Not sure where Jeff is, but perhaps he won’t mind this public service:
Expert: Heed Hints From Would-Be Killers
Good advice. I wonder if there’s a media equivalent to the Stages of Grief that inevitably involves bringing on an expert to express the obvious. Also, the guy was South Korean (not Chinese), and a loner, and an English student. So, shouldn’t that have set off some warning bells? I mean unless it’s terrorists, in which case we shouldn’t take them so seriously.
The solution (obviously) is more experts.
Assignment: Create a sample hint from a would-be killer, and explain how you should respond to it.
Example:
Would-Be Killer: “Geez, I sure am thirsty.”
Dan Collins: “Want a swig of my soda?”
UPDATE: According to racist cracker sources, the suspect was “inscrutable”:
“Ya just absolutely couldn’t scrute the guy, y’know?”
Thanks, Pat Brown. And what kind of expert are you? Identifying potential shooters is the problem—not where they can get guns!
Do you think Jeff is having some sort of bad reaction to those garbonzo beans from last night?
“Where did these things come from that he would have these? I wanna know if he got them off a relative … where these things came from. We need to start doing something about our societal problem. It is a huge problem right now.”
Yeah, she sounds like an “expert” to me.
Also on TV, some broad was talking about treating the victims at the hospital, and how busy they were, but, don’t worry, she assured us, “after it was all over there were a lot of tears.”
The interviews were also vile.
“Gee, you sound pretty composed right now. Do you think it will hit you later? I mean, do you think that later you’ll be thinking of what it was like to be lying there while someone was methodically shooting people in the head?”
—Obviously trying to get the guy to re-visit the moment instantly and start weeping, or some shit.
I said in a comment yesterday that the media was salivating over getting access to the aggrieved and the survivors. I expect a lot of both will just shut the media out. So the ones you’ll hear from at least in the next few days will be a very small percentage. Most of them will be too numb with grief, survivors guilt, or puffed up in self importance for a bit to realize that they’re being played.
For all their constant refrain of solemn empathy with the personal tragedies yesterday, this is not the media’s finest hour.
It’s just starting too. The way to make a tragedy into a sensation is to deflect attention from the human stories – too personal – to the institutional ones. That’s ramping up faster than I expected, though I shouldn’t be surprised.
Which society? Korean or American?
Like I commented yesterday, it took maybe five minutes for people with journalism degrees who’ve spent all their lives writing for papers, TV, or magazines to become experts on security.
They were in the feeding frenzy mode in the first press conference, demanding to know why a 26,000 acre campus wasn’t “locked down” within minutes of the first report.
They’ve had a night to let their preferred storyline gel, so they’ll keep pounding on that.
‘Cuz y’know, ‘talking about guns’ is the warning sign…
So if guns are soooo accessible in America and we have such a gun culture and such violent video games:
How come nobody went all “Grand Theft Auto” and busted a cap in this guys ass when he started frontin’ wif a nine?
Uh, Rob, I believe the VT campus is actually 2,600 acres. Which is still quite large.
Nevertheless, I share your evident scorn for the fucking media.
For some reason, Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry keeps going through my head.
Would be killer: “Boy, I was just thinking how sweet it would be to get me a .357 magnum!”
BJTEXS: “According to the expert, I must wack you upside the head with a lead pipe and call a therapist. Which one do I do first?”
I’d like to see a 24 hour waiting period established for the interviewing of “experts.”
Would-Be Killer: “My foot itches.â€Â
Jim in KC: <censored>
It’s the weirdos like English majors that you really need to watch out for. Especially English majors at engineering schools. Crap, how could the guy not be a loner? (I know this because, well, I was an English major.)
I’d like to think that if one of my friends in school had been about to go off like this I’d have noticed something and taken some steps to try to prevent it, but I just don’t know. And I suspect that many of the so-called experts don’t have the first damn clue, either. They just get paid to pretend like they do after the fact.
Would Be Killer: “Donde esta la bibliotecha?”
Me: “I DON’T SUPPORT ANY PLANS TO HAVE YOU DEPORTED, UNDOCUMENTED FRIEND!!”
tw: slowly46 back away
The reports I’m hearing now say that people have said he was such an introvert that if you said “hello” to him in a hallway, he wouldn’t even acknowledge you.
Add to that he was diciplined for starting fires in trash cans and was “stalking” girls on campus, I think he was screaming, “trouble here”.
Assuming, that is, all that info is correct, which at this point is a stretch.
Yes, we’re all fucking victims now. Which leads inevitably to victimhood.
I keep waiting for someone to scream:
BECAUSE IT’S NOT A FUCKING PRISON YOU IGNORANT PINHEAD!
Unfortunately, they never ask me questions like this.
Would Be Killer: “I’m going to kill you!â€Â
Me: BLAM! BLAM!
Me: “You’re going to do what now?”
I’ve only ever fucked consenting adults.
This dude wrote a ghastly play that got him referred to psychological care and lit his dorm room on fire. Something tells me there were signs something was wrong here.
And yeah, the university should have done more, they should have set out an alarm, they should have sent the students to their rooms and cleared the campus. The campus rentacops should have called the real police. They didn’t for hours, and that’s a real problem. But the guy to blame is, well, the psychotic murderer.
I believe they did. But no one would turn what appeared to be a crime of passion into a campus-wide lockdown.
I keep hearing how hard this lockdown would have been.
Maybe my old alma mater was atypical, but just about every building on our campus had some sort of department office in it.
Could the administration not have called these offices?
Do not the departments have contact lists for their faculty and TA’s? Have cell phones not been invented in Virginia?
Worst case, could not runners have been dispatched from each department to the classrooms in their relevant buildings?
First of all, Jim, VA Tech is NOT an Engineering school. It’s a public state university with an arguably top 20 engineering college. But it also has an arguably top 20 business college.
Second, this whole “heed the hints by weirdos” meme is a bunch of horseshit. For ever Cho that is weird and then kills people, there are hundreds if not thousands of weird people who will never do any such thing.
I would say the constant theme of kids being molested in his plays is the bigger clue to all this. Rather than growing up to be a pedophile himself like many molested kids do, he become a psycho murderer.
In fact, having been on the fringe of a few groups of “weird” people in my time, arbitrarily subjecting them to intrusive therapists (most of whom will be paid by the state and therefore, lousy) will be more likely to push some weirdo FURTHER than they otherwise would have gone, than to “help” them.
True enough.