Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

I know there has been some discussion in other parts of the Forum so I figured this is worth it's own thread.

33 dead, 15 wounded in the worst school shooting in American history.

I don't know what to say really. I was hoping I would never have to hear of this again. It had been a while since we had one and I thought that we had turned the page. I just hope this is the last one and that the fingers are pointed in the proper direction and not at a scapegoat.

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I'm afraid to say I think that you're asking for the impossible. Shootings happen. And scapegoating happens. I bet Jack Thompson is already trying to find out what video games this gunmen played.

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

JT's one step ahead of you.

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What gets me is that VA Tech is the same size public university as what I attend, in a city of 40,000 that is not even twice as large as my city. I was in 5th grade when the Columbine shooting occurred, so the horror of it felt very distant from me. But now that I'm out in the world in a university well open to pedestrians, the horror much easier to imagine. I can also grasp the fear that if it could happen anywhere, it could happen here.

But of course, if I get in my car and drive, there's always a chance that I will never make it to my destination alive. Life is a risky and uncertain business.

Much heartfelt sorrow for the students and family of Virginia Tech.

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dot dot dot

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this:
About time.

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Wow. We don't even know who the guy is and yet JT's already putting the blame fully on video games. I mean, sure, the person MIGHT have played violent games, but they aren't very connected to violence (shootings), and I know of people who get out their rage with games. And I'm glad they do.

Crime has gone down, while video games are a new entertainment medium here to stay. I can barely see how violent video games can be the blame 10000%. Sure, I can say between 10-20% of blame, it's fair, but 100% is just ridiculous. What's really to blame is health care. Seriously. If people were more adequately raised emotionally or treated for their problems better, then these things wouldn't be happening. Of course, we're drilled into thinking about caring for ourselves and be 100% self-reliant, so then there's THAT problem.

Sadly, I'm guilty that I can only think about myself at this time. I'm guessing that security will go up at school, there will be an assembly stressing the importance of ID cards, and propaganda in our school's newspaper on said ID importance. Yet I have no feelings for what happened.

It's terrible what happened and I'm hoping the families and friends can come through the tragedy, though. I can say that.

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um.......

WHAT?!?

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I really don't want to know what you meant by that statement.

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I'm sure that he either meant:
1) The violence at VT would soon bring something of this magnitude
2)Another school shooting was bound to happen during this time
or, Gowd forbid:
3)Another school massacre finally happened and has the window to share views many of us finds ridiculous and/or offensive

I'm hoping it's only the first two.

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Thank you, Capt. Sensitivity.

If I know COLA like I think I do, it's the 3rd option.

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Hence, the word "hope".

Toastpaint, or at least get off this slight tangent for a moment.

For some reason, I think that Jack Thompson thinks video games are to blame, other than the obvious, is for a racial reason. The shooter was reported Asian, and Asian have the stereotype of being videogamers more experienced than we.

Hence, the phrase "for some reason".

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If you knew me, you'd know. You don't.

Its 2, I didn't even know nor care much about whatever the heck was going on at VT, and right now, I could care less. But I'm saying that its about time something like this happend. Now I, among hundreds others, can start shouting in the streets saying "LISTEN, DON'T TALK".
If there is anyway to help prevent something like this from happening, its by listening to the ones who plan it. I don't know this guy, but from personal experience, I can assume he was emotionally distressed/disturbed, but I'm going out on a limb by saying this.
This dude could have been a heartless bastard, but it could have been prevented by talking to the guy. Sure sure, if he didn't go out and get help, then how could anyone have known? Truth, they couldn't have. I'm sure all of this sounds like a bunch of half-assed BS, but I know that if someone didn't start talking to me about how I was feeling, it would have been me shooting up my school, and not this guy shooting up his.

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At some point, people need to be responsible for their own mental health. If I don't know the man, how in the heck do you expect me to offer him any help? Now the man's friends (assuming he had them, of course) probably should have notices some danger signs, true. But still.

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Golly. Scary stuff. I found out about this in history (we had a work period) and I watched live coverage of this from ABC all the way through the next period on mute when I was supposed to be working. Apparently I was the first one at my school to know. Sadder still, the corporate news is already glowing with bs and fluff.

Uff... the girl that lives across the street from me back home goes to Tech. She lost her RA and at least one other girl from her hall, and she doesn't know last I checked where one of her friends is. I'm going to a prayer vigil for Tech now. I really hope she finds her. Prayers out to all the Hokies.

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As the voice of the right-wing gun nut on the forum, I must say that I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone on TV calling for more strict gun control.
I'm guessing 1 of 3 things has happened:
1. The anti-gun owner rights crowd found some decency and decided not to use this tragedy to make a cheap political point
2. The anti-gun owner rights crowd realized that gun control laws don't prevent this kind of thing (we have laws against murder, and people still kill)
3. The anti-gun owner rights people couldn't get in front of a camera.

Either way, it's really sad what happened over there in Blacksburg. I'm a little concerned by the fact that there were two separate events in 2 hours. I really hope that the suspect was behind both and that this wasn't part of some large plan.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

*takes a moment of silence*

The CAA will be praying too.

Something just doesn't make sense to me... The shooting in the dorm that killed one woman and one male. The coverage of the event I was watching described it as "domestic violence"... Is it a completely different event? Or were there two shooters that split up on the campus? Ugh, so confused...

Sree, I'll be honest with you - I thought of gun control when I heard this. I'm not saying that regular law-abiding citizens shouldn't be allowed to have guns, but I DO think it's WAY too easy to get one. Would gun control stop murder? Of course not. But maybe it'd help prevent mass murders like this one. Short of putting metal detectors on every college campus and having key-card entry installed on all college buildings (but if the perp was a student, that wouldn't have helped anyway), I don't know what else might help curb a tragedy like this.

Jack Thompson is a nut.

As everyone has already said, my heart goes out to the folks up in Virginia.

EDIT:

They haven't confirmed it, Ninti. When I first heard the news, I thought perhaps there were two shooters, in a plot together, because the shootings happened on opposite ends of the campus. Now, I'm wondering if it was the same gunman doing both events and the unfortunate oversight of campus police that didn't catch him in time.

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I haven't yet taken the opportunity to express my own utter bewilderment and sadness at this tragic and senseless event. My heart and my prayers go out to the victims and their families.

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Sometimes, I don't know what's worse, the tragedy that was the shooting, or the fact that someone like Jack Thompson would try to exploit this tragedy to further along his own propaganda.

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I wasn't too surprised when I first heard of the VT massacre(of all places, it was Encyclopedia Dramatica).
Oh well.
Also, the guy on the right looks like Meximoot.

Kinda.
Yeah, that's all I have to say...

They may not have to. A revised version of the Assault Weapons Ban is in Congress right now, currently in the hands of the House Judiciary Committee. I imagine the Virginia Tech shooting could win a few votes for it when the time comes. In any event, we can all expect the national gun control and violent media debates to get kicked up over the next few weeks. That's just part of the process; people who think they might have solutions to these sorts of problems are going to want to strike while the iron is hot. In another couple of weeks the country will be back to worrying about American Idol and Anna Nicole Smith, after all.

Mike

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Logical fallacies ahoy! I'd also like to say: graaaaagh!

The VT shooter used two pistols, one of which was a .22. Even if such a ban on assault weapons had been in effect for decades, it wouldn't have prevented this tragedy.

Of course, then there's the fact that there are already so many guns out there that even if the gov't banned ALL firearms today, there'd still be enough floating around to arm every man, woman and child to the teeth for the next century.

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Condolences to the families of the people that were killed in the shooting, even though those families probably won't be reading this post. The worst part is that nothing was done after the first shooting to inform the campus of the possible danger. I know, there are several thousand people there... but still, a few emails being sent out was less than adequate.

I'm not particularly scared, though. With the statistics taken into account, that is, the number of people killed in school shootings compared to the number of people that attend school, the chance is very low.

As for Jack Thompson, he would probably accuse a game involving bunnies picking flowers of promoting flower homicide and sexism. So, taking anything he says into account would not be very rational.

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Terrible. Reading about the victims is the worst part. A lot of these people were smart and promising or had already contributed a lot to society. I guess it shouldn't be more tragic than if 33 uneducated people were killed, but for some reason it feels that way. So I'm a horrible person. The story of the holocaust survivor professor makes me want to necromance the killer's corpse so I can punch him in the face and chop off his zombie head with my sword. (It's a better use for it than playing fruit-sword-"baseball"...)

My mom called me just to make sure I wasn't in Blacksburg for some strange reason. That was odd. Never even been there.

The gun control argument is now officially up and running at full speed on this it seems, and foreign officials are sneaking jabs at our laws into their condolences. Poor form for foreign officials, IMO.

Like I was talking about in another thread, violence like this is completely unacceptable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look for ways to prevent it from happening in the future. What is it about schools that lead to shootings? Usually these things are confined to high schools. You don't get this too often at the university level. But I predict that we'll see more college shootings in the future, because now YOU HAVE TO GO TO COLLEGE. I think school shootings are kids who are having a cornered-animal reaction. When college wasn't as necessary, if you felt trapped, you just left. Now, if you leave, you're pretty much screwed for life monetarily and your family will hate you. In one person the stress levels will rise until they aren't thinking clearly at all, seeing everyone and everything around them as part of this cage holding them against their will, and they lash out (and I think this is doubly true for high school students). It's true they need to get a grip, but saying that won't make them get one. Once stress has pushed someone past rationality, pithy sayings or even reasoned explanations of things that actually would help won't help.

Some possible solutions: psychological checks for gun ownership, the health insurance companies realizing that psychological care is important, combined with a destigmatization of getting psychological help (maybe having psychological checkups yearly just like physicals), and a recognition by all of society that our entire educational system and its relation to hiring requirements is complete nonsense.

(NOTE: The "arguments" in this post were just off the top of my head and I didn't put a bunch of thought into them, so don't get all snarky on me about them. Calmness plz.)

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ATTN: LOWER BOARD USERS HAVE MOVED TO ANOTHER FORUM. COME JOIN THE FUN!

I kinda wanna get up on my soapbox about this...

Ever notice that victims of these horrible tragedies are always shown to be kind, caring, popular, attractive, smart, straight-A students? Like, seriously. They're all well-liked by their peers, they're all helpful, etc. It just doesn't make sense. I'm sure some of it is just them highlighting the victims' positive qualities, but...they are inevitably smart and popular. Just doesn't make sense to me. :/

On a more closely related note, this event is truly tragic. I offer my condolences to the families of the victims.

As for gun control...I'm not for guns being BANNED, but I DO think they should be controlled. Like, they should be fairly hard to acquire. Background checks wouldn't be a bad idea. I mean, like, BB guns and airsoft guns and stuff don't count, but you know what I mean.

I'd like to add, however, that knives are far more awesome than guns.

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I've always said the best way to get everyone say nice things about you is to die. It's considered poor taste to do anything other than saint someone who has recently died.

So of course some of them were jerks. Of course some of them were potheads. Of course some of them cheated and lied and broke the law.

But no one wants to hear that because we feel sorry for the fact that their lives were ended so abruptly and at such a young age.



I don't understand this point of view. VA Tech is already a gun-free campus. It's illegal for anyone to carry a gun there. Nevertheless, this tragedy occurred. What else were we supposed to do to prevent it?

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The student was from South Korea, where the expectation of a college education is higher than anywhere else in the world, practically. It actually goes to strengthen your point. There was probably even more cultural and familial pressure on him to be successful in college than an American would generally have to deal with

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Go watch the video and then read Brian's article.

You know, I really don't think I have an opinion on this. This was terrible but I can't say anything about. Except for that JT is an idiot. But we already know that, right?

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