psychopathic acts, its impossible to distinguish between someone simply indulging in a darker vision, going through a rough patch or actually really screwed up and a danger to others. The thought police are not the next logical step. Neither, of course, is blaming the victims of a tragedy for not being manly enough, but that’s still what’s happened, in some quarters.