the price we pay for 2nd Amendment “freedoms”

Posted by: slothrop | Apr 17 2007 14:57 utc | 3

@Unca (#4)
“I am not amused that this event has eclipsed the Gonzalez testimony today or the upcoming Rice hearings set for this week among other issues…”
Neither amusement nor surprise would be appropriate feelings here. Give them mad props for jumping on a more titillating distraction than a shark attack or celebrity trial this time. I guess one leads with the atrocity one has, not the atrocity one wants…

Posted by: Monolycus | Apr 17 2007 15:09 utc | 5

There you are, in school (work, on the street, the grocery, at the beach, whatever) and someone pulls a gun and starts shooting. What do you do?
You pull your gun, of course, shoot the guy and you’re a HERO! Yay!
Second scenario: There you are when you hear gunshots. You pull your gun and turn to look for a target. Wait! There are two guys with guns and they seem to be shooting at each other! Whom do you shoot?
Third scenario: You turn, gun in hand, looking for a target and there are five people, men, women, black, white, hispanic, all shooting at or towards each other. It’s a fire fight! Whom do you shoot?
Fourth scenario: Some other guy is drawing a bead on some guy with a gun and that guy happens to be YOU because he doesn’t know who the bad guy is either. Who gets shot?
one gun owner’s perspective.

Posted by: conchita | Apr 17 2007 16:16 utc | 7

Interesting to go from “distractions” to “heroes”. I’m with Bertolt Brecht on this one… “Unhappy the land in need of heroes.” Don’t believe in ’em, myself. The “hero” is the person who does his or her job and doesn’t make anyone have to do anything “heroic”.

Posted by: Monolycus | Apr 17 2007 16:31 utc | 9

The “hero” is the person who does his or her job and doesn’t make anyone have to do anything “heroic”.
good one monolycus

Posted by: annie | Apr 17 2007 17:10 utc | 11

Thanks for the Lennon link. Good one.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Apr 17 2007 21:28 utc | 13

it is being reported that cho seung-hu had troubled and troubling history. some thoughts and links here:

Cho had shown recent signs of violent, aberrant behavior, according to an investigative source, including setting a fire in a dorm room and allegedly stalking some women. A note believed to have been written by Cho was found in his dorm room that railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus.
Cho was an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service, the Associated Press reported.

Posted by: conchita | Apr 17 2007 21:47 utc | 15

Conchita’s link is here.

Posted by: Jake | Apr 17 2007 23:17 utc | 17

The mayor of Nagasaki was shot and killed today. Owning a gun in that country is a big no-no. link

Posted by: Jake | Apr 18 2007 0:02 utc | 19

I cannot believe these anti-Ciceronian rants!
Cicero was a very “serious” person.
The Republic must have civilitas.

Posted by: Ms.M. | Apr 18 2007 0:27 utc | 21

How do you keep getting the Moon url to preface your link? *laughing*
Here is your TalkLeft link: Talkleft

Posted by: Jake | Apr 18 2007 0:42 utc | 23

I think the president summed everything up today;
“they (the victims) were just in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
Everything else is just the same MSM broken record “debates”on guns, personal histories of both the shooter and the victims, and meticulous timeline references. Otherwise everything will go on as before until the next time, which is not far off considering there have been 16 other school shootings in the past 8 months. Just a particularly bad car wreck, in an endless parade of car wrecks. It’s not that something couldn’t be done to remedy such things, its that nothing will be done — the guarantee of which lies in the presidents statement.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 18 2007 1:21 utc | 25

I have to say that I noticed a distinct upsurge in shooting sprees even before yesterday’s. The obvious thing, at least to me, missing from the media is an argument for more mental health services. As the housing market crashes and the economy tanks, this scene will probably be happening every other day. For the most part, the US is a society of loners.

Posted by: biklett | Apr 18 2007 2:27 utc | 27

Uncle Alert – was hoping nose finely adapted to smelling rot at great distances would be attuned to Va. Did you see pic from sky on whatreallyhappened showing them arresting some guy? I’ve been really sceptical ‘cuz they wouldn’t release guy’s name, plus that pic, plus the 2 hr. gap – things weren’t adding up too well. I was hoping you’d monitor things, so I wouldn’t have to this time around.

Posted by: jj | Apr 18 2007 2:45 utc | 29

jj,
My daughter is graduating next month and thankfully her debt is less than 20k. It is fixed, but many have penalties for paying off a loan early. There is a big case starting in NY against top banks colluding with universities about student loans.

Posted by: biklett | Apr 18 2007 3:12 utc | 31

@jj (#28)
“Speaking of which do any Barflies know if these students loans are fixed rate or adjustable?”
My principal sum at graduation was $72,000 (seven years on and I have it down now to $63,000), and the interest rate is fixed. I believe that the fixed/adjustable interest rate question boils down to the discretion of the lender, although I am fairly certain that consolidations with federal lenders will always offer a fixed rate.
Toss another one on the “maybe” pile from me.

Posted by: Monolycus | Apr 18 2007 4:06 utc | 33

Like some obscene Santa handing out wrapped candy, death was distributed casually, indiscrimanately, in a total mask of silence interrupted only by the cough of his guns.
Brace yourself: once again, we are going to be subjected to a chorus of hand wringing well salted with hypocrisy from political and religious leaders.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Apr 18 2007 4:32 utc | 35

I said it was early. There is “indescribable shock” in Seoul, apparently… and the response has been to point out that Cho Seung Hu is only 99.9998% Korean. Apparently, he had a Mongolian great, great grandmother or something, so this is no reflection on Koreans. Genuine sympathy (no matter how smugly it might have been expressed) has given way in the past 24 hours to visible embarrassment when the topic is broached. We’ll see how this plays itself out.
All I can say is that I am SO glad the shooter wasn’t Muslim, although don’t let that stand in anyone’s way if they’d like to let slip with some extra surveillance, deportation and ghettoization. Never let an individual’s subjective, tortured experiences stand in the way of a good, generalized xenophobia.

Posted by: Monolycus | Apr 18 2007 5:57 utc | 37

I asked a coworker in Student Services what one could do when a student was a walking time bomb, as this one obviously was. She said nothing, unless there were ‘threats’. I think that there was plenty of time to expel this student from the college; he reportedly sttalked women on campus, ‘took inappropriate pictures’, and wrote threatening papers about specific faculty members. No one in his writing class dared criticize his violent, psychotic ‘plays’ and they all seem to have been afraid of him! What does it take?
And they reportedly caught an attempted copycat in OUR dorms yesterday. The college was bright enough to immediately expel the student.

Posted by: hopping madbunny | Apr 18 2007 9:49 utc | 39

All I can say is that I am SO glad the shooter wasn’t Muslim
What have facts got to do with anything?
Via Kurt Nimmo

Ismail Ax “is a well known phrase in the Muslim world. The Muslims believe that the [Old Testament] is wrong in saying that Abraham was supposed to kill Isaac with a knife, rather they believe he was supposed to kill Ishmael (Ismail) with an Axe. They also believe that Abraham was supposed to go out and attack idols with an axe, and some also attribute the phrase to meaning that Ishmael was supposed to kill Isaac, the father of all Western culture, with an axe… Cho was a South Korean immigrant to the US, but it seems undeniable that his killing spree, at least in part, was motivated by some sort of belief in Islam.”

Posted by: DM | Apr 18 2007 10:12 utc | 41

The cause is not guns
True, but as a tool they have one purpose – GBH or better – and being able to pick one or six up, like bread & milk, on the way home from a rough day at the office certainly can’t help
I find the argument that the only thing protecting me from the criminal element or even anarchy (how would we tell the difference?) is the uncertainty of gun ownership somewhat specious

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 18 2007 12:16 utc | 43

He sent a message, photos, a DVD to NBC. Broadcasters are actually airing the DVD!
The pornography of violence!@!

Posted by: small coke | Apr 18 2007 23:04 utc | 45

Student Arrested Over Va. Tech Remarks

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) – A University of Colorado student was arrested after making comments that classmates deemed sympathetic toward the gunman blamed for killing 32 students and himself at Virginia Tech, authorities said.
During a class discussion of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech, the student “made comments about understanding how someone could kill 32 people,” university police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said.

it seems empathy is illegal in Colorado. or are they just being prudent? at any rate it does appear that politically incorrect discussion is not allowed at the University of Colorado.

Posted by: dan of steele | Apr 19 2007 7:58 utc | 47

A 2001 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study found that in homicides among intimate partners, women are murdered more with guns than with all other means COMBINED.

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 19 2007 11:00 utc | 49

I’m just glad Cho shot himself so we don’t have to maintain his murderous ass in jail for the next 20 years.

Posted by: El taco | Apr 19 2007 13:22 utc | 51

A Federal database of every medicine you’re ever taken?
I read this the other day and couldn’t believe me eyes. Americablog hits it on this one.
Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 19 2007 14:48 utc | 53

Our culture is so sick we can’t recognize a sociopathic time bomb and do something before it’s too late catlady wrote.
The problem is that when in a rich individualistic society, group consensus breaks down and reliance on higher authority is appealed to – The Gvmt., laws, the police, the courts, the lure of damages as a return for insult, endless procedures financed by group members, interested parties, etc. a stalemate ensues.
I don’t know about the VT killer, but certainly in the US individual rights are protected – one can walk about dressed as a ghost, exercise free speech, be sexually blatant, claim rights to indulge in many kinds of deviant behavior. Have a gun. Though not at VT, which had a no-gun policy on its campus, no use whatsoever of course. Creepy poetry? Calls for hate? Free speech. Guns and all? The right to defend oneself. Weird behavior? Sure. It is all allowed.
The onus of detecting, regulating, repressing anti-social behaviors is thrown to ‘the law’ (the police, private security, the courts and the prison system) – a regulatory and repressive mechanism. The ‘law’ cannot deal properly with smoking pot, picking ones nose, writing violent or nihilist poetry or songs, being insulting to Jews of blacks, walking naked in the streets, insulting teachers, running a numbers lottery, etc.
(Note for ex., that the Taliban’s number one selling point is to do exactly all that.)
It would take a law book which was a two million pages in length, and attributing about 3 or 10 % of GDP. (At present, the US spends just above, I think, 1% or 1.5% of GDP on law cases. Japan is second.)
The police cannot regulate society; and Bush’s Patriot Act is just another, more repressive, move in that direction.
So in VT a killer appear. The school spends much money on ‘security’ (all of it probably useless and misguided, pork also for donators or pols..), polices, which bothers everyone with ridiculous stuff , etc. but the system as a whole cannot either detect, or deal with, or even why not, care for, a ‘deviant.’
That, ppl feel, or know, it up to ‘the law’ or ‘security’. They give up responsibility to higher authority, smugly secure in their inaction, knowing they will be ‘covered’ and could not have done different or better.

Posted by: Noirette | Apr 19 2007 18:09 utc | 55

From the student who posted Cho’s plays at the link above:

While I was hesitant at first to release these plays (because I didn’t know if there are laws against it), I had to put myself in the shoes of the average person researching this situation. I’d want to know everything I could about the killer to figure out what could drive a person to do something like this and hopefully prevent it in the future. Also, I hope this might help people start caring about others more no matter how weird they might seem, because if this was some kind of cry for attention, then he should have gotten it a long time ago.

Posted by: catlady | Apr 20 2007 0:23 utc | 57

“Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Iran”

It is impossible to run for president without repeating every lying utterance of the Israel lobby. It is Israel that has the bomb, not Iran.
Hillary and Obama will say nothing about this disgraceful, ugly display. McCain will get a pass from them and from the media when in fact he is no better than the Virginia Tech gunman. Cho came by his murderous rage through pure insanity. McCain would kill on an even larger scale and make it all sound good and reasonable.
Once again we see the awful hypocrisy that is killing this nation. We recoil when individuals kill but sing songs to encourage government killing, which is always the most lethal. No terrorist group in history has ever killed on the scale of a government.
The fundies are right. The end is near.

Noirette:

The problem is that when in a rich individualistic society, group consensus breaks down and reliance on higher authority is appealed to…

The problem is that group consensus is forged, in all senses of the word, by “higher” authority.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Apr 20 2007 1:23 utc | 59

Cho seems to have had psychological problems since early childhood. This Guardian article shows that his family knew he had problems. But they were so poor, I wonder if they ever sought medical care for him.
Cho’s family worked hard in the US. His father worked in a laundry, to fund his children’s education. His mother, a part-time waitress, attended the Korean church in Centreville, where she implored the pastor to help her son. When Cho started at Virginia Tech, his mother took his dormitory mates to one side to explain his character and asked them to help. “She was worried that he spent all his time in his room, lost in a world of video games,” the paper quoted the pastor as saying. “[Cho] came to bible studies for a couple of years, but rarely spoke and never got along with the other youths.”
My initial thought was that he had had a psychotic break, either due to depression or schizophrenia that had gone untreated. I wonder if his parents had medical insurance? People routinely avoid seeking care for medical issues because they cannot afford treatment. Esp. the working poor. His mother, it seems, tried to get someone to help him. If the pastor thought bible studies would be able to solve some sort of biochemical issues, then that’s another way he did not find adults who could provide proper care.
People who have psychotic depression, just like with those with schizophrenia, may hear voices and have violent thoughts — and with both of these illnesses people’s thinking is distorted to some degree or another — obviously in his case, the distortion was so bad that he killed people for some grievance that played out in his mind. At least that’s my take on him.
While SSRIs get attacked regularly, they or mood stabilizers have saved lives, far more lives than they’ve taken from my knowledge of people who have needed and used them. I would be more concerned if my loved one was not getting help for a mental illness with medication, whether temporary or long term, and therapy, along with other ways to deal with such problems.
If someone is a diabetic, people don’t expect them to simply “get over it” — they use insulin and exercise and life changes to deal with a long-term illness. Why should anyone expect that people with mental illnesses should not use medication that does help people? Yes, the inability to have records of long-term studies is a problem that may be a big deal in the future. This is often the case with medications and sometimes the result is bad and sometimes it’s not. Some people have blamed SSRIs for suicide. But no causality has been established. In a moment when people are a danger to themselves, if they can get past that moment of suicidal (or homocidal, in Cho’s case) “infatuation” then that’s a good thing…because the thoughts that create that infatuation are part of the illness, whether someone takes medication or not.
My take on this comes from my experience with a family member who was suicidal before anti-depressants, not after — and I always wonder, when someone blames SSRIs for a suicide, if the ideation wasn’t there already.
Nevertheless, the sad, sad thing to me is that his parents seem to have been incapable, for whatever reason, of getting needed medical care for Cho when he was younger. When he came of legal age, they could no longer make such a decision. Apparently the legal system did try to deal with the problems that no one else could or would address. But the judge didn’t take the big step and commit him. I wonder why?
He shouldn’t have been able to buy weapons either, but he was, in fact, able to buy two.
A judge’s ruling on Cho Seung-Hui’s mental health should have barred him from purchasing the handguns he used in the Virginia Tech massacre, according to federal regulations. But it was unclear Thursday whether anybody had an obligation to inform federal authorities about Cho’s mental status because of loopholes in the law that governs background checks.
Cho purchased two handguns in February and March, and was subject to federal and state background checks both times. The checks turned up no problems, despite a judge’s ruling in December 2005 that Cho “presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.”
So there are so many places along the way that Cho did not get the help he needed… it’s hard for most of us to imagine someone would become a mass murderer. It is an ultimate admission of a shattered mind to expect this can happen, and few want to assign this identity to another person… it’s “unamerican” to admit “defeat.”
But there were signs and times along the way when things could have changed and this moment could have been avoided.
And here’s another guy who may be psychotic — tho in this case his seems to be possible methamphetamine psychosis.
He has a history of spousal abuse, it seems.

Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 20 2007 5:59 utc | 61

A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.
“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”
Violence is commonly resorted to as the antidote to the disturbing emotions raised by the widespread hostility toward women in our society and the pathological fear of so many men that they aren’t quite tough enough, masculine enough – in short, that they might have homosexual tendencies.
In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity, “it is tremendously tempting,” said Dr. Gilligan, “to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”

I can’t think of a female mass murderer, can you?
In Thailand someone with a “hot heart”, a hot head in the West, is thought to be a fool. I’ve seen Americans or Australians here shouting at Thais for some real or imagined “reason”. The Thais don’t get mad. They walk away. The superiority of Thais and Thai culture over farangs and farang culture once more demonstrated to them.
Surely there are plenty of violent Thais. The paper had a story last week of a karaoke girl who refused the advances of a drunken threesome, one a cop. She rode away on her motor bike and the cop took off in hot pursuit. He hacked off her right arm above the elbow when he caught up to her. She drove home with her left hand.
But in general the hot head is looked upon as a fool. Violence as the fruit of foolishness. The newspapers and TV couldn’t sell the vicious cop as some kind of porn star here, as the US media would have. As the US media are selling Cho.
How can we install a respect for the quiet strength of compassion as a sex symbol? Women are in charge of defining what’s sexy in men, aren’t they?
Right after we dethrone the violent male let’s draw back the curtain on the rich. Being rich is more often a sign of moral degeneracy than of sainthood. Yet rich people are looked “up” to everywhere.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Apr 20 2007 8:43 utc | 63

“Can we learn to speak up with love and authority when we see and hear clues that scream: danger?”
Done that and the people in question are still drinking themselves to death

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 20 2007 9:27 utc | 65

If you, like me, didn’t know who Aileen Wuornos was :
Aileen Wuornos

After her first death sentence, Wuornos often said she wanted “it all to be over.” In 2001 she began fighting to be executed. She petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for the right to fire her legal counsel and stop all appeals, saying “I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I’d do it again, too. There’s no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I’d kill again. I have hate crawling through my system…. I am so sick of hearing this ‘she’s crazy’ stuff. I’ve been evaluated so many times. I’m competent, sane, and I’m trying to tell the truth. I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.”. Some argued that she was in no state for them to honor such a request.

Jeb Bush honored her request.
She was a serial killer, not one of these flameout mass murderers.
She was sold by the American media as a porn star, as you point out :

Within weeks of her arrest, Wuornos had engaged agents to sell the rights to her story as well as three of the law enforcement agents who were tracking her down. Inaccurately touted as “the first female serial killer,” Wuornos’ life has been documented in numerous books and portrayed in several films and television shows.
* Books: Lethal Intent (2002), ISBN 0-7860-1518-7, by Sue Russell
* Documentaries: Nick Broomfield directed two documentaries: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992), and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). Broomfield conducted the last media interview with Wuornos on the day before her execution.
* Movies: The 2003 movie Monster, starring Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci, tells Wuornos’ story from the moment she met Selby Wall (based on Wuornos’ lover and four-year companion, Tyria Moore) until her first conviction for murder. For her performance as Wuornos, Theron received the Academy Award for Best Actress. This award was given on what would have been Wuornos’ 48th birthday, although this was not mentioned in Theron’s acceptance speech. Theron donned prosthetic teeth, wore spray-on freckles and gained thirty pounds to play Wuornos.
* Television: 1992 made-for-television movie Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, starring Jean Smart as Wuornos, was first broadcast in 1992. Wuornos has also been featured on 60 Minutes, A&E, and Court TV.
* Music: Diamanda Galás, who calls Wuornos “a huge hero”[6], dedicated to her the song Iron Lady on the album Malediction and Prayer. In 2006, Bitch released the sympathetic song Aileen Wuornos on the album Make This/Break This. Also, Portland punk band Harum Scarum sampled a quote from Wuornos’ documentary preceding the song “Systematic Death” on their debut record Mental Health (Tribal War Records). The album jacket contains articles and editorials about Wuornos.
* New York-based metalcore band It Dies Today’s song “Sixth Of June” was based on Wuornos’ last words. The song can be heard on their album called “Sirens.”
* Detroit rapper Obie Trice, referenced Wuornos in his song “Wake Up” from his sophomore album Second Round’s on Me, with the line “They say he was a monster from birth, so/ Fuck it, I’ll just Aileen Wuornos them hoes.”

I still maintain that it’s predominantly men who are more likely to commit “suicide by cop”, killing as many wholly innocent people as possible as they do so.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Apr 20 2007 10:08 utc | 67

@John Francis Lee,
The combination of gender and sexuality has always seemed to be the driving force behind the rampage killers. I suspect serial killers as well, though obviously in a different way. I haven’t paid as much attention to them, whereas being in suburban Denver with a sister in high school when Columbine occurred has made me very interested in rampage killers. The concept of “suicide-by-cop” is also a very important distinction, I think. There’s a reason my first post in this thread called the rampage killing “American suicide bombers.” They don’t want to escape, the want to go out in as big a blaze as possible.
@anna missed,
I understand that in a large amount of cases, SSRIs can prove to be extremely helpful to people who often need them. However, I understand there’s a growing body of evidence which shows that suicide rates spike when people stop taking them. I don’t want to get into a huge debate about it because I don’t know if that’s what happened to Cho. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Posted by: Rowan | Apr 20 2007 14:40 utc | 69

JFL – yes, she didn’t kill them all at once to go out in a blaze of glory like this latest fella felt he deserved. It probably is a macho thing…

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 20 2007 19:35 utc | 71

@Rowan, #60:
My first thought, on reading the plays, was that Cho had been molested anally–possibly as a very young child. His manifesto has other clues suggesting the same, and there was a reference somewhere to his parents worrying early on about him, that he had language/communication problems. I would think that sexual abuse would be even harder to deal with if one was raised in an Asian culture where adults/elders are much more respected than in US. Coming into adolescence in the US on top of a troubled Asian childhood can’t help much. I haven’t seen any other speculation along these lines; am I making up shit out of my own ignorance?

Posted by: catlady | Apr 21 2007 5:03 utc | 73

jfl, not to be disagreeable but have you ever heard of lizzy borden? when i was a child my aunts would recite – “lizzy borden had an axe, gave her mother twenty wacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” i can’t swear on my memory, nor do i remember exactly who lizzy borden was, but i suspect she was either irish or from new england, or possibly a legend.

Posted by: conchita | Apr 21 2007 5:29 utc | 75

despite what Lizzie’s parents may have weighed, technically they’re not a large enough mass

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 21 2007 8:43 utc | 77

$cam :
These sound like the same set of people who can never take anything at face value. No explanation but the most abstruse is acceptable. These folks are given to The Illuminati or the Masons as the power “behind” reality.
I can understand the media whores keeping stories alive using such tactics.
I can understand religious people seeking for the “signs” leading to the “privileged” knowledge of the “secrets” of the universe.
But most of us are not media whores, or pilgrims seeking out the esoteric knowledge that will tell them who their masters “truly” are. Most of us are trying to master our fate.
We have here a sick man acting out. We have many people nearly as or as sick who don’t act out in this gruesome fashion. The world seems increasingly filled with them, so well ordered it is.
The story is not the sick person. The story is how was this sick person so easily able to kill so many to satisfy his demented ego.
“They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose.”
And the American pornotainment industry falls all over itself to provide one.
It’s not about censorship. It’s about editing.
Borges told the story of the map of the earth at the scale of one to one. Absurd. Thank you for everything Jose Luis Borges. You are the antidote to Cho what’s his name.
Reporting the news is necessarily the act of an editor. You cannot report everything, or there would only be room for the reporting and not for the news. They’ve taken the room the news ought to occupy and filled it with “reporting”.
The American pornotainment industry had to drop something else in order to lavish the coverage, the prurient coverage, on Cho. Heroin pushers only sell the people “what they want” too, you know?
They dropped coverage of… I don’t even know. I don’t see the American media. I’m reading this whole thing by braille.
My guess is there was no coverage of John McCain’s “updated” rendition of Ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-bra Ann”. Am I right? Or minimal coverage. Certainly no delving into “what it all means”, certainly not the projection of meaning they’ve surely given to Cho. Even if they covered that there was little coverage of the several hundred Iraqis killed the same day, the same way, in Iraq. I’ll bet.
The people in VA are dead. There is no bringing them back. The people in Iraq are dead, too. Forever. But there are more people going to die tomorrow in Iraq, and the day after. Guaranteed. This can be prevented. But it is not being prevented. That is news.
At one time my father took The Mirror, The World Telegram and Sun, The New York Times, The Daily News, The Herald Tribune, The Post, The Journal American… all published everyday in NY alone. There were serious papers among them and some of the papers that are total trash today yet did serious reporting in those days, selecting their stories for their segment of the audience.
Not it’s one sleaze fits all.
Race to the bottom describes more than globalization.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Apr 21 2007 13:49 utc | 79

Uncle- the two articles by Ak are the same. This article is about the issue of a sort of “poisoning” from the drugs in question that are only about the physical symptoms of the patient (clonic-tonic seizures, for example) and not about aggression because of SSRIs.
I wonder if Ak would consider The Inquisition as a time of increased violence in a society? Monolycus’ description of the treatment of children is my idea of a violent society toward children. What about Saudi Arabia, with its abuse of females for things like showing an arm while driving? That’s ultra-violence to me. How long has that been going on? Are crime statistics in SA (if they were trackable) corelated to the violence perpetrated on women?
The final article from the alternative medical supply business (which may have just as much stake in maligning SSRIs as big pharm would have in promoting them) again does not take into account this issue of “which came first” — the ideations or the actions. As noted above, in studies that were better because of controls, SSRIs, in themselves, do not seem to be the entire issue (a study with a control, obviously, looks at the effect of the medication across a population, not just the mentally ill.)
I wonder how many people take or have taken SSRIs, compared to those who have committed violent and criminal acts? I would imagine, looking at the percentages, it would be difficult to assign blame to medication alone. Otherwise, why are there so few who express such behavior, even if mentally ill?
I would also be interested to know if meds showed up in Cho’s system, and if so, I would like to know who was monitoring his mental health and his medications, which is the correct practice for someone who is considered so mentally ill (as far back as 2005) that he is a threat to his own safety.
Monolycus- thanks for sharing about the Korean culture. Someone I spoke with yesterday said that in Cho’s culture, no one would take their child for treatment of a mental illness because of the social stigma. She said it was more honorable to commit suicide.
This same person, who was apparently old enough to remember, said that after Marilyn Monroe committed suicide a 1000 or so women in the U.S. did or tried the same because of their identification with her. I remember from lit class, also, that when Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther was published, it created a social panic because of young couples who killed themselves. SSRIs were not in use or known of at either of these times, btw.
So, it’s not new for people to identify with someone who commits a violent or self-destructive act. With weapons with the capacity to fire lots of bullets, such acts can create much more destruction now. With mass media, these acts are emphasized over and over again and the perpetrators become infamous.

Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 21 2007 15:39 utc | 81

“if it needs to be done, it’s expected to be handled personally and quietly”
yes, lock oneself in a bedroom; take the safety off a fan; go to sleep and never wake up… 😉

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 23 2007 12:29 utc | 83

via Think Progress:

In a new video, the the right-wing American Family Association attributes the tragedy at Virginia Tech to: a lack of prayer in school, a lack of the Bible in school, a lack of spanking kids, a lack of physical punishment in school, abortion, condoms, Bill Clinton, internet pornography, free speech, the entertainment industry, “satanic” music, and liberal culture in general.

video

Posted by: b | Apr 23 2007 17:48 utc | 85

small coke- my oldest son has asperger’s syndrome and there is no “cure” because it is not a disease. it is a difference in brain wiring, not chemicals per se, from what I understand. asperger’s can sometimes cause depression and anxiety because of the difficulty in social situations. ppl with asperger’s tend to be physically clumsy…this has an “official” name something about sensing one’s physical space.
who knows if he had aspergers. if he did, I doubt it could be considered the cause of his illness. my own son, btw, talks too much. it’s called perseveration, and is common for people with aspergers. they may be late to talk, but once they do…. ppl with aspergers often have above avg. IQs and tend to focus on one sort of activity. my son can quote baseball statistics, games played, great players going back to pre-Babe Ruth. My son is a buddhist because he believes in total non-violence…asperger’s ppl tend to be spooked by loud or suddent noises.
anyway, one of the defining features of my son’s asperger’s is his naivite…something also common. they don’t “get” sarcasm and don’t employ such language with others.
my son has never taken any medication for asperger’s (or depression or anything else, for that matter, except ear infections) because there is no specific meds for a.s. instead, ppl employ “life skills” behavior therapy to help them recognize facial expressions and learn when to take turns so that someone else can talk.
my son takes great pleasure in life. he laughs alot. he has dreams that he is pursuing. he can’t wait until he can live on his own. But he also has to be taught things by breaking them down into discrete steps…even tho he was a national honor society student.)
my son is just one person…there are as many expressions of a.s. as there are those who have the disability, I suppose. (Tho there is an “aspie” group that says they are not disabled, but simply neurologically diff. They refer to the rest of us as “neurotypicals.”
anyway, one thing I know of relating to meds is the prescribing of SSRIs to bipolar individuals. Depressions and bipolar disorder are two distinct illnesses. SSRIs can provoke a manic episode and even lead to manic psychosis. if Cho were taking medicine, this is one reason ppl have to be monitored. in a depressive phrase, a doctor might not recognize a patient is bipolar. ppl with bipolar disorder, btw, are more likely to commit suicide than depressives.
Ppl with bipolar disorder are also disproportionately represented among the great artists, writers and scholars throught out history, too, btw. sort of like sickle cell traits…sometimes it confers benefits and protects from malaria, sometimes it expresses a fatal anemia.

Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 24 2007 16:10 utc | 87

small coke and fauxreal, i read somewhere that cho was considered autistic as a child. will need to dig to find the reference so cannot vouch for its veracity.
also, have read the discussion about ssri’s with interest but do not have time to comment extensively unfortunately. my thinking is that there are people for whom they are necessary for survival, particularly those who are bipolar, but other seem to take them like aspirin and i wonder about a general tendency in our society to treat illness with a pill rather than look at the underlying causes. i have observed a friend ordering prozac and other medications online – i.e. not prescribed and without medical supervision – and i have observed a friend who requested anti-depressant medication and was prescribed the medication and told by the doctor to come back in 30 days. I was shocked that in both cases there was little to no medical supervision nor accompanying therapy. i see a similar casual approach to taking anti-depressants, etc., across the board in our society, and it appears that the medical establishment condones this, and it seems that educators are also adopting this perspective with increase of recommendations to readily diagnose and treat adhd with medication without considering causality or even the possiblity that it may be normal childhood or adolescent behavior. It doesn’t help that the ads for these drugs paint individuality or simple growing pains as something abnormal and suggest the drugs as a “cure”. Adbusters did an excellent issue on this several years ago if your local library subscribes.

Posted by: conchita | Apr 24 2007 18:46 utc | 89

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