After Virginia Tech: Who To Blame?
235 words.
There are a lot of jumbled thoughts in my head after the Virginia Tech shooting yesterday. One infuriating aspect of the media coverage has been the almost constant attempts to shift blame away from the shooter. “What went wrong?” they ask, as if the shooter was just another victim. “Who’s responsible?” “How could this have happened?” They don’t say it, but it’s definitely implied: “Who’s career should end over this?”
I suppose it’s natural to ask those sorts of questions. One doesn’t like to think that a young human being is capable of such pitiless violence. At least one entire generation of Americans have grown up without having to experience the brutality of war firsthand, so it’s easy to forget the human capacity for killing. But to me it’s obvious how to assign blame: The murderer is responsible. This “happened” because some sociopath plotted and carried out an operation to kill a lot of defenseless students and teachers at a time when they would be most vulnerable.
The media should stop trying to get school officials fired and start doing some real reporting about things that matter. Find out some more about the shooter. Was it really a student with a personal grudge or was this another unexpected battleground in the global war on terrorism? Emerging details support the lone gunman theory, but it’s hard not to wonder about it in this day and age.
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