Chrystalline ([personal profile] chrystalline) wrote2007-04-19 11:41 pm

Silent Witness or Vocal Action?

For those who don’t use WP, there’s a collection of new blog post links at the bottom of the admin dashboard. While I was playing around with the settings, I saw a post about holding a day of blog silence for the Virginia shooting victims. I considered simply posting the image and timestamping it for the 30th (after all, I just learned how, it’s easy, and it’s not like it makes a huge difference either way - I’ve never been a daily poster), but as I read the comments in the thread, I changed my mind.

I want to talk about this because not only is this a highly-emotionally-charged issue, but there are people being close-minded on the one side and impractical on the other.

On the one hand, a day of blog silence is kind of gimmicky and really doesn’t accomplish much by itself. The two minutes of silence Lorelle describes in Israel is different, partly because the scale of slaughter was mind-blowing, but mostly because it’s an actual, physical silence that requires you and everyone around you to connect in a way that the internet just cannot accomplish. I’m a web geek, pure and simple, but a moment of silence on the web hardly has the same effect as a moment of silence in person. However, if it makes you feel better, go ahead.

That said, will all the people posting variations on the theme of “Silence won’t change anything” please stop being so inflammatory about it? The vitriol is staggering. Stop being on my side; you’re making my side look stupid. (No Graeme, it’s not just you)

To those of you taking this as an opportunity to bash the US - you are welcome to your opinions, but hanging around trash-talking doesn’t help either. If you want change, then do something to make it happen; flaming bloggers who don’t agree with you is not going to miraculously change their minds. If you’re upset because someone organized a memorial for US victims and not some other nation’s dead, why don’t you organize a memorial for them? Stop bashing us because we don’t honor the dead of every single tragedy in every single nation. We can’t handle that much ourselves, even if we could be aware of it all, and neither could you. You don’t want to participate, fine, but there’s no reason to be so antagonistic to Lorelle just for bringing it up.

I like Fish’s suggestion, actually, because there are countless tragedies in the world, and frankly, there will always be tragedies because humanity is fundamentally flawed. There will always be death by human error and human anger and human pride and human hatred - it won’t go away for the wishing of it, but we can take steps to protect ourselves.

I think what gets me the most riled is the fact that the majority of the commenters are set on the idea that stronger gun control is what’s needed and act as if the US as a whole is insane because we have our Second Amendment, despite the already-Constitution-bending gun control laws. It’s a mistake to assume that restrictions on guns will prevent slaughter.

Hello? Have we forgotten the whole of human history already? There have been cases of murder since the very beginning, when Cain murdered his brother Abel, presumably with a knife or club of some sort. Since then there have been murders and wars with sticks, knives, spears, swords, axes, arrows, catapults, biochem warfare (diseased/decomposing carcasses flung over fortress walls, smallpox-infested blankets, anthrax, and mustard gas), cannons, rifles, bombs, machine guns, missiles…

You think restricting gun sales is going to change humanity’s ability to kill each other when we choose to do so? Now that the gun has been invented, anyone with sufficient knowledge can make one. It can’t be un-invented. It’s not going away, and trying to disarm the world is futile. Besides, the greatest incidents of mass-slaughter in this country have not involved guns. September 11? Pocket knives and box cutters on airplanes. The airline industry is gradually dying, but it hasn’t been banned, and banning the manufacture and sale of box cutters and pocket knives would probably result in an increase in self-inflicted knife wounds as people tried to use larger knives on their boxes. Oklahoma City? Fertilizer and diesel fuel. Surely you don’t mean to outlaw that? The country would starve.

As long as we’re thinking about this, let’s consider this: what if one or more of the professors had been carrying a gun that day? Some of the students had the presence of mind to block the door shut after he left so he couldn’t get back in, but what if they’d had the option of a weapon to use to stop him before he shot more than thirty people? The death toll would have been a lot lower.

“But,” many of you are saying, “the issue is getting the guy help when he needed it!”

Okay, let’s go down that line. The AP article says:

Cho’s twisted, violence-filled writings and menacing, uncommunicative demeanor had disturbed professors and students so much that he was removed from one English class and was repeatedly urged to get counseling.

Counseling. Psychiatric hospitals. I get the feeling what he really needed was an exorcist. Being alone and outcast in school is not enough to make someone go berserk like this; I was one of those, and the idea of going on a killing rampage like this is horrific. The kind of rage and hate I see in the few stills and quotes I can find of his video just seems more demonic than anything else. There is no rational thought in it; it’s blind, killing fury, as if someone (or something) was whispering in his ear, goading him into taking this extreme action. I can’t see any other explanation for his “forced into a corner” comment, and I don’t see that plunking him in a chair and making him listen to a psychiatrist would have made any difference. Obviously his teachers never managed to get through to him; why would the shrink be any different?

The comments from his grandfather are troubling, though. Your family is the primary shaper of your future. If your family doesn’t care enough to set you on the right path while you’re growing up, you’re going to meet an unhappy end. It’s not the school or the classmates’ fault.

Still:

AP:
Police and university officials have been accused of missing warning signs in Cho’s behavior and failing to safeguard the campus after the gunfire broke out.

There is probably some merit in this, though the dorm shooting probably seemed like an isolated incident until the shooting started in the classrooms. It’s always easy to look back in hindsight and say, ‘yes, they should have done something about that.’ Things aren’t always that clear beforehand, especially in an era when schools have to be extra-careful about the feelings of people who aren’t white males. It would have been very easy to turn any action they took restricting Cho into a “they hate Asians!” PR nightmare.

AP:
Authorities on Wednesday disclosed that more than a year before the massacre, Cho had been accused of sending unwanted messages to two women and was taken to a psychiatric hospital on a magistrate’s orders and was pronounced a danger to himself. But he was released with orders to undergo outpatient treatment.

On the one hand, it’s easy to say they should have locked him up, since we now know what he was capable of doing. On the other hand, I know of others who have been accused of being a danger to others who have had their lives ruined by such high-handed action from psychiatric personnel. It’s dangerous to give them the power to declare: “This one is sane and should be allowed freedom, but that one is not sane and should be locked away forever!” There is no objective measurement of sanity. There are rough guidelines, but it pretty much comes down to “this person gives me the creeps - he’s not right!” It’s not truly scientific, it’s subject to interpretation, and that makes the power of freedom or captivity a frightening prospect when in the hands of other people, like the psych hospitals.

All in all, this whole situation frightens me on many levels. I can see this being used to further disarm the public, to strengthen the power of the pyschiatric personnel, and to rationalize treating the population as if we are nothing more than cattle to be herded by the officials in power. Remember the victims in Virginia, yes, but remember also the Polish and the Jews in WWII who were slaughtered because they had already been disarmed.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.