Earlier this year, I wrote some quickly-formulated thoughts in response to the Virigian Tech shootings, which also referenced earlier thoughts on an Amish school shooting/tragedy and some root causes relative to people not getting the help they need. In part:
- I attempted to take a stab at exploring the issues surrounding something like this once before, but it brings no resolution any closer to me.
- I'm going to fumble/punt here, so please bear with me... I understand the media has a duty to inform the public, and that this is the hugest story of the year by far. But, at what point does the media need to just back the fuck up? Whether they mean to or not, their need to get ratings and eyes glues to TV sets involuntarily adds a degree of celebrity to the people who commit these acts (bear with me, here; I use the term "celebrity" in the most macabre sense of the word). I think back to the movie "The Frighteners" where Jake Busey's character carved numbers into the foreheads of his victims because he was counting... and trying to outdo the serial killers before him. I don't like the need to label things like this the "Virginia Tech Massacre" or the "worst" school shooting in history (to me, this implies that we can assign a degree of evil or "badness" to something that really can't/shouldn't be quantified).
- To carry this a little further and dredge up something again from above, if this country doesn't wake the fuck up and take a good hard look at itself, this IS going to happen again. Whether we like it or not, there are bad people out there. I don't like giving them inadvertant goals or targets to strive for.
I re-read those thoughts, and then I read about the Omaha mall shooter being emotionally damaged throughout a portion of his life, and then telling his landlord moments before killing eight people and wounding five more that it would make him famous:
"He basically said how sorry he was for everything," Maruca Kovac said of the note. "He didn't want to be a burden to people and that he was a piece of shit all of his life and that now he'd be famous."
It turns my stomach. It makes me angry. But, most of all, it breaks my heart. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.
