Sympathy for the Devil

A lot of really stupid things are being said in the wake of the VT tragedy, but some of the stupidest are contained in quotes from Camille Paglia in this column. If I understand Paglia correctly, she's essentially sympathetic to the killer's manifesto. An extended example:

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, 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.

“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.”

Of course it's only natural that this would cause someone to kill. Bullshit. The problem here is that we had someone with a screw loose (or whatever the medical term is) and that person had access to the means to seek redress for his imaginary grievances. No one likes shallow, promiscuous rich kids (except the same), but most of us are able to deal with that by calling them "bitches" and "assholes" behind their backs. Call it class warfare on the cheap by the apathetic, but that's usually enough to get us through the day.

Incidentally, young men can still "run away" regardless of class snobbery. In fact it's bizarre to suggest that class snobbery is somehow a new innovation to ward off young men keen to get there and do stuff. Young aristocrats tried it en masse in 1870s Russia as part of a radical student movement at a time and in a place when class lines were far more rigid

Another Useless Clue

The Washington Post has found a Korean movie that might have been some kind of supposed influence on VA Tech shooter.

Whatever.

No seriously, that's my reponse, whatever. Does anyone really think that knowing this is somehow significant? We can send out some tough-talking reporter to ask rhetorical questions of the director with that cut-eye glare that investigative journalists all seem to master. Maybe some video stores will ban this particular movie. The movie will be a convenient prop whenever family-values people make presentations to lawmakers.

Then we'll forget it.

Why? Because any one of hundreds of movies would have done in the place of this film. The output of Quentin Tarantino alone could have been used to give the killer some kind of aesthetic gloss. If you purge all movies from our culture, maybe he'd model himself on more literary killer, like Raskolnikov, or Judge Holden.

The Post article attaches great importance to finding out which specific movies Cho was into. It will tell us next to nothing about him.

Mark Steyn: Armchair quarterback for school shootings

The Poor Man has a really great take on Mark Steyn's tasteless blame-the-victim approach to dealing with the VA Tech massacre.

Unfortunately we can't all be manly men like super hero Mark Steyn who would have totally rushed the guy and caught all the bullets in his mouth and spit them back at him. Look at Mark Steyn's manly visage, he has a beard, like Chuck Norris or Shipwreck from GI Joe.

As usual, any number of groups have piled on to turn VA Tech into a soapbox for their issues however tangentially they may be related. But for Steyn to harp on university kids for not being all manly and butch like him and other high school drop-outs is particularly odious. (Note: I am not intending to tar high school drop-outs by association with Mark Steyn, most of them do NOT become far-right columnists.)

Incidentally, right now Mark is preoccupying himself giving sympathetic coverage to Conrad Black at his trial. Black is so manly that he throws fancy parties where he dresses up as Cardinal Richelieu and other really macho characters. Thank you for pointing us to the pinnacle of manliness, Mark, I'll go buy a Richelieu outfit and start buying shoes for a crazy lady.

Cho Seung-hui: Media Sensation

Or at least it looks that way given the air time he's gotten. They are broadcasting his rants and his photos after he sent them into NBC. Why? It's exploitation, it's really that simple. I can't imagine what might be gleamed from such displays in mass media. Wow. What a surprise, he photographed himself with guns, he wrote a manifesto with a list of supposed enemies.

It's kind of sad though, rereading the above, that the school shooter is now fairly easily profiled. That says something.

Lurching Contrasts

The BBC World Service followed up a report on the Virginia Tech killer with a quick blurb on a car bombing in Baghdad. In a way we have a sort of perverse luxury here, don't we? Mass killing is rare enough here that we can pour over all the morbid details whereas in Iraq it's another day, another car bomb in a crowded street.

In both cases I think we can know profiles generally. Like most school shooters, the VT killer appears to have been a bit of loner who was into guns and left a body of disturbing writing and pictures. But we won't stop there will we? In the coming days this shooter's life will be picked apart. What music did he like? Video games? Movies?

We will know everything and yet it will tell us nothing we didn't all assume the first minute we heard about this killing. Meanwhile the suicide bomber toils in anonymity - another easy profile, just not picked apart to the minutiae.

Always keep it loaded!!!

I was thinking about the predictable response of the gun lobby what happened at Virginia Tech. The argument goes roughly like this: Nothing terrible will happen so long as law-abiding gun owners are packing heat.

Leaving aside the question of whether that makes Iraq or Afghanistan the world's safest society by this logic, we have a problem with this premise. One of the few things that we do know about the shooter in this case is that he was a resident alien in the US on a student visa. Since I'm pretty sure that a felony is probably one of the easier ways to get such a visa revoked, up until two days ago, this individual was most likely a "law-abiding gun owner."

But what if there were other law abiding gun owners that didn't all go bonkers on the same day that this guy did? Well, it's one thing to own a gun, it's another to know how to use it. Sure you might go to a target range every week, but shooting a human being is not the same as shooting a paper target. For another gun owner to stop this sort of assault they need to be prepared to use deadly force.

Now maybe you're thinking that yeah, you could kill if it was to stop a murderous rampage, but are you ready to die? You'd be risking your life here too.

So, the profile of the sort of person who ought to be armed to prevent this (other than off-duty cops or soldiers - two special cases where I'd say specific training makes them effective) is the type that can use a firearm in a dynamic real-world environment, is not squeamish about killing, and has a disregard for his or her own life.

What's the profile of a school shooter again?