Va Tech Shooting
I should probably say something intelligent and poignant about the shooting at Virginia Tech today, especially since it was the most deadly school shooting ever (and most deadly random mowing-down of human life with guns within the US borders that comes to my mind at all.) The thing is, I can't think of anything to say. I mean, what do you say? Some kid wakes up one day and decides to kill a bunch of people, and I'm supposed to say something that makes that make sense?
Actually, he didn't just wake up and decide to do that -- he had to have spent some time planning that and making it happen, which makes it even more difficult to discuss. Why? Why would someone do something like that? What happened to this kid to make him despise humankind so much as to take a gun on a college campus and blow people away like little metal ducks in a carnival game?
This is an act so heinous that I can't even begin to wrap my head around it to talk about it, much less understand what happened enough to point a finger or work myself into a good rant. All I can do is feel incredible sadness for those poor students -- some of them probably finishing up their first semester away from home -- and for the families of those who had to experience this firsthand. It terrifies me to think that this sort of thing is happening often enough that the news channels have snazzy graphics and theme music already made up with titles like "GUNS IN SCHOOLS" and "SCHOOL SHOOTING" with little crosshairs in the O's.
Everytime this happens, especially in a school, I want to run home and hug my kids and never let them out of the house again. This is the first time I have ever really had to explain something like this to them. They were too young to get 9/11, and too sheltered to hear about some of the other tragedies our nation has faced. The Iraq war is really far away. This happened just one state over. Isaac and Joe are kind of freaked out, and I wish I could say to them, "it's just TV. It wasn't real." But I can't. They know better, anyway.
Actually, he didn't just wake up and decide to do that -- he had to have spent some time planning that and making it happen, which makes it even more difficult to discuss. Why? Why would someone do something like that? What happened to this kid to make him despise humankind so much as to take a gun on a college campus and blow people away like little metal ducks in a carnival game?
This is an act so heinous that I can't even begin to wrap my head around it to talk about it, much less understand what happened enough to point a finger or work myself into a good rant. All I can do is feel incredible sadness for those poor students -- some of them probably finishing up their first semester away from home -- and for the families of those who had to experience this firsthand. It terrifies me to think that this sort of thing is happening often enough that the news channels have snazzy graphics and theme music already made up with titles like "GUNS IN SCHOOLS" and "SCHOOL SHOOTING" with little crosshairs in the O's.
Everytime this happens, especially in a school, I want to run home and hug my kids and never let them out of the house again. This is the first time I have ever really had to explain something like this to them. They were too young to get 9/11, and too sheltered to hear about some of the other tragedies our nation has faced. The Iraq war is really far away. This happened just one state over. Isaac and Joe are kind of freaked out, and I wish I could say to them, "it's just TV. It wasn't real." But I can't. They know better, anyway.