How Will You React?
by Chris on Apr.18, 2007, under General Thoughts
What’s next?
We’ve all heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech, and now more information is going to come out, leading to a wave of media speculation, blog postings (my bad), and calls for emotionally-driven action.
So, how will you react?
Will you use this incident as a stalking horse for your issue of choice, as the gun-control and pro-gun lobbies are doing?
Will you demand immediate, emotion-fueled legislation aimed at preventing another event just like this, forgetting that almost every other tragedy will be very little like this one?
Will you point your finger at everyone, demanding that someone who is alive and can feel your revenge take some part of the fall?
Will you forget, next time, that none of the quick fixes you demanded this time made a difference?
Will you remember that we live in the safest, least-violent epoch in human history, with lower violent crime rates and murder rates than humanity has enjoyed at any time in history?
Will you glue yourself to the television, to WikiPedia, to Metafilter, to Google News, to Little Green Footballs, to the Virginia Tech website, to CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox, thereby providing validation to those that would use their homicidal urges as a cry for attention?
Will you make no difference at all?
April 19th, 2007 on 4:34 pm
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April 23rd, 2007 on 8:13 am
Interesting how in some of your questions you give your answer as part of the question. Personally, as you would expect, I’m not actively doing anything. I do see it as another point for the gun control lobby to use. No, setting things up to prevent this will not prevent another incident as you’ve indicated because the next one will be different. I do not want to see more and more restrictions based on preventing this. We have too many regulations and restrictions already, less law/government is better. Work to improve, train and educate the law enforcement world and take away so much of the trivial matters that uptight, paranoid, self-important people make them do now.