[Nine] people were killed and as many as [nine] were wounded Thursday in a shooting at a small community college in Roseburg, Oregon, according to multiple reports.
Sheriff John Handlin said at a press conference Thursday afternoon that officers had ‘neutralized’ [aka killed] the shooter, who was male, during an exchange of gunfire in a campus building at Umpqua Community College.
(The Huffington Post, October 1, 2015)
As tragic as this shooting is, one can be forgiven acquired emotional deficiency (or numbness) – born not only of compassion fatigue but also of a growing sense that such shootings are now as American as apple pie. After all, according to a report in yesterday’s edition of The Washington Post, we’ve been assaulted with BREAKING NEWS on “294 mass shootings” this year alone – with a toll of 380 dead and over 1,000 wounded.
And, frankly, the availability and use of (all manner of) guns in America are such that President Obama advocating gun control seems almost as naïve as Pope Francis opposing birth control….
I fully support strict gun-control laws. Nevertheless, I am convinced that no laws can prevent these kinds of human tragedies. In fact, incidents like this bring into stark relief the fact that it’s not guns, but insane and troubled people – with motives no one can possibly anticipate or comprehend – who commit mass murders.
(“Massacre at Virginia Tech,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 17, 2007)
In fact, the only despairing hope we have of reducing the incidence of these shootings is for the media to heed this admonition I offered in “Massacre in Obama,” December 7, 2007.
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I’m constrained to wonder why the media always reward these psychotic people by giving them the fame they covet; that is, by plastering their pathetic mugs all over television and on the front page of every major newspaper … worldwide, and reporting pop psychology about why and how they did their dastardly deeds. Isn’t it clear to see, especially in this age of instant celebrity, why some loser kid would find this route to infamy irresistible?
You’d think – given the record of these psychotic and vainglorious episodes since Columbine – that we would have figured out by now that the best way to discourage them is by focusing our attention on the victims and limiting what we say about the shooter to: May God have mercy on your soul as you burn in hell!
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Unfortunately, the media are as hooked on the ratings they generate from providing wallowing, wall-to-wall coverage of such tragedies as the shooters who perpetrate them are on the notoriety they get, even if posthumously. But hey, if this is what it takes to interrupt their indulgent, wall-to-wall coverage of that one-man human disaster, Donald Trump….
And don’t get me started on the NRA:
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has perpetrated a brazen and unconscionable fraud on the American people by pretending to be arch defenders of their right to keep and bear arms. Because the NRA is just the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers, and its sole mission is to ensure that those manufactures have the right to sell as many guns of every type to as many people as possible. Period!
(“The Second Amendment and Gun Control,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 19, 2012)
God help America.
Related commentaries:
Chattanooga shooting massacre…
Another day, another school shooting…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Thursday, at 6:05 p.m.
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