Some Analysis of the Killings at Virginia Tech

April 17th, 2007

As a part of my Homicide Investigation class at George Washington University, my instructor has asked us to write a brief analysis of the killings that occurred at Virginia Tech on Monday. Even though I am only a student and haven't had the experience, statistically speaking, there are many things that are common when this type of crime occurs. I am in no way stating that any of the following is fact, it is just my interpretation of the events as based on my knowledge gained in my Homicide Investigation course.

* * *

It appears that the offender's motivation for the first shooting is domestic. There have been much speculation as to the offender's relationship with the female victim. Some feel that they may have been in a relationship or that Cho had feelings for the female victim. It is possible that his motivation to kill her was caused by Cho's apparent hatred for "spoiled, rich kids." Is it possible that Cho had feelings for the female and was rejected? Thus taking his hatred out on her? Based on the fact that Cho walked across campus (at least half a mile) to Norris Hall to commit his crimes shows he had been planning this. The killings at Norris were not spontaneous at all.

Cho wanted to destroy what symbolized the high class that he felt such disdain for. Since he associated many, if not all, students at Virginia Tech as being in this class, he felt that everyone encountered could potentially be his victims.

This murder seems most likely to be an authority murder. The perceived authority being the higher class. If Cho grew up in a middle or lower income family, then this could explain his problem with the higher class. Northern Virginia can have very large gaps in the income levels among families. Cho probably felt this gap during his time in school in Northern Virginia and this is what probably helped escalate his hatred.

But the question remains of who was his primary target? Was it the first two victims? Or was his primary target someone in Norris Hall? Usually in an authority killing, the killing ends once the primary target is killed. Did Cho find his primary target in Norris Hall, then end his life?

Weapon stockpiling and verbalization of hatred towards a particular authority is also common in this type of murder. It seems that Cho did both of these things by purchasing two semiautomatic handguns and writing disturbing poetry and plays in his creative writing classes.

Cho probably had a history of mental illness, including isolation, paranoid behavior, etc. Cho's post offensive behavior did not seem to change at all. Especially since he shot two people, and calmly went back to his own dorm, then walked across campus to execute another batch of killings. Cho's history of being isolated and calm continues to his post-offensive behavior. This is probably why nothing was suspected of his behavior in between the two shooting incidents.

--

Original Source: fallenposters / Do Not Cross (Blog) <a href="http://fallenposters.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/some-analysis-of-the-killings-at-virginia-tech/">http://fallenposters.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/some-analysis-of-the-killings-at-virginia-tech/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License</a>.

fallenposters / Do Not Cross (Blog)

2007-07-09

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

eng

On the Forbidden Subject of Culture

<p>April 19, 2007

<em>UPDATE:

Thanks for the various thoughtful comments, thoughtful commenters - I&#39;m sure you know who you are.

First off, I do acknowledge that I was a little snarky and "aha!" in the initial reaction to things, and I agree that it just puts people in a bad mood. But, I could have easily erased what I said, and not because I think it was wrong to have the thought, but because it distracted so much from the majority of the stuff I was really trying to say. Yet, I would somehow feel it dishonest to do so, and the reason I write is to organize my thoughts and logic for people to see; I just wish people in general, and not just over the past few days, could read this blog as one man&#39;s thoughts in motion, as opposed my final thoughts on matters. I have strong opinions, but those thoughts wend and weave according to other good opinions.

That said, I also know I write a lot. Loooong posts. Opinionated posts. Wordy posts. And that&#39;s off-putting as well. I know that, but it would take me forever to get this stuff out if I had to condense it down, distill it, make it simpler. And since the vast majority of blogs out there write in short form, I don&#39;t feel like I&#39;m adding to a trend in need of reversal - on the contrary, I wish there were more thoughtful people who tried to think carefully, put in the time to express their opinions fully, and really engage with difficult subjects. So I think that perhaps the blogosphere is better off with a few wordy fools who try to think aloud and in the sense of intellectual full-contact sports.

As for race, I think the media is talking about it pretty minimally, as I assumed they would. And looking at this from primarily an American perspective. I&#39;m inevitably looking at this from a Korean perspective, because it is here in Korea that I sit, live, and work. It&#39;s here that I have worked with a lot of kids who look just like Cho in background, culture, and personality. I thought that I&#39;d be one of the few people talking not about there necessarily having to be some "cultural angle" on this, but that there should be room and though given to the possibility.

If anything, the problem isn&#39;t that the American media is focusing on his race, because it really isn&#39;t, and even if it did, I don&#39;t think it&#39;s bad to talk about possible cultural specifics, if done appropriately. However, the real problem is that the American media should have been talking about:
- why is it that only males are serial killers and mass murderers?
- why are they mostly white?
- when they aren&#39;t, what&#39;s the reason?

Instead of shutting down a conversation about the profiles of these kind of people, we should be opening it up. Were there some factors about extreme Christianity that led to this? Does this have nothing to do with the fact that some of the most outspoken and extreme Christian groups among American youth are of Korean descent? Is this question "wrong?"

I don&#39;t think so, if we are also asking, "Why are serial killers almost exclusively white?" There is a serious racial undertone to ALL such murders, in that the perpetrators are almost always white, as well as the overwhelming presence of gender, in that they are always male?

This is as obvious as the hand in front of my face, yet when I was asking these same questions in Columbine, no one wanted to go there. And nobody did. Instead, we look at Marilyn Manson, video games, and other things that were obviously not determining factors, since I&#39;d engaged in all above activities, but don&#39;t go around killing people. I loved me some NWA, and they were actually TALKING ABOUT going and killing white people. Yet, I didn&#39;t "go get my AK." I guess it WAS a good day.

I&#39;m saying that this whole brouhaha stems from the fact that Americans still have amazing difficulty talking about culture and race, in what is supposed to be the most diverse and multicultural society in the world, where anyone can be a citizen. We&#39;re getting better at it, but we&#39;re still not good at it.

So now, we&#39;re told to believe, before anyone even knows anything, that Cho&#39;s particular pathology could have had nothing to do with any cultural malaise, or that some of the roots of his alienation may not have had to do with being Asian. I&#39;m not saying there necessarily are, but to meet such a question with "this question is irrelevant. culture has nothing to do with this. conversation over" is equally un-productive.

And as for people saying that my ideas can be "co-opted" for the "other side," I just say that this is thinly-vieled intellectual cowardice talking, because I&#39;m not a hillbilly in a pickup truck talking about shooting the next Asian I see because he took daddy&#39;s factory job away. If you think that&#39;s what I&#39;m saying, or you confuse what I&#39;m saying with that, you&#39;re more paranoid than you think you are.

People should be talking more about aspects of masculinity here, because all these killers are MEN. What&#39;s up with that? People should be talking more about whiteness because the vast majority of these people are WHITE. And when they so shockingly and brutally aren&#39;t, we might ask the question "what traits did he share with the Columbine boys?" (which the media is already asking), but we also might look at "what traits might have been different that also got him to the same place of being able to commit mass murder like this?"

And if we&#39;re going to be comparing to Columbine, while never even really having an intelligent about the fact that the politics of whiteness as an identity, masculinity, and feeling of extreme alienation seem to lead to something, if we can agree to talk about all these things with the Columbine boys - IF - then in Cho&#39;s case, we&#39;d have to also talk about the one thing he did NOT share with them and the MAJORITY of the rank of the killers he has so infamously joined, that being his Asianness, Koreanness, or whatever - in any case, his non-whiteness.

That makes the case of the DC snipers ALL the more interesting, all the MORE remarkable. If you were a criminal profiler for the FBI, or a clinial psychologist, or an administrator in charge of schools, I hope these people would find such questions interesting. If someone held an academic conference about it, I&#39;d hope they&#39;d attend, rather than close one&#39;s ears and boycott it.

But that seems like what most people want to do. I don&#39;t fear some imagined backlash against Asian men; sure, there may be a few idiots out there who do something, but overall, it&#39;s probably for any particular Asian male right now to die in a car accident, or of lung cancer. So buckle up and stop smoking - I don&#39;t think anyone has to hide in their houses.

But the disappointing reaction is, "Stop talking about race! He was just some crazy fucker!"

No, he wasn&#39;t. No, all the killers weren&#39;t. There are clear patterns here. Start with the fact of maleness and extreme alienation, along with feelings of victimhood and desire for martyrdom. Then work your way down to identifying any overarching cultural patterns in white or Asian (Korean) socialization patterns, similarities in self-identification, all that stuff.

I&#39;m not a psychologist. But if I were, I&#39;d be licking my lips over this stuff. Has there been no one who&#39;s written a doctoral thesis about "The Role of White Identity, Disaffectation, and Constructions of Masculinity in Serial Murderers"? Maybe that&#39;s a wack topic, and it&#39;s not my field. But seriously - has no one done research on this? Come on? Is this really such a taboo topic, even to a research psychologist?

Anyway, mums the word. All the serial killers were just crazy fuckers. Let&#39;s just leave it at that and act all surprised AGAIN when this happens AGAIN, which it will.

And for all those imagined white guys who are cutting out eyeholes in sheets to go get that Asian male grad student who took that last fluffy donut from the tray in the cafeteria (those BASTARDS! they&#39;re really taking everything!), don&#39;t worry:

The next mass murderer, statistically and historically speaking, will probably be a white guy, anyway.

So what&#39;s everyone worried about? At least the imagined heat will be off Asians, right? Whew! </em>

-------------- ORIGINAL POST --------------

Over the last 24 hours, it&#39;s been suggested that even broaching the issue of possible cultural issues when looking at the case of Cho warrants being labeled "racist." <a href="http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/17/vtech_korea/index.html" target="_blank">Salon.com</a> has linked to a previous post from this site that relays the story that several university administrators in Korea with whom I spoke when Fulbright Korea hosted a tour here expressed concern about the fact that they saw a pattern of Korean students studying in the US having trouble adjusting, and that those students were almost exclusively male. This was several years ago.

Or read this:</p>
<blockquote><em>Although Asian Americans were at relatively lower risk of homicide in the 1970s and 1980s, they have experienced increasingly higher risk since the 1990s. From 1970 to 1993, the homicide rate for Asian Americans in California increased 170%.13 Asian immigrants are also at significantly higher risk of homicide than Asians that were born in the United States. The growing trend of homicide among Asian American communities coupled with the increase of Asian American youth violence thus poses an urgent issue of concern for Asian Americans.</em></blockquote>
<p>Whence these racist, cultural arguments? Another, from the same source:</p>
<blockquote><em>Despite the model minority myth that Asian Americans as a whole are economically and academically successful, delinquency among Asian American youth has actually been on the rise in recent years. In the past 20 years, the number of API youth involved in the juvenile justice system has increased dramatically, while national arrest trends for Black and White youth have decreased. Arrest rates for Southeast Asian youth (Vietnamese, Cambodia , Laotian), are the highest within the overall API population. Studies have shown that peer delinquency is the strongest predictor of adolescent delinquency. Other suggested risk factors for adolescent delinquency among Asian Americans include personal experiences of victimization, acculturative conflict, family conflict, and individualist versus collectivist orientation.</em></blockquote>
<p>More racists? Or how about a report on <a href="http://www.sph.umich.edu/apihealth/community.htm" target="_blank">"Violence Affecting Asian-American and Pacific Islander Communities"</a>, compiled by Masters candidates at the Michigan School of Public Health?

But wait? For me to pose questions that perhaps young Cho Seung-hui could have had "personal experiences of victimization, acculturative conflict, family conflict, and individualist versus collectivist orientation" that maybe, maybe could have played a role in his pathology...

How did I become "racist? for asking the same questions? Here&#39;s what I wrote in <a href="http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/shooter_is_sout.html" target="_blank">the original post</a>, which was fired off in the heat of the moment, upon the initial revelation that the shooter was of Korean descent:</p>
<blockquote><em>A group of American university administrators whom Fulbright hosted nearly 10 years ago, when being a tour of Korean universities, asked the staff, "Why is it that out of all our international students, Korean males have so much trouble?"

To my surprise, all of the university officials cited incident after incident of Korean male graduate students who seemed to have trouble adjusting, often got into fights with other students in the living spaces, and were often the source of trouble in dealing with romantic relationships gone bad or women in general, especially when they involved Korean females dating non-Koreans.</em></blockquote>
<p>In <a href="http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/the_politics_of.html" target="_blank">the longer post</a>, I continued asking questions that were pretty basic and acceptable before two days ago, pointing out that many Asian and Asian American males often face cultural pressures particular to the Asian cultures that they come from, as well as socialization as an Asian male in the greater American context as well.

How dare I say such a thing? Funny how the raison d&#39;être for community organizations such as the <a href="http://www.kyccla.org/about/index.htm" target="_blank">Koreatown Youth & Community Center (KYCC)</a> can talk about:</p>
<blockquote><em>...programs and services...specifically directed towards recently-immigrated, economically-disadvantaged youth and their families who experience coping and adjustment difficulties due to language and cultural barriers.</em></blockquote>
<p>Yet when someone points out that perhaps some of Cho&#39;s pathology had to do with being an Asian male, subject to possible culturally-determined pressures as well as that of being subject to socialization/discrimination <em>as an Asian male</em> - all of which where conversations going on within the Asian American community until just two days ago - this is now out of bounds?

So asking the question <em>before</em> this incident was OK. Asking it after Cho&#39;s bloody rampage is now grounds for arguing that one supports an ideology of racial superiority. That&#39;s especially funny since my mother is Korean and I have younger Korean cousins in college now who&#39;ve been through the educational meat grinder here, and I have been involved in just such community organizations as the ones mentioned above when I lived in the Bay Area.

And the other sad thing about the sudden "off-limits" status of this issue is the disappointing fact that Americans of all "colors" still have such difficulty talking about the overlapping boundaries of race, nation, and culture. Pointing out before this incident that Asian/Asian American males had specific identificational and cultural concerns, especially when one is talking about 1.5 generation Korean Americans (which is how Cho is generally being referred to now) was OK and actively encouraged in multicultural settings, especially since this was expected of anyone who wanted to convey one&#39;s real cultural sensitivity as an professor, teacher, counselor, social worker, or psychologist working with a variety of people from diverse backgrounds.

I have worked with and am familiar with a few community-based organizations when I was back in Oakland, and had many Korean American friends who work in orgs related to specifically "meeting the needs" of Asian American youth, dealing with the issue of domestic violence in the Korean American community, and was familiar with several other non-profit orgs that dealt specifically with problems of reducing participation in gang activity among Southeast Asian youth, issues specific to that community, organizations based in Chinatown, as well as other places around the East Bay.

I have friends who&#39;ve worked deeply within many organizations that held the assumption that "culture matters" and that Asian/Asian American youth had specific needs that should be recognized in the larger community. I know people who stayed up long nights applying for city, state, and federal grants to operate such projects, programs, and organizations that took the relevance of disaporic culture and its effect in Asian kids in the US as a central assumption of their reason to exist.

Now, after this incident, culture not only <em>doesn&#39;t matter</em>, even broaching the topic is grounds for being labeled a "racist," even when one is working well within a set of affective connections to a community for which such issues have been stated concerns <em>for years</em> - nay, decades - before Cho Seung-hui walked into a Virginia Tech classroom and started his rampage of death.

Yes, of course he was an individual, and he is fully responsible for his actions. But Korean culture now stops at the airport? Or with a green card? That&#39;s certainly news to me. I guess I didn&#39;t get the memo. And I guess I should also be expecting my KKK membership card in the mail any day now. Thanks, <a href="http://www.kyccla.org/about/index.htm" target="_blank">Salon</a>, for declaring such talk as mere "instant prejudice."

Funny thing is that I, as well as the university administrators mentioned in my initial reaction, Asian American community organizers, and a whole lot of other people were thinking in these terms for years before this. Now, <a href="http://www.aaja.org/news/aajanews/2007_04_16_01/" target="_blank">some</a> would have us go in the opposite direction:</p>
<blockquote><em>As coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting continues to unfold, AAJA urges all media to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason. There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people.

The effect of mentioning race can be powerfully harmful. It can subject people to unfair treatment based simply on skin color and heritage.</em></blockquote>
<p>I feel that point of view, but much of the popular reaction has been to link mentioning culture or nationality with "racism" itself.

And the many Asian and Asian American commenters who&#39;ve written in, saying that my apparent status as "white" or a "neocon" or a "loser who can&#39;t get women at home" or far worse names.

Yep. There I am. That&#39;s why I live in Korea, why I learned Korean, why I write these incessantly long posts, and why I conduct my research. But when I pull out my Korean-mom-racial-membership card, does that mean I&#39;m a self-hating Korean American? Do I only hate half of myself? Or maybe my Korean "half" hates my black "half" and we are in eternal conflict. I think I have to go beat myself up now.

It&#39;s interesting that the mode of even calling me "racist" relies on racist slurs and categorical assumptions.

My point is that I shouldn&#39;t have to pull out the "my mom&#39;s Korean" as a magical shield in order to say what wasn&#39;t unreasonable to say until before this incident. I should have to <em>play identity politics</em> as a qualification to <em>talk about identity at all</em>. That&#39;s one of the thing that makes this whole thing get more and more ridiculous.

Does anyone forget that the film <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Luck_Tomorrow" target="_blank">Better Luck Tomorrow</a></em>, which touched on Asian American identity, socialization, alienation, violence, and other facets of Asian American culture - especially from the perspective of Asian American masculinity? So after the fictional violence witnessed in the narrative, we can talk about such issues - which is what I assumed the filmmakers wanted when it went mainstream and didn&#39;t merely screen in art house theaters? But after a real incident that could be seen to touch on similar issues, now that real people are dead and dying, broaching the subject gets you lumped in with the Klan.

I better remember to tell my mom that I hate Koreans now. That should be a fun conversation.

And just as I said, here are some of the conversations people are having now in Korea, from a look at the Korean press. From <em>The Korea Times </em>(which has masked its URL, so no link is possible:</p>
<blockquote><em>"I couldn&#39;t believe that someone like me was really involved in this brutal murder," a netizen (ID hahaha) said. Other people showed the same response as they said they have begun to feel more responsibility for the case when they found out that a Korean was involved.

Others said that the case looked similar to some cases happening in the Korean military where young soldiers try to desert from their barracks out of love or relationship issues.</em></blockquote>
<p>I&#39;m not saying that they&#39;re right or wrong. But these are questions people are asking. Are Koreans "racist" for asking these questions, which a lot of us are thinking about as well?</p>
<blockquote><em>There are also questions raised over studying abroad at a very young age _ quite the fashion in Korea at the moment. As domestic media in the U.S. referred to Cho as a "loner," people are now questioning whether sending their kids abroad for study would be good.

There were constant reports of children feeling lonely and causing problems with drinking, doing drugs or having sex problems, but the massacre has triggered the debate on whether such studying is really needed.

Cho flew to America when he was a little kid, and is said to have not made himself accustomed to the different culture. ``I think his being alone made him a loner, and made him do something horrible. And would you still say that won&#39;t happen to your child?&#39;&#39; a blogger grandchyren asked.</em></blockquote>
<p>From <em><a href="https://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2007/04/18/200704180092.asp" target="_blank">The Korea Herald</a></em>, as I grimly predicted, and as is all too often the case when extreme shame from one&#39;s relatives or persons within one&#39;s realm of concerns brings shame to your or your organization, both his parents attempted to take their own lives, the father apparently "successfully":</p>
<blockquote><em>Los Angeles-based Radio Korea reported Wednesday morning that Cho&#39;s parents attempted suicide, according to neighbors.

Cho&#39;s father reportedly slashed his wrist after having learned of his son&#39;s alleged killings at around 1 p.m. Tuesday, Seoul time.

Cho&#39;s mother attempted to commit suicide by taking toxic drug, Radio Korea said. She was quickly transported to a nearby hospital, but is listed in critical condition according to the report.</em></blockquote>
<p>No, culture isn&#39;t a factor at all here, and it should most certainly not be talked about, right? No one was surprised a couple years ago when a scandal ensued in a high school over a student who had been physically abused, which, upon reaching nationwide proportions, the principal took a leap off into the Han River. No one in Korea was really shocked by this, although the incident is unfortunate. I&#39;m not talking about ancient, fetishized elements of a Hollywood movie about samurai over a swelling soundtrack - I&#39;m talking about real people.

And I guess me having expressed the concern that his parents would immediately attempt suicide in a similar way was just me being "insensitive," rather than observing that such a thing is not only not unusual in a situation like this in a Korean context, it&#39;s not at all surprising, however unfortunate.

And in my head, when the leading cause of death for Korean teens and twenties in South Korea is suicide, most often caused by culturally specific forms of stress, isolation, and social factors that are not factors in different cultures, and I see a Korean kid - and again, I am of the old-school Asian American assumption that culture doesn&#39;t stop with a green card, but I guess I&#39;m old-fashioned and "racist" in the post-Cho Seung-hui era - who struck me as possibly influenced by similar concerns...why is it suddenly inappropriate to raise the notion of culture? Just because it makes us uncomfortable now that it&#39;s real, raw, and in the nation&#39;s face, as opposed to the more hidden back rooms of our ethnic communities?

This is not saying that there were no factors related to Cho being American. Surely, obviously, naturally - there were. He wasn&#39;t an exchange student who got off a place last September. He lived and socialized and breathed and experienced life in America. And yet, even without getting into the fact that Korean culture doesn&#39;t stop at the airport terminal when a kid is 8, and that he&#39;s generally considered by even Korean-Americans as a "1.5er," let&#39;s not forget that he was Asian American; in other words, he was not white, and most likely did not see himself (and I&#39;m going out on a limb here, as many of the people who adamantly insist that Cho was and could have been "American") as "just another kid."

A similar attitude of non-reality surrounds the fact that no one asks the question of what aspects, if any, of whiteness or white identity itself informs the fact that in most such incidents, the perpetrators are white, middle class males? A few people poked at the question after Columbine, but most people chose to toss that hot potato.

I&#39;m not saying <em>being white</em> cause you to <em>kill people</em>. I am saying that it should be OK for us to ask certain questions about what peculiar concerns there <em>just might be</em> in terms of socializing, identifying, and being labeled as "white" and male in American society, especially in the midst of America&#39;s "culture wars," major shifts in norms and role expectations with regard to not just race, but class, gender, sexual orientation, and perceived amounts of privilege?

These are some questions that people in Whiteness Studies ask, which is a new and necessary branch of inquiry partially related to Ethnic Studies. It recognizes that "people of color" do not just exist a blank backdrop of nothingness, but that "whites" are "raced" just as much as "Blacks" or "Asian Americans" or "Latinos" or any other recognized (and socially constructed) racial group in the United States. Yet still, some people think Whiteness Studies must necessarily be a group of people trying to assert "white rights" or be secret Klan members.

Yet, when a dated-but-smart film such as John Singleton&#39;s <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Learning" target="_blank">Higher Learning</a></em> deals with the journey of a white kid who feels alienated, ostracized, and actively victimized <em>as a white man</em>, who then goes to a high perch with a high-powered rifle to start a killing spree, it&#39;s lauded and applauded.

Until some white kid(s) actually commits such an act in question, at which point asking certain questions is out-of bounds again.

Generally, as a doctoral student and young scholar in Ethnic Studies, I&#39;ve noticed the tendency to confuse talking about race with being racist. This is frustrating to no end. And in the case of Cho, it really wasn&#39;t about race, but more about nationality and culture, and asking the question of the extent to which Cho&#39;s obvious inner pain and turmoil just may have been culturally specific and valenced.

But again, if the shooter had been an "Arab terrorist" I think the cultural argument would help us humanize him - who was he? How did he get caught up in this? What were some personal frustrations as a poor, Palestinian (for example) boy with few future prospects that might have made him an easy recruit?

Is this line of questioning "racist?"

Then I guess, so is it all, including the Harvard School of Public Health, where a conference <a href="http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/05.13/07-disparities.html" target="_blank">convened around a very similar issue</a> in 2004:</p>
<blockquote><em>Faculty, students, and fellows interested in disparities in health care due to ethnic and racial differences convened at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) Friday (May 7) for a symposium seeking to translate research into practice.

Topics discussed at the all-day event, the Second Annual Symposium on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Research in the U.S., included Latino and Asian mental health, the increasing presence of minority researchers in the field, societal determinants of health, quality of care, and politics and policy as related to ethnic and racial health disparities.</em></blockquote>
<p>The "racism" continues:</p>
<blockquote><em>Among the wide variety of topics discussed was new research on the mental health status of Latinos and Asians in America. Margarita Alegria, director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard, presented preliminary research from the National Latino and Asian American Study, begun in 2002.

The study, conducted in five languages, is a broad survey of Latinos and Asian Americans across the country and aims to fill in gaps in the information available on the mental health of those two ethnic groups.

The study so far shows that Puerto Ricans have a higher incidence of mental health disorders than other Latino groups, which also include Mexicans, Cubans, and a category for other Latinos. It also shows a strong trend of increasing mental health problems for Mexican-born immigrants the longer they are in the United States. To a lesser extent, other groups showed a similar correlation of increasing mental health problems with time in the United States, until they had lived 70 percent of their lives in the United States at which point the trend levels off.

For Asians, Vietnamese show a lower incidence of mental health disorders than other groups, which include Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians. Alegria said researchers couldn&#39;t yet explain that low incidence of mental health problems for Vietnamese.

Alegria said the survey shows considerable regional variation, with mental health disorders increasing for individuals who live in parts of the country where their ethnic group is not concentrated. For example, she said, Mexicans, who are concentrated in the Southwest, had higher mental health problems when living in the Midwest. Cubans, who are concentrated in the South, had greater problems when living in the Northeast.

"Where you live really makes a big difference in your risk for psychological disorders," Alegria said.

One possible explanation for the higher rates of mental disorders among Puerto Ricans, Alegria said, is selective immigration. Alegria said more Puerto Ricans than other groups reported that they had immigrated because of health reasons. In addition, she said, there may be a demoralizing factor at work. Puerto Ricans, unlike members of the other ethnic subgroups, are U.S. citizens. They also report higher levels of English fluency. Alegria said Puerto Ricans may expect to be more socially mobile after arriving in the United States.

Alegria said the survey provides an important starting point for further research. Among important questions to be answered are the higher rates of disorders among Puerto Ricans, the lower rates among Vietnamese, the roots of geographic differences in different parts of the country, and </em><strong><em>the connection between length of time in the United States and rising incidence of mental health disorders.</strong></em></blockquote>
<p>There are a million questions I&#39;d ask the kid if me and Cho Seung-hui were sitting in a room and he had agreed to talk to me. The first one would have been "Are you feeling frustrated for any particular reason?" Another might be, "Are you feeling any academic pressures, any stress from you parents?" Who knows? These are perhaps overly direct and useless questions, since I&#39;m not a trained mental health care professional - but if I were, I sure would be attentive to issues of his cultural background, especially if my file on him indicated the possibility of that perhaps there might be more going on here than just your standard, John Doe pysch services referral.

It&#39;s a place to start. But he&#39;s dead, and that&#39;ll never happen. But to imply it&#39;s <em>racist</em> to ask these questions, to even think about the concerns of Korean American youth like Cho, who may well find themselves precariously placed along pressure points between family, friends, and school as defined in cultural, educational, linguistic, and pscyhological terms - this just boggles my mind now.

Posted by Michael Hurt on April 19, 2007

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Archived with permission of author.

Original Source: Scribblings of the Metropolitician
<a href="http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/on_the_forbidde_1.html">http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/on_the_forbidde_1.html</a></p>

Michael Hurt

2007-06-21

Brent Jesiek

Michael Hurt (kuraeji@gmail.com)

eng

The Politics of Pride and Shame

Michael Hurt

2007-06-21

Brent Jesiek

Michael Hurt (kuraeji@gmail.com)

eng

In the Mind of a Murderer

Justify it as you like, I cannot think of Cho Seung-Hui as anything other than a murderer. A lot has already been said about the subject, so apart from the links to his plays <a href="http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/">here[link]</a>, I won&#39;t be saying much.

The content of his plays being sophomoric aside (in all honesty my high school freshmen have written richer and deeper material than this), I don&#39;t think the content of his plays immediately says that he "fits the profile of a school shooter." As a previous entry said, there is no such thing as a profile; each situation is born of unique circumstances mingling with the unique turmoil in each unique individual. However, it <em>is</em> a definite warning sign of a person being disturbed, coupled with his general attitudes and way of pushing others away. Help was offered, but he refused it and did what he wanted to do anyway.

One can&#39;t help but feel powerless when confronted with a person like this. The other school shootings we had in the past were perpetrated by children who I think could have been talked to—just that insufficient attention was given to their behavior. However, this guy was already an adult—like many other instances of adults going on a rampage, they have already made up their minds and will no longer respond to reason. This is why it is imperative that schools should take events like this seriously. Sure, they are <em>aberrations</em>, but this implies that <em>somewhere, something went wrong.</em>

The most immediate problem seems to be security, of course. Students will not be able to bring firearms (or poison, as in the case of Gelyn Fabro) if the security weren&#39;t so lax. Guards search bags, yes, but do they know what they&#39;re searching for?

Of course, there&#39;s also the whole issue with of how the person is treated. The school can only do so much—personal and parental problems are already beyond the reach of guidance counselors—but still, the school can provide the student with an environment where he or she can express his or her frustrations in a harmless way. Cho&#39;s situation was different—this guy was already an adult, and that&#39;s why I believe that his problems were already beyond reasoning. He had to deal with them by himself, and he couldn&#39;t. He had to choose the worst possible option. But for high school students, I believe that something can be done. Of course, people are different. There are university students who might be receptive to counseling. Cho&#39;s case is indeed an aberration, but aberrations do not excuse the school from not taking any action. In his case, action was indeed taken. Schools just have to be sure that they&#39;ve done everything in such cases.

I&#39;ve always believed that elementary students need a teacher who they could see as a parent. In high school, they need a teacher who they could see as a friend or elder sibling. In college, a student needs a teacher who he or she could see as a mentor. Thankfully I&#39;ve had such teachers in all my years in the academe.

On a less serious note:
<a href="http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=231">Another Mario parody[link]</a>

~ by J. R. R. Flores on April 20, 2007.

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Original Source: <a href=http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/in-the-mind-of-a-murderer/">http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/in-the-mind-of-a-murderer/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License</a>.

J. R. R. Flores

2007-06-20

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

eng

Confessions of a Would-Be School Shooter

<p>By now the subject of Virginia Tech has been much publicized and probably hackneyed. We talk about lax gun control laws, wasted lives, disturbed young men and how we wish things like these would never happen again. In my <a href="http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/in-the-mind-of-a-murderer/">previous entry[link]</a>, I talked about how problematic Cho Seung-Hui is and the difficulty with which we tend to see the minds of these people. We always talk about things like these happening to someone else. However, as Bill Watterson once said in his great comic strip series Calvin & Hobbes, "We are all someone else to someone else." And so instead of talking about Cho from a distance and saying how crazy he was, I&#39;d like to talk about how I was probably just like him.

As I read through TIME&#39;s articles on the VTech massacre, I began reflecting on my own past and how disturbingly close I came to becoming a school shooter.

In real life, I&#39;m a very quiet person—meaning I don&#39;t speak much. If I have something to say and feel it&#39;s absolutely necessary, I have a very loud voice. Most of the time, though, I prefer to keep to myself and do not really talk. This habit caused one of my co-teachers to remark "You know, if one of us is going to become a psychopath, it would be Joey." Of course, I&#39;d just laugh and shrug off the remark. It was only today that I realized how close I was to this.

In one of my <a href="http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/08/resurrection-and-revival/">earlier posts</a> I talked about how I was so maligned by my classmates in grade school. I really hated them; there were times I&#39;d think about seeing their corpses hanging from a large weeping willow tree on campus. Seriously.

I think this started after my parents&#39; marriage was annulled, but I don&#39;t blame it entirely on them (and I presently harbor no bitterness toward them in this matter). There were a lot of events that led to certain, er, emotional imbalances I had in the past, I myself am not really sure how they add up to one another. Regardless, I was a young boy who was full of hate and I can very clearly remember that <i>at one point I really thought about shooting my classmates</i>. Dad had bought an air rifle at that time and I was beginning to learn how to use it, and I remember telling them to stop bugging me because I had a gun. Of course they mocked me even more, at which point I just kept quiet and seriously thought about blowing their brains out. How old was I then?

Ten.

The next year, I was beginning to move closer and closer toward rebellion, and my mind began to darken. I just have an eerie feeling that if the events of my life did not transpire as they have, I would have ended up walking onto campus with deadly weapons and making away with the lives of those who I saw as inferior, then myself. The difficulty in getting weapons aside, I certainly had the potential to be a school shooter.

I don&#39;t know how it happened, but God somehow dealt with the events of my life at that point and eventually brought me to Him. There were times I&#39;d still feel that I was alone against the world (I still sometimes do) but I cannot deny that it was something much more dangerous before. I wanted to lash out against a world I thought was inferior to me, a world that I felt worthy to judge, a world that oppressed me.

Later on in college, I met the very guy who I had really felt like killing several years before. We were both waiting for a cab outside the university, and since we were both going in the same direction we just decided to take the cab together. We talked a bit about how the other was doing in college, where we planned on going when we graduated, and so on. I really don&#39;t think this would have been possible had my Lord Jesus not wiped away the bitterness that so stained my soul at a young age.

When I was a child, I felt like killing children. Now that I have grown in the grace of the Lord, I feel it is my calling to help them truly live. And this would all not be possible without my God working in my life. In His death I died to myself, and in His resurrection I rose again to a new life. Thus I have come to appreciate even more what He has done for me.</p>
<blockquote>"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." -Romans 12:2</blockquote>
<p>Teaching and not Shooting,

Your Black Lion

PS: I&#39;m going on a short hiatus starting Tuesday night until Saturday. I&#39;ll be going to Pagudpud with Martin, Arghs and Fil. Yes, I&#39;ll finally be going to the beach.

~ by J. R. R. Flores on April 23, 2007.

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Original Source: <a href="http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/confessions-of-a-would-be-school-shooter/">http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/confessions-of-a-would-be-school-shooter/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License</a>.</p>

J. R. R. Flores

2007-06-20

Melisa Rivera

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

eng

No Shortage of Manliness

April 23, 2007

Filed under: Feminism, Minnesota Monitor, Virginia Tech — Jeff Fecke @ 12:21 pm

It is human nature to try to figure out why bad things happen. Long ago, we blamed natural disasters on the capriciousness of the gods. The flood was caused by Poseidon&#39;s wrath, the storm by Thor&#39;s fury. Gifts were given to the gods, sacrifices of fruit, of animals, even of people, in order to placate them and turn their anger into love for their human charges. Today most of us (Pat Robertson excepted) reject the notion that bad things happen because of an angry and vengeful God. And yet, when tragedy strikes, we still seek to find the pattern underlying the madness, our ultimate failing that led to our punishment by...well, we&#39;re never quite sure, but we&#39;re sure we&#39;re being punished.

After Cho Seung-hui opened fire on his classmates in Blacksburg, Va., it was only natural for us to ask why. The primary answer — that he was a deeply troubled, possibly schizophrenic and certainly psychotic man who was operating outside the bounds of normal society — is unsatisfying and seems to beg more questions than it answers. And so some writers have seized on an explanation that has a mythic history as rich and powerful as any blameworthy figure in human lore: It&#39;s the women&#39;s fault.

Not all women, of course, but specifically feminists. These horrid people have, we are told, upset the natural order. They have made women more like men, causing them to demand for themselves the same privileges and prerogatives that men alone have traditionally enjoyed. At the same time, they have demanded that men stop behaving like louts, thus feminizing them, making them more female, robbing them of their manly virtue. <em>National Review</em> columnist John Derbyshire started the drumbeat by arguing that all of the students should have been armed, the better to kill the shooter. But that wasn&#39;t his main point.

"Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals," he wrote, "why didn&#39;t anyone rush the guy? It&#39;s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns, for goodness&#39; sake — one of them reportedly a .22."

Nathan Blake, a writer for the weblog Human Events caught Derbyshire&#39;s meaning and amplified it. "Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that."

Now, you may think that blaming students for not rushing a man with two semi-automatic handguns is, to put it nicely, insane. Especially since there were more than a few examples of bravery that day, from the resident adviser who gave his life trying to protect the first victim of the shooting to the students who held the door shut with their feet while Cho fired away above them. But of course, one should never let facts get in the way of a good session of blaming women. Besides, it wasn&#39;t just the men hand-wringing about those wimpy men; there were also women hand-wringing about those tough women.

Sarah Baxter, writing for the Sunday <em>Times of London</em>, fingered female sexual promiscuity as the reason that Cho Seng-hui went on his rampage, going so far as to quote long-time scold Camile Paglia in her argument.

"The pervasive hook-up culture at college," wrote Baxter, "where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

"&#39;Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again&#39; [said Paglia]."

As the Kinks once said, it&#39;s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world. And that&#39;s when the gods get angry.

The scolds, of course, never really explain why it is that "young women behaving like men" is confusing and enraging — or at least, why young women behaving like men is worse than young men behaving like men. They don&#39;t have to bother. We all know that good girls don&#39;t, and cool boys do-the message is driven into us, all of us, from the moment we become aware of what sex might be.

If anything exacerbated the insanity of Cho Seung-hui, it was this message — the message that if he was worthy, he should be having sex, and lots of it. That if he was worthy, women would and should be lining up for him — but not the pure and chaste ones. Normal people learn, at some point, that this message doesn&#39;t make a lot of sense; that sex, while entertaining, is neither the best nor the most important measure of human worth and human happiness. We learn that whether you&#39;re having sex or not is a truly meaningless measure of your worth as a human being — whether you&#39;re a good girl who is, or a cool boy who isn&#39;t.

But Cho Seung-hui wasn&#39;t equipped to deal with this message, this drumbeat that he was a failure because he wasn&#39;t successful with women. And so he turned his rage to violence, first stalking women, then ultimately attacking them. That his rage reached a violent crescendo that included men as well was unsurprising, for it wasn&#39;t women he hated, or men — it was himself.

The killer internalized the messages of what men are "supposed" to be, and when he could not measure up in his mind to that standard, he did the only thing he could think to do — he became ultra-violent, violence being another acceptable proof of manliness. It wasn&#39;t a shortage of manliness that was the problem last Monday, it was a surfeit.

And so we come to find that the fault, if there was fault that we can assigned, lay not at the feet of the women who rejected a stalker, nor at feminists who want people to have rough equality, nor at men and women who faced a horrific massacre and did not all fight back against nigh-impossible odds. If there was a fault, it was that we as a society continue to try to tell people what they&#39;re supposed to be, rather than letting them determine that for themselves. That&#39;s not as satisfying as blaming women, nor as simple as blaming victims. But it&#39;s the truth, and we do ourselves and the dead no favor by pretending otherwise.

(Cross-posted from <a target="_blank" href="http://minnesotamonitor.com/editDiary.do?diaryId=1650">MinMon</a>)

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Original Source: Blog of the Moderate Left
<a href="http://moderateleft.com/?p=3324">http://moderateleft.com/?p=3324</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States</a>

Jeff Fecke

2007-06-19

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States

eng

Virginia Tech: The Challenge of Instant Communication in a Crisis

<p>Wednesday, April 18, 2007

I have been percolating some ideas about how to better integrate technology into a crisis plan I am currently working on. My work with the Red Cross over the years has sharpened my senses and I do have some idea of how to successfully communicate during a crisis. However, this week&#39;s events at Virginia Tech have given me some further ideas.

I don&#39;t want to start getting clinical about this before I say that I am deeply moved by the tragedy this week. Having lived in Virginia for many years I feel close to the tragedy, and moreover, because we have a dear friend who is a professor in the engineering department in V-Tech. I heard from him Tuesday night and am grateful that both he and his freshman daughter are okay.

That expressed, there are many lessons to start learning, especially as we prepare for the unexpected and communicating to large groups in crisis.

There was a great <a href="http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=us/0-0&fp=462693b442b2782f&ei=IHMmRqKHJMCGswHGq9S0Cw&url=http%3A//online.wsj.com/article/SB117685626072073360.html%3Fmod%3Dgooglenews_wsj&cid=1115495034">story in the Wall Street Journal today</a> that (registration req.) discussed the use of disseminating information via texting in a crisis. I have pulled some of the information about services from that article.

My main takeaway from this event is the need for redundancy of communication. There need to be both high and low tech layers of communication to be most effective. First and foremost, an organization has to have a strategy to get in touch with all of the stakeholders and employees that need to be reached. A good start is a list of employee cell phones and home phone numbers that are ready to use in an emergency, as well as emergency contacts.

Having a <a href="http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2006/06/crisis-communication-bird-flu-and.html">crisis communication plan</a> is essential to get the most out of our communications, but here is an incomplete checklist of tactics to consider:

<b>High Tech Strategies</b></p>
<p><ul><li>Have a service set up to send instant text messaging (SMS), one such service is run by <a href="http://www.omnilert.com/notification_products.html#amerilert">Omnilert </a>and costs about $9,000 per year, another for schools is and opt in service run by <a href="http://www.mobilecampus.com/">Mobile Campus</a></li><li>Set up redundancy in the servers to handle any increased load</li><li>Set up and Instant Communication Platform, something my friend <a href="http://ike.pigott.name/occam/">Ike Pigott </a>calls the Situation Room. Running this on a blog platform is a really handy way to control the speed of getting the message out.</li><li>Immediate updates on the web page that could be pulled from a blog platform</li><li>E-mail blasts</li><li>Harness the culture of Facebook and MySpace and maintain profiles there for instant communication, especially in the aftermath of events</li><li>Make the online information you share easily viral so that it can be passed on via blogs and other social media without diluting the message</li><li>Use YouTube to distribute video responses to a wider audience</li></ul></p><p>which includes advertisements

<b>High Touch and Lower Tech</b></p>
<p><ul><li>Equip employees across the areas that might be affected in a Paul Revere-like system of notifications. Distribute pagers and give training for instant response in disseminating messages across wide geographic or spread out operations.</li><li>Consider a service to deliver mass phonecalls to cell and home numbers</li><li>Employ an audio warning system, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/18/scitech/pcanswer/main2697647.shtml">like the siren system installed at UT Austin</a> after the shootings there in 1966, or better yet, one with audio voice warnings, as by <a href="http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/collegiatetimes/footage.mov">this video</a> it seems they used at V-Tech</li><li>Have good relationships with bloggers and mainstream media to get messages out fast</li></ul></p><p>This is just a start of the list and it will be governed by the needs of an organization and budget. However, these kind of "incidents" could happen anywhere and we need to be prepared to meet the challenges. Do you have anything to add to the list?

posted by Kami Huyse at <a href="http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2007/04/ambulances.html">1:41 PM</a>

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Original Source: Communication Overtones
<a href="http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2007/04/ambulances.html">http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2007/04/ambulances.html</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License</a>.</p>

Kami Huyse

2007-06-19

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License

eng

The Altar of the Gun

<em>Note: I found writing this piece to be a way of channeling my own anger <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041600533.html?hpid=topnews">at the massacre this morning</a>. But I recognize that anger is only one part of the grief process. Please join me in praying for the families and friends of those killed.</em>

American worships the gun. Today, 33 more were sacrificed on the altar of our devotion to the gun. Specifically to semi automatic handguns. There are already <a href="http://bimmer1200.livejournal.com/20511.html">dozens</a> of <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/004221.php">articles</a> from disciples arguing that the massacre today at Virginia tech could have been avoided if some of the students had been carrying guns so they could shoot the killer before he killed them. We trust the gun more than we trust God.

The brutal reality of our gun fetish is that selling guns and ammo is highly profitable. But it is not simply the fact that the market values short term earnings from gun sales more than the social, cultural, political and long term economic damage that gun violence does to our society. More importantly, the gun industry long ago learned to effectively invest their short term earnings into the social, political and cultural sphere. Their investments in the NRA, especially <a href="http://www.vpc.org/nrainfo/chapter2.html">since 1977</a> years have returned 10 fold and the results are a culture in which gun ownership is intimately connected with the values of self-sufficiency, responsibility and security that so many Americans identify with. We&#39;ll call these frontier values.</p>
<p>As much as we&#39;d like to wish that the new Democratic congress would seize on this moment to pass some common sense gun laws, the reality is that many of the new members of Congress were partly by actively courting those with frontier values. Unless their constituency shows signs of disconnecting handguns from frontier values, any vote for limiting the sales of hand guns will be doomed.

It may be that changing our gun culture requires looking at movements that have successfully challenged large corporations with large amounts of cultural capital. The anti-smoking movement comes to mind. The last 30 years have seen a drastic shift on the public perceptions of smoking. The parallels are striking. The right to smoke was once also closely associated with frontier values. The industry also heavily invested in cultural, social and political institutions to maintain and promote the cigarette. For a time it seemed that they were effective. But these days its very hard to find anyone in political office trumpeting the rights of smokers.</p>
<p>What were the tactics and strategies of the anti-smoking lobby? They brought law suits by second hand smokers against big tobacco. Unfortunately a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000485.html">law passed in 2005 </a>protects the industry from any parallel suits.

Another tactic of the anti-tobacco movement was its relentless funding of anti-smoking advertising. Through memorable add campaigns they have gradually associated with smoking with disease and decay. It seems this solution has much potential given the brutal reality of gun crime. Is the anti-gun lobby much less well funded? Have they not found the right message?

Of course, part of the anti-smoking victory can be attributed to the scandal of Tobacco companies lying to consumers for many many years. This highlights a major difference between gun industry and the tobacco industry is that gun manufacturers are much less visible in the debate then big tobacco was. The NRA is by far the most visible and powerful gun lobbying organization. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_%26_Wesson#The_Agreement_of_2000">wikipedia article on Smitth & Wesson</a> tells the interesting story of how gun owners turned on the hand that fed them after Smith & Wesson was seen to have compromised on gun control.

But there is hope. In the United Kingdom after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_Massacre">Dunblane Massacre</a>, more than 700,000 Brits signed the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowdrop_Petition">Snowdrop petition</a> calling for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the United Kingdom. The petition led to the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997 which completely banned handguns in the UK (this was the final in a long series of hand gun control laws) According to a report from the home office, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, only 49 people were killed by handguns (<a href="http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207.pdf">Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2005/2006</a>, page 36). This is a rate of roughly 1 per million compared to 55 per million in the US (<a href="http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html">FBI 2004 Crime report)</a>. It turns out that a mandatory five-year jail term for carrying a hand gun does have an effect. I lived in the UK from 2004 through 2006 and noticed that fatal shootings were so rare that they regularly made the national newspaper. People take the hand gun ban for granted and find the gun religion in our country to quaint and strange. On one of my first evenings in the UK I watched a documentary in which a UK reporter went deep into US gun country and interviewed gun disciples. It was like watching an exotic safari.

Change is possible. Massacres like the one at Virginia tech do not need to be a reoccurring horror in our headlines and our lives. Let&#39;s work together to end our worship of the gun.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 6:44 pm by <a href="http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/author/timn/">TimN</a>

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Original Source: Young Anabaptist Radicals Blog
<a href="http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2007/04/16/the-altar-of-the-gun/">http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2007/04/16/the-altar-of-the-gun/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License</a>.

Tim Nafziger

2007-06-17

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

eng

on the VT massacre

<p>17 April 2007

The talking heads keep talking about the "VT Massacre", not that it doesn&#39;t deserve attention, but this is too much attention. And VT is getting a bad wrap unfairly on one specific point: the notification of students on campus as to what was going on.

The media seem obsessed with the 2-hour gap between the first shooting and the campus-wide email. They think the whole campus should have been told immediately. This is a short-sighted and impatient assumption, and is definitely not appropriate in a time like this when cooler heads should prevail.

First, when the first shooting occurred, no one knew what the hell was going on! As with any incident like this, the police responded immediately, and their first priority was to figure out what happened. From what the VT police have said, they had reason to believe the shooter had left campus. So, what good would it have been to lock the campus down? And even if they had, how would that have stopped the assailant from coming back, as this may have only added police officers to the list of the dead. <strong>My point is VT authorities didn&#39;t notify anyone immediately because they didn&#39;t know what to tell them!</strong>

In this age of information and 24-hour TV news, many have been spoiled into thinking they should have answers immediately, and that someone has failed them if they don&#39;t. Spoiled is definitely the best word for that outlook. Answers aren&#39;t always available right away, and rarely is the complete picture seen even days after an event like this, if ever.

So, why are some in the media out to vilify the very people who were trying to protect the public and figure this whole thing out? I can see no reason other than lack of understanding and sensationalism, neither of which is an acceptable answer.

---

On a different note about the incidents of yesterday: As a life member of <a href="http://www.kkpsi.org">Kappa Kappa Psi Honorary Band Fraternity</a>, as was receiving updates on the status on members of our chapter at VT. All were accounted for by midday and none harmed.

But we did get unfortunate news: One of the fallen was a member of the VT Band, a brother-in-arms, if you will. From <a href="http://www.music.vt.edu/performance/ensembles/mv/index.shtml">the Marching Virginians website</a>:</p>
<blockquote><i>The Marching Virginians are deeply sorrowed by the loss of fellow MV and friend, Ryan "Stack" Clark. He was a loved friend, mentor, and role model who will always hold a special place in the hearts of all the MVs as a true example of The Spirit Of Tech. Stack, we thank you for all the memories, and for sharing with us your true love of life. We will love and miss you always.</i></blockquote>
<p>Please continue to keep those up at Virginia Tech and their families in your thoughts and prayers.

-the Progressive Conservative

posted by Matt Collins at <a href="http://conservativeprogress.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-vt-massacre.html">4/17/2007 08:51:00 AM</a>

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Original Source: <a href="http://conservativeprogress.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-vt-massacre.html">http://conservativeprogress.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-vt-massacre.html</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License</a>.</p>

Matt Collins

2007-06-17

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

eng

Desensitization, Detachment and Virginia Tech

Apr 23 2007

Written by Lynn Kindler

To all family, friends, and people affected by the horrific and sad shootings at Virginia Tech, please accept my heartfelt sympathy. I know that I am joined by many others who are keeping you in their thoughts and prayers.

With that said, I&#39;ve been putting off writing about how the shootings affected me because I did not want to add to all the hype and gander that is already going on about it and because my initial reaction was NOT what I had expected to feel. Being an extremely intuitive person, I&#39;m used to "getting" insights and a heightened sense of awareness before incidents like the one at VT occurs—often weeks before. This time not only did I not intuit anything but as the events unfolded I had no feelings about it. I&#39;m a very caring person and since my initial non-feeling bubble, have had many insights but the initial non-feeling sensation really caught me off guard. I checked with many of my friends to find out how they reacted and found out that there were many very caring, spiritual people who had the same initial reaction as I did which was the absence of intense emotion.

After listening and reading some of the news about VT, what was revealed to me was the seemingly collective response of not wanting to fan the fire of the media. The way that many of the people from Blacksburg handled this event, showed a majority of caring and thinking people who wanted to respect the event and all its complexities without the media circus. I am inspired by the people who have been writing and communicating under the mass media radar through <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">www.facebook.com</a>

At first glance, I wondered if what "we" were experiencing en-mass was desensitization towards violence. How many of us wake up to NPR in the morning with the latest recount of a suicide bomber event? But someone very close to me noted that as listened to me she could hear anger under my numbness and upon closer inspection I realized that I was angry about our ignorance of mental illness and how to handle it fairly and successfully. I was angry about gun control (a rifle I can see, an automatic weapon—why?) and last but not least watching the story unfold in the media bit by bit as every one tried to become THE source for facts about the VT shootings.

In many of my spiritual teachings I have learned that it is important to be able to detach with love. It seems that in order for me (and you) to be effective, we&#39;ve got to be able to get our personal spin out of the mix so that we can detach from the intense reaction in order to respond thoughtfully. It&#39;s about being able to feel and yet not getting run over by our feelings.

I am very hopeful about the kind of ideas and actions that will come out of this horrific event. I heard one student interviewed who responded, "What can we learn from the Amish shootings". One thing that we can do right now is to have difficult conversations such as what I&#39;m admitting to you here and be willing to talk with each other about what is really going on.

As the great Coaching guru Thomas Leonard used to say, "Be real be human".

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Original Source:
<a href="http://www.smallbusinessgurus.com/content/view/460/60/">http://www.smallbusinessgurus.com/content/view/460/60/</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5</a>.

Lynn Kindler

2007-06-17

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5

eng