V.Tech and Personal Responsibility

If you want to go on about personal responsibility you can just say he was satanically possessed…

The one thing that I’ve seen time and time again in tragedies such as the one most recently at VT is that the perpetrator is a social outcast who had been bullied, picked on, ridiculed, etc… all of his life.

Now, I’m in no way attempting to justify the act of mass murder as an appropriate response to such treatment. Yet the teasing and other forms of social ostracism that children and teenagers inflict on each other is mind-boggling, and often borders on (if not qualifies as) psychological cruelty.

Children know that it’s wrong to bully, pick on or ridicule someone else, but usually get away with it because our society isn’t willing to reinstall a sense of honor and integrity in our children. Put another way, school is often a jungle where the rule is “survival of the fittest”.

Thus, does it come as any surprise that young people who aren’t capable of surviving in such an environment resort to horrific violence?

[quote]Professor X wrote:
Kill’Em All wrote:

No this is what did it.
http://www.newstarget.com/021798.html

I’m not sure how serious you are being with the response, but I do consider the mass medication of society a problem in and of itself. I also find it EXTREMELY hypocritical that I can have several patients over any given day taking anti-depressants (and this is the military) yet the same people who seem to ignore this are the same ones who decry the use of anabolics in sports or the legalization of one of the least harmful “drugs” known to man.

It would be wrong to blame anti-depressants alone for what this guy did. That is plane scapegoating and overly simplistic. There were MANY factors that no doubt contributed. How much his prescribed drugs played a part is only speculation.

Anymore discussion of that topic will probably just result in debate about how backwards most politicians are in what they promote or rally against regardless of party affiliation.

I think the primary blame in most of these cases falls on the parents of these kids. An attentive parents knows if their kid is crazy. You can’t hide ‘crazy’ unless someone is truly insane with a possible multiple personality disorder.[/quote]

I defenitely was not being completely serious. But I just had a hunch that their was some defenite chemical involvement.

Ive had some friends on Anti D.s that suddenly became suicidal on them and it took them 3 weeks to come back to normal.

I am really curious to see if this guy was on any other substances,even if weeks prior.

yes defenitely the parents are part of the equation. I have to say I feel bad for them and even their safety though.

But then again you hear about people beaten and tortured their whole lives, and turning out to be the most humanitarian beings.

What pisses me off about this most is that everyone with some asshat agenda is trying to prescribe broad and intrusive “solutions” to the whole of society when nobody fit to manage a pretzel stand can demonstrate that there’s a significant problem. How many school shooting incidents have we had this week? This month? This year? In a country almost 300 million large?

We have an incident like this once or twice every few years. This guy killed 32 college students out of a total US enrollment of almost 20 million, or roughly .00016%. Unfortunate though it may be, THIS IS NOT AN EPIDEMIC. There are still a million preventable ways your kid is more likely to die and we do nothing about them. Why? Because most of them are recognized as either statistical flukes or acceptable tradeoffs.

If we really wanted to save lives we would reduce the speed limit to 35 and quintuple the number of traffic enforcement officers. Why don’t we? We accept the risk. It’s time people accept the risk of living in what is till one of the safest places in the world.

Next time you bitch about how unsafe your kids are at school, just remember that if they were in Ivory Coast at the wrong time, they would have been made child soldiers after watching you get murdered.

[quote]Sting wrote:
The one thing that I’ve seen time and time again in tragedies such as the one most recently at VT is that the perpetrator is a social outcast who had been bullied, picked on, ridiculed, etc… all of his life.

Now, I’m in no way attempting to justify the act of mass murder as an appropriate response to such treatment. Yet the teasing and other forms of social ostracism that children and teenagers inflict on each other is mind-boggling, and often borders on (if not qualifies as) psychological cruelty.

Children know that it’s wrong to bully, pick on or ridicule someone else, but usually get away with it because our society isn’t willing to reinstall a sense of honor and integrity in our children. Put another way, school is often a jungle where the rule is “survival of the fittest”.

Thus, does it come as any surprise that young people who aren’t capable of surviving in such an environment resort to horrific violence?[/quote]

I agree with almost everything you say. We have to detest Chou’s reaction but it would be blind to just cast him as a monster and leave it at that. As you say, this is a trend. All of these schoolyard murderers were outcasts that had been ostracized and bullied by others and finally just got fed up.

I dont think this phenomenon is anything new. Kids who are a little bit different have been getting picked on forever. What to do about it? We need to think about it, because while most of us are horrified by what happened, there are people out there right now who have been bullied all their life and a part of them must feel redeemed by Chou’s horrific massacre. As a result, one or two of them may feel inspired to copycat.

[quote]etaco wrote:
We have an incident like this once or twice every few years. This guy killed 32 college students out of a total US enrollment of almost 20 million, or roughly .00016%. Unfortunate though it may be, THIS IS NOT AN EPIDEMIC. There are still a million preventable ways your kid is more likely to die and we do nothing about them. Why? Because most of them are recognized as either statistical flukes or acceptable tradeoffs.

[/quote]

I have to admit. You make an excellent point here. The problem is that thing like this (understandably) become media events and, as a result, we imagine them to be more pervasive than they actually are. It’s especially frustrating in regards to kidnappings of children. When one happens and the child dies or gets raped, we hear about it for days, weeks, years (in the case of Jon Benet Ramsey). Then people think that it is an epidemic and wont let their kids out to play in the yard!

As you suggest, kids are much more at risk of dying from car accidents when they accompany a parent on a casual ride to the supermarket.

Point well taken!

[quote]Steel Nation wrote:
I blame the media. Those cocksuckers sensationalize every gory detail. Look at msn’s website today. The fame they’re giving this asshole is unbelievably disgusting. All in the name of ratings and the almighty dollar. I wonder what it feels like to sell your soul and values for advertising money.

EDIT: I don’t blame the media for what happened. The asshat-in-question is obviously responsible for his own actions. I blame them for being completely irresponsible and sensationalistic in their “reporting” of it. [/quote]

“The media” is basically a reflection of society. They show us what we want to see. It’s very democratic, in a way. Show something that people have no interest for and your ratings plummet. Show Anna Nicole, Tom Cruise jumping on a couch and people getting shot, stabbed, beaten on a 24 hour loop and you have advertisers knocking on your door to buy your spots.

Society dictates the media it has. Or, more precisely, it gets the media it deserves.

[quote]BabyBuster wrote:
PGJ wrote:
Liberalism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere can help themselves.
That’s becoming our culture. A culture of entitlement.

All the libs are going to jump around and blame the GUN, not the MAN for the killing. They are already trying to put the blame on the gun store for legally selling him the guns and on the campus police for not shutting down the school in a timely manner. This guy was 100% responsible for his evil actions.

The problem is you can’t effectively deal with people with obvious problems because you might infringe on their rights. You have to do something really out-there to get attention because nobody want’s legal trouble. Docotrs can’t even tell their patients they are fat and need to loose weight. They can get sued for that.

Yes, personal accountability is virtually lost today.

Take your worthless political agenda elsewhere. This is a serious conversation about serious situation, and doesn’t need to be dragged down with your “libs are stoopid” BS. This is too real and too soon of a tragedy for you to use it to espouse this crap.
[/quote]

Go back and reread the OP. This is a political thread. It’s about personal accountability. People are already starting to blame guns, gun store owners and the campus police. Those people just happen to be primarily liberals.

“Oh, the poor guy was picked on”. I guarantee there will eventually be a great deal of sympathy coming out of left-leaning individuals claiming his murderous rampage was not entirely his fault, that he was reacting to social mistreatment, that he had a sickness.

We already know about every doctor’s visit he ever made, but can you name 5 victims of his rampage? Already there is a certain level of sympathy for this evil man.

This whole situation is being used by politicians as a springboard for gun control instead of focusing on personal accountability. Sue the gun store and the gun manufacturer. Hold others accountable, right.

On another note, I don’t understand how a guy with 2 small caliber pistols killed that many people. Why did nobody fight back? With that many people in the building, you would think that someone would have tried to stop the guy. I AM NOT SECOND GUESSING OR CRITICIZING THE STUDENTS AND STAFF. That is a legitimate question that I bet investigators are looking at closely.

[quote]PGJ wrote:

On another note, I don’t understand how a guy with 2 small caliber pistols killed that many people. Why did nobody fight back? With that many people in the building, you would think that someone would have tried to stop the guy. I AM NOT SECOND GUESSING OR CRITICIZING THE STUDENTS AND STAFF. That is a legitimate question that I bet investigators are looking at closely.

[/quote]

I have contemplated this as well. I think the long and short of it is that they were just college kids. They weren’t warriors, prepared to fight on a moment’s notice, ready to give their lives for their peers, and fearlessly resolved to confront chaos head-on. Most people aren’t, even guys with training and a lot of T, can still completely buckle under some conditions.

It is a lot to ask someone to sacrifice their life to protect others. It is some ‘noble’ ideal that has all but lost its meaning in the modern world. Most people, in a life or death situation, do whatever they feel will save THEIR life. It is not exactly priority to save a bunch of classmates who you may or may not even know very well.

It is also a really difficult thing to speculate on, because it is really easy to think you are trained to handle a situation like that, but without having actually been in one(as was the case with all the victims) it is impossible to say how you would really act.

Even the most virtuous T-man, with all the confidence and strength and quick thinking, might still be completely ineffectual to stop a shooter in a situation like this.

But, it does raise the topic that perhaps that is the problem. That no one even considers these situations to be possible. Sure they happen, but people still deny that it can ever happen to them. Is it too much to ask people to consider what they might have done in that situation? and really consider it.

People talking about guns and school security and all this other stuff are completely missing the point, imo. Even if all the students were armed, the results may very well have been exactly the same. Just owning a firearm is a far cry from actually being able to use it in a chaotic situation. It’s even farther from being able to stand up, and put your life on the line so readily.

I think that the ‘issue’, if there is one, is that of respect and integrity and personal responsibility. These situations are aberrations, they are not the norm, and it is precisely that they happen so infrequently, that no one has any clue what to do when they do happen. People need to learn that these things CAN and will happen, but they can’t be afraid of them.

[quote]PGJ wrote:
Go back and reread the OP. This is a political thread. It’s about personal accountability. People are already starting to blame guns, gun store owners and the campus police. Those people just happen to be primarily liberals.
[/quote]

It doesn’t matter if they just happen to be primarily sea monkeys. It is completely irrelevant.

[quote]Malevolence wrote:
PGJ wrote:

On another note, I don’t understand how a guy with 2 small caliber pistols killed that many people. Why did nobody fight back? With that many people in the building, you would think that someone would have tried to stop the guy. I AM NOT SECOND GUESSING OR CRITICIZING THE STUDENTS AND STAFF. That is a legitimate question that I bet investigators are looking at closely.

I have contemplated this as well. I think the long and short of it is that they were just college kids. They weren’t warriors, prepared to fight on a moment’s notice, ready to give their lives for their peers, and fearlessly resolved to confront chaos head-on. Most people aren’t, even guys with training and a lot of T, can still completely buckle under some conditions.

It is a lot to ask someone to sacrifice their life to protect others. It is some ‘noble’ ideal that has all but lost its meaning in the modern world. Most people, in a life or death situation, do whatever they feel will save THEIR life. It is not exactly priority to save a bunch of classmates who you may or may not even know very well.

It is also a really difficult thing to speculate on, because it is really easy to think you are trained to handle a situation like that, but without having actually been in one(as was the case with all the victims) it is impossible to say how you would really act.

Even the most virtuous T-man, with all the confidence and strength and quick thinking, might still be completely ineffectual to stop a shooter in a situation like this.

But, it does raise the topic that perhaps that is the problem. That no one even considers these situations to be possible. Sure they happen, but people still deny that it can ever happen to them. Is it too much to ask people to consider what they might have done in that situation? and really consider it.

People talking about guns and school security and all this other stuff are completely missing the point, imo. Even if all the students were armed, the results may very well have been exactly the same. Just owning a firearm is a far cry from actually being able to use it in a chaotic situation. It’s even farther from being able to stand up, and put your life on the line so readily.

I think that the ‘issue’, if there is one, is that of respect and integrity and personal responsibility. These situations are aberrations, they are not the norm, and it is precisely that they happen so infrequently, that no one has any clue what to do when they do happen. People need to learn that these things CAN and will happen, but they can’t be afraid of them.[/quote]

Very, very good points. I wasn’t so much speaking about fighting to save others as much as fighting for “self preservation”.

I completely agree that nowbody knows how they will react in a true life/death situation until that situation arises. Is it ironic that the only person who seems to have resisted is the 76 year old Jewish professor who was a victim of Nazi Germany?

I’m still having a hard time understanding how this guy killed 32 people in a matter of minutes with a .22 and a 9mm.

[quote]Malevolence wrote:
PGJ wrote:
Go back and reread the OP. This is a political thread. It’s about personal accountability. People are already starting to blame guns, gun store owners and the campus police. Those people just happen to be primarily liberals.

It doesn’t matter if they just happen to be primarily sea monkeys. It is completely irrelevant. [/quote]

I disagree. This is an issue that deeply divides American society politically. You automatically know which side stands for which position.

[quote]Malevolence wrote:
PGJ wrote:

On another note, I don’t understand how a guy with 2 small caliber pistols killed that many people. Why did nobody fight back? With that many people in the building, you would think that someone would have tried to stop the guy. I AM NOT SECOND GUESSING OR CRITICIZING THE STUDENTS AND STAFF. That is a legitimate question that I bet investigators are looking at closely.

I have contemplated this as well. I think the long and short of it is that they were just college kids. They weren’t warriors, prepared to fight on a moment’s notice, ready to give their lives for their peers, and fearlessly resolved to confront chaos head-on. Most people aren’t, even guys with training and a lot of T, can still completely buckle under some conditions.

It is a lot to ask someone to sacrifice their life to protect others. It is some ‘noble’ ideal that has all but lost its meaning in the modern world. Most people, in a life or death situation, do whatever they feel will save THEIR life. It is not exactly priority to save a bunch of classmates who you may or may not even know very well.

It is also a really difficult thing to speculate on, because it is really easy to think you are trained to handle a situation like that, but without having actually been in one(as was the case with all the victims) it is impossible to say how you would really act.

Even the most virtuous T-man, with all the confidence and strength and quick thinking, might still be completely ineffectual to stop a shooter in a situation like this.

But, it does raise the topic that perhaps that is the problem. That no one even considers these situations to be possible. Sure they happen, but people still deny that it can ever happen to them. Is it too much to ask people to consider what they might have done in that situation? and really consider it.

People talking about guns and school security and all this other stuff are completely missing the point, imo. Even if all the students were armed, the results may very well have been exactly the same. Just owning a firearm is a far cry from actually being able to use it in a chaotic situation. It’s even farther from being able to stand up, and put your life on the line so readily.

I think that the ‘issue’, if there is one, is that of respect and integrity and personal responsibility. These situations are aberrations, they are not the norm, and it is precisely that they happen so infrequently, that no one has any clue what to do when they do happen. People need to learn that these things CAN and will happen, but they can’t be afraid of them.[/quote]

This has been the most fascinating part for me since it became apparent that no one attempted to defend themselves during this tragedy. There were tools available to these people that could have been used to disrupt the shooter but no one chose to intervene beyond the dormitory RA and the Jewish professor. Everyone else seems to have assumed the “deer in the headlights” mode.

God only knows how many cannisters of mace and pepper spray were in the possession of the female students yet no one attempted to use them. Mere seconds were available to disrupt this shooter but no one had the instinct or training to act for their own or collective defense.

These students probably never even considered the possibility that they would have to fight for their lives on 16 April 2007 or any other day.

My father taught me to never put myself in a position to become a victim and it was reinforced in my Army career. Now I am passing that on to my children. They know to be aware of their surroundings and who is in the area with them. They know to always look for an “out” that can be used in a violent situation.

They also know to use every available resource to disrupt a violent individual and escape as quickly as possible. When they get old enough they will take training so they will know how to use a concealed firearm to prevent becoming a helpless victim.

Most of us wear seatbelts every day to save our lives even though the likelihood of a potential fatal crash is very slim.

We should also prepare ourselves every day in case the unimagineable happens and we find ourselves facing violence.

[quote]DM246 wrote:

This has been the most fascinating part for me since it became apparent that no one attempted to defend themselves during this tragedy. There were tools available to these people that could have been used to disrupt the shooter but no one chose to intervene beyond the dormitory RA and the Jewish professor. Everyone else seems to have assumed the “deer in the headlights” mode.

God only knows how many cannisters of mace and pepper spray were in the possession of the female students yet no one attempted to use them. Mere seconds were available to disrupt this shooter but no one had the instinct or training to act for their own or collective defense.

These students probably never even considered the possibility that they would have to fight for their lives on 16 April 2007 or any other day.

My father taught me to never put myself in a position to become a victim and it was reinforced in my Army career. Now I am passing that on to my children. They know to be aware of their surroundings and who is in the area with them. They know to always look for an “out” that can be used in a violent situation.

They also know to use every available resource to disrupt a violent individual and escape as quickly as possible. When they get old enough they will take training so they will know how to use a concealed firearm to prevent becoming a helpless victim.

Most of us wear seatbelts every day to save our lives even though the likelihood of a potential fatal crash is very slim.

We should also prepare ourselves every day in case the unimagineable happens and we find ourselves facing violence. [/quote]

Great points. I think a lot of it has to do with a society trained to not fight back.

Just recently here in Georgia, a man walked into a public school and started sexually assaulting a young female student. Luckily, there were some staff members who attacked the man and held him down until the cops came. They were heros. Then in the local paper, there was a letter CRITICIZING the heros for rash action and saying they should have not gotten involved and just called the police. WTF?

[quote]PGJ wrote:
Malevolence wrote:
PGJ wrote:
Go back and reread the OP. This is a political thread. It’s about personal accountability. People are already starting to blame guns, gun store owners and the campus police. Those people just happen to be primarily liberals.

It doesn’t matter if they just happen to be primarily sea monkeys. It is completely irrelevant.

I disagree. This is an issue that deeply divides American society politically. You automatically know which side stands for which position.

[/quote]

And knowing that, means nothing. It only serves to create more division. Treat people as people, call a spade a spade. As soon as you start trying to define people as either this or that, you start closing your mind to the reality that life, and people, are more complicated than that.

Take some responsibility, and don’t succumb to cheap political labeling games, that mean absolutely nothing in the real world.

There’s way too much monday morning quarterbacking going on here over every aspect of this incident. Everybody is making assumptions with complete information after the fact, with plenty of time to consider the implications. The police, the kids, the school administration, they were all operating with minimal shreds of info, trying to piece together the most likely scenario and other possibilities in a severely time constrained high pressure situation.

For most though, the limited information available would have presented a “most likely scenario” substantially different from reality until it was too late to respond to the situation any better.

[quote]DM246 wrote:
This has been the most fascinating part for me since it became apparent that no one attempted to defend themselves during this tragedy. There were tools available to these people that could have been used to disrupt the shooter but no one chose to intervene beyond the dormitory RA and the Jewish professor. Everyone else seems to have assumed the “deer in the headlights” mode.

God only knows how many cannisters of mace and pepper spray were in the possession of the female students yet no one attempted to use them. Mere seconds were available to disrupt this shooter but no one had the instinct or training to act for their own or collective defense.

These students probably never even considered the possibility that they would have to fight for their lives on 16 April 2007 or any other day.

My father taught me to never put myself in a position to become a victim and it was reinforced in my Army career. Now I am passing that on to my children. They know to be aware of their surroundings and who is in the area with them. They know to always look for an “out” that can be used in a violent situation.

They also know to use every available resource to disrupt a violent individual and escape as quickly as possible. When they get old enough they will take training so they will know how to use a concealed firearm to prevent becoming a helpless victim.

Most of us wear seatbelts every day to save our lives even though the likelihood of a potential fatal crash is very slim.

We should also prepare ourselves every day in case the unimagineable happens and we find ourselves facing violence. [/quote]

I agree with much of what you said. “Don’t let yourself become a victim” is particularly poignant, if not a bit controversial. The seatbelt analogy as well.

That being said, there is a line between being personally responsible, safe, rational and being excessive, paranoid, and overbearing.

[quote]PGJ wrote:
Great points. I think a lot of it has to do with a society trained to not fight back.

Just recently here in Georgia, a man walked into a public school and started sexually assaulting a young female student. Luckily, there were some staff members who attacked the man and held him down until the cops came. They were heros. Then in the local paper, there was a letter CRITICIZING the heros for rash action and saying they should have not gotten involved and just called the police. WTF? [/quote]

I would certainly call the staff members heroic and I am sure the female student and her family appreciated their fast action on her behalf.

The author of the critical letter was probably the rapist’s mom. Those “mean staff people” beat up her poor misunderstood son. ha ha

I am in Georgia as well and the town I live in has seen a rash of home invasions. A couple weeks ago two guys tried to intervene on behalf of a neighbor during a home invasion. While they were able to disrupt the criminals they failed to assess the situation and arm themselves beforehand. Unfortunately, both would-be heroes were killed in the process but not before unmasking one of the criminals. An eyewitness recognized the criminal and identified him to police and he has since been arrested for murder.

Both of those guys would be alive if they had been skilled in situational awareness.