It's Official
Bagdhad is at least as safe as at least one American city today.
Already the wingnutosphere is warming the microphones for their NRA masters and apologists:
Nobody seems to know much yet on what happened. These things do seem to take place in locations where it’s not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that’s the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset.--Apologist Instapundit
In other words, the solution is more guns--in schools, yet!
The quote above was stolen from The Stranger in Seattle. One of my favourite haunts as the home of Savage Love.
Today, like most North American media, the Slog (The Stranger's Blog) has been following the Virginia shootings.
Dan Savage has some words on the subject.
The comments drove me into what I can only describe as a full-on wingnut-type fury. Y'know, like O'Reilly hearing about illegal immigrant babies getting vaccinations or Limbaugh saying drug users should be shot. So I kind of let fly.
To all you apologists for the NRA: Get stuffed. With cacti.
30 bodies on the deck and you claim that gun laws are "unenforceable", so you shouldn't try?
You say that US culture loves guns, so no-one should try to stop them?
You blame this on some soi-distant "personal rage" problem and say that banning guns would be like banning aircraft or cars?
How odd that more mass murderers don't choose to run twenty or thirty people over; or that apart from the events of September 11th 2001 no-one has chosen to kill people using a plane.
How weak you sound, and how pathetic.
30 dead people. Dead at least in part by a cancerous hankering for firepower on behalf of US culture?
The lone gunman without a gun is simply a lone man.
Stop making excuses for arming him.
In the same area. It's official: worst school shooting in US history
posted by Metro @ 3:00 pm
5 Comments:
I kept checking in with the U.S. news all day, hoping to get a concise synopsis of the story (since I stumbled on it in progress). The news media in the U.S. are repugnant. There was no succinct summary of the facts. Instead, maudlin conjecture and emotion. One would think that this story is horrific enough without milking it for ratings, showing over and over again a bloodstain on the sidewalk. One young man who happened to take a cell-phone clip of police firing weapons became an instant celebrity. He'll probably be on Leno tonight. "Massacre! Carnage! But first, a word from Lysol®, a Family Company!"
I wouldn't shoot the messenger if I were you. He's not a celebrity, he's a victim.
The police know who it is, and they'll release that information soon. They'll have to, the rumours are all over the Internet that it was a student from Shanghai who'd had a fight with his girlfriend, perhaps over an engineer. I saw a name mentioned on one of the sites, but I can't find it again.
Check Al Jazeera, in all seriousness. They're a good news agency and not bound to keep US police secrets.
I never implied that the young cell-phone man was at fault. Clearly I'm blaming the news media and the networks.
Yeah, it's the worst school shooting in US history. But it's not the worst US school mass-murder. Explosives should be at least as controlled as guns.
Actually, one of my points in an argument elsewhere is that had this person tried to buy 500 pounds of fertilizer, he would have attracted attention.
As it was, he bought a gun, waited one month, and bought another.
That's why it's gun control that's needed.
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