Thoughts on Virgina Tech

[Moose12]

How does this happen!? Worst school shooting in U.S. History.

[9thDogbert]

Its disgusting...truly is.

When I saw that on the news this morning my heart broke..so many lost lives.

[Real-BadSeed]

Terrible tragedy, alot of hurting families today...

[Bikewer]

The "how" is a question for the psychologists and such. Ever since Charles Stuart Whitman climbed the Texas Tower way back when, the idea of mass killing has entered the communal consciousness.
I don't recall any such incidents on such a scale before Whitman did his little number back in 1966.
Since then, however, it's become depressingly common. Oh, I imagine that an individual's chance of being killed by a mass murderer is vanishingly small. Still, hardly a week goes by that we don't hear of a "work-related" shooting (as we're calling "going postal" now....), or some other case of a loony going over the edge and deciding to take a bunch more with him.

Since I'm in campus law enforcement, this is a prime area of concern. College students like to believe they live in a safe and protected environment, but an incident like this can occur at any time.
We train for them; we do the "response to an active shooter" training, and we now have patrol rifles (M-16 variant) to give the squad a leg up fire-power wise.
I wonder what sort of police presence they have up there? What the response was? It'll all come out on CNN no doubt

[Moose12]

I also don't get how this person supposedley killed somebody in their drom 2 hours before the rest of the shootings, he went 2 hours unchecked, and al the students were unaware. Supposedly though, don't quote me, it's all very skeptical right now, nobody knows if the person is even a student.

[[8th] Wise]

Have many friends that go there, and I transfer there this Fall. This is affecting my community very much as well. A damn shame.

[Yossarian]

I work in campus security too, and I think things are going to be different when I go back to work. We don't worry too much about these things at my school (Queen's University), but you never know.

Terrible stuff. People (Jack Thompson, mostly) are already putting political spin on it, and we don't even have a final body count.

[Coca-Cola]

I know one way it can happen, easy. The shooting in Quebec really got me thinking about what can push people over the edge, especially if you are depressed. I was at one point in such a state and let me tell you if you aren't diagnosed and helped with psychiatry and medicine, especially soon if you're really low, you start thinking some pretty dark thoughts. These thoughts can even scare you particularly after you come out of the hole you were in. You end up not caring about others and yourself. Problematically, most of the time these feelings can also be severely aggravated by social problems ie. regarding hatred of certain students, staff or other people in their lives via insults, bias, physical violence or other negative things which can ultimately be the straw which brakes the camel's back. Now there are a multitude of things which can do this but I think that since we're talking about school shootings these reasons are the most relevant. I know this partially first hand. Given a lot of people whom you hate, a very depressed state of mind and a gun well it speaks for itself doesn't it.

I can understand that if the assailants refused or didn't want to go get help it would be their fault however part of me goes out to the assailants, particularly at the Quebec shooting, since some are known to be depressive and aren't checked up on. Just like any other condition diagnosis and help can, and I think should, also come from family, friends and loved ones on top of one's self. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying what the shooters do was right but I think some of them were just reaching out to tell the community that that is how they feel and are avenging their feelings from lack of care and love.

Not everything is always one sided and I think that these people might not be as negative as portrayed and may be beacons of standing up for one's self, though extreme and a wake up call to have more psychiatric help at schools, work place and abroad.

[Velvet_Revolver]

This is a horrible tragedy...


PS :It's not Charles Stuart Whitman, it's Charles Joseph Whitman...

[NTH_NL]

I was just thinking the same thing as Cola. People will probably lay the fault on everything ranging from videogames to music but not the reasons stated by Cola.
Which is a damn shame.