It seems to me that once the VT news dies down

[blues90]

All the talk about gun laws will vanish and will all go right back to where they were . This is always the way things happen , right down the memory hole without a move toward any resolve . Either this or some other horrid event or perhaps even a meaningless event such as a shaved head will come along and take the headlines .

What do you think ?

[bryant69]

1. You are right

For one thing as much as we might get up in arms about it here (some of us anyway), the Democratic Party isn't interested in having this be an issue.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. Until the next time, when again they'll all pretend the appropriate

and polite level of shock, dismay & outrage.

[saltpoint]

3. A couple of DU posts have hit on the notion of bullying as one of

the constants found in many of the campus- or school-setting shootings.

In many of the cases, the shooter is a male whose classmates or teachers often say he was bullied, sometimes from early grades.

An NPR report yesterday covered the Korean-American community in Los Angeles, the largest concentration of Korean-Americans in the country. There was general concern that the Blacksburg incident might result in ethnic backlash, and a couple of South Korean children had been targeted, and one had been spat on.

The gratuitous satisfaction school kids get from ostracizing and bullying a classmate seems to me to be hardly worth the loss of 33 human beings in Blacksburg this week, or at Columbine, or any of the other campuses where shootings have resulted in death and injury.

I can't say what will happen with gun legislation, but I'd like to see the VT tragedy prompt a national dialogue on bullying in schools.

I don't see any negatives and it might do a hell of a lot of good.

[blues90]

5. There is a large Korean community in L.A.

Here there is a division with borders , there has been a large transition of Koreans taking over areas that were once black then hispanic and now Korean , this also borders on a very large area of Armenians . You can walk a few blocks and leave one area and enter another with only the intersections being the borders .

This has caused alot of resentment . I worked for a Ford dealership in Hollywood that was a split , half Korean and half hispanic . The sales and owner and finance were all Korean and the working sector is hispanic , by the way I was the only white there .

The younger customers being of each race were tolerent of eachother for the most part but the older generation were not .

I can only say there is a tension one can almost feel all throughout these areas .

[saltpoint]

9. I understand and had heard similar accounts from others.

I hope the Blacksburg incident does not prompt people in L.A. or anyplace else to revert to retro-bigoted attitudes toward anyone.

That would only mean more wounding, more sadness.

[charlie]

11. After Columbine

Jon Katz, a journalist who was widely derided on Slashdot (he couldn't write "water is wet" without a torrent of posters proclaiming his idiocy), wrote a column entitled "Voices From the Hellmouth", examining high school bully culture as a possible cause for Harris and Klebold's rampage. With that, he went from pariah to Someone Who Knew, and the response caused Slashdot itself to suffer from the dreaded Slashdot Effect, the servers buckling under the load for the better part of a week. Katz uncorked a tide of anguish and anger, thousands of plaintive stories were posted as nerds, dorks, and geeks unburdened themselves. The tumult on Slashdot spread to the wider net and attracted notice in the old media, and for a short moment it looked like the issue of bullying might break open into national awareness, but like most things, it sparked brightly and was snuffed by media's attention deficit disorder. A goddamned shame.

[saltpoint]

12. Hey charlie. Thanks for that post. I'm not familiar with Katz' work, but

I follow what you're saying.

I wish there were some other place -- well, some other person, actually -- people with that kind of burden could speak with instead of trying their luck in cyberspace, but at least they felt they had an outlet now that might not have been available to them only a few years ago.

It would take more than the occasional workshop and memo home about bullying, I think, but hell, it's worth the effort to say the least. I'm not doing a Pollyanna version of life -- I realize it's tough in the real landscape and that it would be impossible to stop all bullying. But a concerted public relations effort -- heightened and championed by a Democratic president -- would go a long way to make it better for some. Shoot for the stars and be grateful for any gains.

I love your phrase, "the media's attention deficit disorder." Sad to say that's exactly the problem.

[AZBlue]

4. If we let it vanish, it will. If we pursue it, it won't.

This one's really up to us.

Are we going to demand changes and hold our legislators accountable?

[Ignacio Upton]

6. You're correct

It will be like the Columbine aftermath: blame guns, and possibly video games, and then not talk about them after a few months to a year. The shooting will have zero impact on 2008 politically-speaking.

[Rocknrule]

7. "Dies down" probably isn't the best phrase to use

Sorry, but people get very sensitive to these things, you know

[blues90]

10. You are right , how about , evaporates ?

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Have you sent a letter to your reps?

You can bet your local gun owners have