Tragedy in the land of the Hokies

[Dreamin']

Though any of the news networks would have done the same.

You're probably right. But CBC restored my faith in the media for one brief moment:

 

On CBC Television, Radio and CBC.ca, we would report the essence of what the killer was saying, but not do what he so clearly hoped all media would do. To decide otherwise

[Reni]

To be clear - I wasn't defending anything - I was just saying. Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS or NBC would have all done the same, I have no doubt. I don't think NBC has a cornerstone on lack of integrity.

 

Good on the CBC and the BBC reports I have also seen have been done well.

[Analogman]

It was a rallying cry for other so-called "martyrs" to join them.

 

Experts alert for Va. Tech copycats

 

What I am saying there is - interesting how it always seems to go back to religion and guns.

[Dreamin']

To be clear - I wasn't defending anything.

I know. I just wanted to rant some more.

 

religion and guns

Both can be deadly in the wrong hands.

 

I was thinking about that episode of the The Newsroom where they want to show a suicide (live) on the news to boost ratings, and when the depressed guy changes his mind, the executive producer says, "He's got to kill himself, or I'll have egg on my face!"

 

I miss that series. It was kind of like The Office, but much much darker.

[Reni]

Remember that politician that actually did commit suicide on television? That was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in my life.

[Analogman]

Budd Dwyer

[Dreamin']

I didn't know about that. Horrible!

[Dreamin']

Some more Googling yielded this little gem:

 

In tonight's episode of The Newsroom -- the scathing '96 Canadian sitcom repeating its 13-episode run -- a train has plunged into Africa 's Congo river and, thousands of kilometres away in Toronto, TV news director George Findlay (Ken Finkleman) is trying to pin down the wording for the nightly news.

 

But with the clock ticking toward deadline, his staff have been unable to confirm the existence of either deadly piranha or even one Canadian casualty.

 

"Well, we're hoping there's a Canadian dead," says Findlay, who has already been forced to settle for the dubious term, "piranha-like fish."

 

"OK, how about this? 'Perhaps' one Canadian was eaten by piranha-like fish."

 

"I have a problem with that," says the associate producer. "I mean, how do we know he was eaten?"

 

"Perhaps one Canadian 'may have been eaten' by piranha-like fish," says Findlay.

 

"Or," interjects lackey No. 2, "Perhaps one Canadian may have been eaten by 'flesh-eating' fish."

 

Findlay muses to himself: "I can live with 'flesh-eating.' "

[Analogman]

HOUSTON - The shooter in an apparent murder-suicide at the Johnson Space Center had received a poor job review and feared being fired, police said Saturday.

 

William Phillips, 60, smuggled a snub-nosed revolver into the space center Friday, shot David Beverly, 62, and barricaded himself with a hostage before shooting himself in a building that houses communications and tracking systems for the space shuttle, officials said.

 

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt said Phillips bought the .38-caliber revolver March 18, two days after receiving an e-mail citing deficiencies in his job performance and saying that he was going to be reviewed.

 

A copy of the e-mail was found in Phillips' lunch bag on the day of the shootings, police Lt. Larry Baimbridge said.

 

On Friday, Phillips had lunch with Beverly and another man, police said. Then, early that afternoon, Phillips entered Beverly's office with the gun in his hand and said "You're the one who's going to get me fired," Baimbridge said.

 

After Beverly talked with Phillips for several minutes, Phillips shot him twice. He then returned and shot Beverly twice more, officials said.

 

Phillips duct-taped a woman to a chair, holding her for hours, police said. Officers entered the room and freed her after hearing the gunshot that killed Phillips.

 

The woman hostage, identified by

NASA as Fran Crenshaw, a contract worker with MRI Technologies, worked in the same general area.

 

Space agency spokesman John Ira Petty said Saturday that NASA was conducting what he called a continuous review of security procedures. Petty would not discuss specifics, saying the apparent murder-suicide was a police matter.

 

To enter the space center, workers must show an ID badge as they drive past a security guard. The badge allows workers access to designated buildings.

 

Beverly's wife, Linda, said her husband of 41 years was an electrical parts specialist who felt working at NASA was his calling.

 

"His intellect and his knowledge, David really felt he was contributor," she said.

 

Phillips, an employee of Jacobs Engineering of Pasadena, Calif., had worked for NASA for 12 to 13 years. He was unmarried, had no children and apparently lived alone.

 

During the confrontation, NASA employees in the building were evacuated and others were ordered to remain in their offices for several hours. Roads within the 1,600-acre space center campus were blocked off, and a nearby middle school kept its teachers and students inside as classes ended. Doors to Mission Control were locked as standard procedure.

 

(This version CORRECTS other references to Phillips, instead of Williams.

 

 

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer 31 minutes ago

 

NEW YORK - Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nation's collective memory in a word or two: Luby's. Jonesboro. Columbine.

 

And now, Virginia Tech.

 

Since Aug. 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a 27-story tower on the University of Texas campus and started picking people off, at least 100 Americans have gone on shooting sprees.

 

And all through those years, the same questions have been asked: What is it about modern-day America that provokes such random violence? Is it the decline of traditional morals? The depiction of violence in entertainment? The ready availability of lethal firepower?

 

Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox blames guns, at least in part. He notes that seven of the eight deadliest mass public shootings have occurred in the past 25 years.

 

"I know that there were high-powered guns before," he said. "But this weaponry is just so much more pervasive than it was."

 

Australia had a spate of mass public shooting in the 1980s and '90s, culminating in 1996, when Martin Bryant opened fire at the Port Arthur Historical Site in Tasmania with an AR-15 assault rifle, killing 35 people.

 

Within two weeks the government had enacted strict gun control laws that included a ban on semiautomatic rifles. There has not been a mass shooting in Australia since.

 

Yet Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota State Department of Corrections, said the availability of guns was not a factor in his exhaustive statistical study of mass murder during the 20th century.

 

Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and '50s.

 

In fact, Duwe found that mass murder was just as common during the 1920s and early 1930s as it is today. The difference is that then, mass murderers tended to be failed farmers who killed their families because they could no longer provide for them, then killed themselves. Their crimes embodied the despair and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the sense that they and their families would be better off in the hereafter than in the here and now.

 

On Dec. 29, 1929, a 56-year-old tenant farmer from Vernon, Texas, named J.H. Haggard shot his five children, aged 6 to 18, in their beds as they slept. Then he killed himself. He left a note that said only, "All died. I had ruther be ded. Look in zellar."

 

Despondent men still kill their families today. But public shooters like Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho are different. They are angrier and tend to blame society for their failures, sometimes singling out members of particular ethnic or socio-economic groups.

 

"It's society's fault ... Society disgusts me," Kimveer Gill wrote in his blog the day before he shot six people to death and injured 19 in Montreal last year.

 

In the videos and essays he left behind, Cho ranted about privileged students and their debauched behavior.

 

He also mentioned the Columbine killings, referring to Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris as "martyrs." Imitation undoubtedly plays a role in mass shootings as well, said Daniel A. Cohen, a historian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

 

"Certain types of crimes gain cultural resonance in certain periods," Cohen said.

 

So many post office employees gunned down their co-workers during the 1980s and early '90s that they spawned a neologism. To "go postal," according to the Webster's New World College Dictionary, is "to become deranged or go berserk."

 

The most recent postal shooting was in January 2006 when Jennifer San Marco, a former employee who had been fired a few years earlier because of her worsening mental state, walked into a letter sorting facility in Goleta, Calif., and killed six people with a handgun.

 

Criminologist Fox speculates that the increasing popularity of workplace killings, and public shootings generally, may be partly due to decreasing economic security and increasing inequality. America increasingly rewards its winners with a disproportionate share of wealth and adoration, while treating its losers to a heaping helping of public shame.

 

"We ridicule them. We vote them off the island. We laugh at them on `American Idol,'" Fox said.

 

But there has also been an erosion of community in America over the past half-century, and many scholars believe it has contributed to the rise in mass shootings.

 

"One would think that there's some new component to alienation or isolation," said Jeffrey S. Adler, a professor of history and criminology at the University of Florida.

 

People used to live in closer proximity to their families and be more involved with civic and religious institutions. They were less likely to move from one part of the country to another, finding themselves strangers in an unfamiliar environment.

 

Even so, the small-town America of yesteryear wasn't completely immune. On March 6, 1915, businessman Monroe Phillips, who had lived in Brunswick, Ga., for 12 years, killed six people and wounded 32 before being shot dead by a local attorney. Phillips' weapon: an automatic shotgun.

 

Remarkably, violence in today's media seems to have little to do with mass public shootings. Only a handful of them have ever cited violent video games or movies as inspiration for their crimes. Often they are so isolated and socially awkward that they are indifferent to popular culture.

 

Ultimately, it is impossible to attribute the rise in mass shootings to any single cause. The crimes only account for a tiny fraction of homicides.

 

And a significant fraction of those who commit them, including Cho, either kill themselves or are killed by police before they can be questioned by investigators

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

Budd Dwyer

 

Filter's song was based on that incident:

 

I wish I would've met you

now it's a little late.

what you could've taught me

I could've saved some face

they think that your early ending

was all wrong

for the most part they're right

but look how they all got strong

that's why I say hey man, nice shot

what a good shot man.

a man

has gun

hey man

have fun

nice shot

now that the smoke's gone

and the air is all clear

those who were right there

got a new kind of fear

you'd fight and you were right

but they were just to strong

they'd stick it in your face

and let you smell what they consider wrong.

that's why I say hey man nice, nice shot

what a good shot man.

a man

has gun

hey man

have fun

nice shot,

I wish I would've met you

I wish I would've met you

I'd say

nice shot.

[aricandover]

their first album was good

[Analogman]

things i learned on the internet about the virginia tech massacre

 

It happened because we don

[Spawn's dad]

any way you can spin this into an argument for the flac format?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it would certainly be a better world without agendas.

[Analogman]

I got that from a blog I read.

[Spawn's dad]

either way. I think we both agree 'those people' are assholes...and that a flac argument parody would provide some welcome levity to the never ending regurgitation of personal agendas in the wake of tragedies. Or not.... substitute me for we, perhaps

 

It happened because we don

[Analogman]

another view

[quarter23cd]

another view

Wow, Analogman, you were right--Marilyn Manson did finally show up in all of this. (first I'd heard of it, tho I've admittedly been ignoring much of the coverage of this)