Yesterday's bloodbath at Virgina Tech sets the nation up for another round of predictable reactions:
• Calls to ban guns on one side with a call for MORE guns on the other.
• Calls to ban "violent" video games.
• Calls to ban "violent" movies and TV shows.
• Calls for tighter security for public buildings (armed guards, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, random searches etc).
• Overreactions at other colleges to imagined threats.
• Orgies of wankerism by the TV and radio talking heads. People like Nancy Grace will metaphorically stroke themselves to shuddering orgasms as they wallow in their all-you-can-eat buffet of postmortem predation.
• Dozens, if not hundreds of law suits over what could have been done to stop this from happening.
• Demands that the death penalty be added to more crimes.
• Demands that various university officials resign.
• Conservatives who will blame the victims nattering on about the treasonous nature of those who demand sane gun laws.
Those are the ramifications. Now for the realities:
• Six months from now the only people who will care about this event are families of the victims, the survivors, and the officials being sued. The media will forget about the incident until next April 16th when they trot out their cameras for the memorial service, and a 3-5 minute piece called <i>Virgina Tech One Year Later: What have we learned?</i>
• Many, many people who have survived this event will suffer the mental trauma, which will slowly eat at them for the rest of their lives. Some will get help, most won't. This damage will manifest itself as depression, an inability to hold jobs or maintain relationships. For some, the trauma will lead to drugs, alcohol, and abusive behavior. Eventually, it will cost someone else their life or lives, whether due to suicide, or murder.
• We, as a society, have the ability and the resources to greatly reduce this kind of suffering, but we won't.
• As tragic as this mass shooting is, the number 33 will simply be a number which some future individual will see as a "record" to be broken. It will broken in this country. It will be broken far sooner than we think.
• The sanctity of gun ownership will prevent any meaningful reform of gun laws.
• Each bullet the medical examiner removes from a dead son, daughter, mother, father, brother, or sister; each bullet the surgeon remove from a broken body, represents a profit to a gun dealer and a gun manufacturer. They will keep on selling these instruments of death with nary a troubling thought to disturb their sleep. People will buy groceries, go on vacations, and send their children to college on these profits. These people should be shunned and spit upon, but they won't.
• Politicians will cash checks from the NRA which will allow them to thwart any attempt to reduce the chance of these types of bloodbaths. They will be quite sanctimonious about taking the money. These people should be shunned and spit upon, but they won't.
• Some jokers will think it funny to call in fake threats to other colleges. Some will be caught, most won't. Those who are caught will not suffer the punishment they deserve, nor anything close.
• About every ten days for at least the next two years, the same number of American soldiers will die in Iraq as died at Virginia Tech. 2-3 times that number of Iraqi civilians will die EACH day in Iraq from at least the next decade.
• George W. Bush will sleep soundly.
http://www.thoughtcrimes.org/s9/index.php?/archives/1886-Ramifications-and-Realities.html
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