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This has been bouncing around chat for a few hours now, most recently a debate of logistics. I for one am curious as to the background of such a shooter.

The first questions that came to my mind

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shooter's been ID'd

Since he's an immigrant from a foreign country I can only hope this doesn't unleash a slew of hateful stereotypes.

Well School Shootings are always a bad thing, So I will finish this post with
R.I.P. victims, god bless.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

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Since he's an immigrant from a foreign country I can only hope this doesn't unleash a slew of hateful stereotypes.

South Korea seems to be worrying about the exact same thing.

I don't see how people could possibly link the young man's race to the violence. Blacks, whites, asians, indians.... we are all just as likely to flip out and go batshiat insane as the next.

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I just heard about this in my Political Science class. It's absolutely terrible and I hope that any family and friends of victims will be able to recover from the tragedy.

My professor told me that after the initial shooting that the campus authorities went on as though nothing had happened. We had a long discussion about it. Do you think it would have been a good idea to get everyone off campus, or would you feel that making people walk off campus just sets them up to get shot?

I heard about this last night. It's horrible... Why does any human being have to be so sick and twisted to do anything like this?

I'm sorry to the people who've lost friends and family. This kind of thing makes me lose faith in humanity.

Although I have a rant related to this. Why won't the US Government just ban guns? It would solve so many problems, and maybe there'd be less of these horrors. Of course, it would upset the rednecks who think that owning a gun actually makes you LESS likely to die.

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the last people who shot up a school(columbine), they got a movie about it!

maybe michael moore will be intrigued to make a sequel.

It seems to be unavoidable that you get comments like this in such a discussion.

This post has been edited by Sinslayer on 17th April 2007 20:32

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Quote (Sinslayer @ 17th April 2007 14:48)

I heard about this last night. It's horrible... Why does any human being have to be so sick and twisted to do anything like this?

I'm sorry to the people who've lost friends and family. This kind of thing makes me lose faith in humanity.

Although I have a rant related to this. Why won't the US Government just ban guns? It would solve so many problems, and maybe there'd be less of these horrors. Of course, it would upset the rednecks who think that owning a gun actually makes you LESS likely to die.

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the last people who shot up a school(columbine), they got a movie about it!

maybe michael moore will be intrigued to make a sequel.

There always seems to be an idiot who says that sort of bullshit when this happens. Please, if you honestly have any scrap of intelligence, leave the internet forever and get a life.

The knee-jerks have already started. Ban guns, they say. This wouldn't happen if they were banned, they say.

I'm not buying it.

Guns will *always* be in our society, legal or not. Outlawing them ensures that law abiding citizens don't have them. That is ALL that the measure would do.

Guns have no place in school settings unless being carried by safety officers/police, but what about this scenario..... what if the instructor had a firearm? What if this young man's killing spree ended when he barged through the door and the class instructor, properly trained in gun use and in emergency scenarios such as this, fired to wound or kill him?



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Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them.

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My condolences to those who lost friends and family.

Quote (Sinslayer @ 17th April 2007 20:48)

Although I have a rant related to this. Why won't the US Government just ban guns? It would solve so many problems, and maybe there'd be less of these horrors. Of course, it would upset the rednecks who think that owning a gun actually makes you LESS likely to die.

Full bans don't work though. Criminals will stil obtain guns, and on a few occasions people trying to start rampages have been stopped by others using their own firearms.

Take the UK for example. Over the next few days, some US liberals will tout our gun control laws as something to aspire to I imagine.

Our firearm crime has almost doubled since 1998, and it's about to increase again because the government is now focusing on replicas rather than the real guns flooding cites like Manchester and London.

These events occur because of a multitude of factors, but there's always a single scapegoat that the media pounces on. Easy availability of firearms from the left, videogames, movies, and music from the right, drugs and alcohol from both, pre-existing psychological disorders when the other lines of moral panic are debunked.

Or it could just be the pressure of life today. We're living in a time where we're having fear and paranoia spoon fed by news agencies more concerned with ratings than the truth and informing people. Simulatenously, we're being told we've never had it better. We're getting conflicting information from all sides, being enocuraged to excell but at the same time we're seeing hundreds of people just like us failing

This post has been edited by Del S on 17th April 2007 20:15

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

I never said that criminals wouldn't get guns at all, but allowing guns to be legal certainly doesn't help.

Quote ("Del S")

Full bans don't work though. Criminals will stil obtain guns, and on a few occasions people trying to start rampages have been stopped by others using their own firearms.

There's also the risk that if you have a firearm and the attacker is unarmed, he'll simply turn the gun on you. Even if gun crime levels are still high, imagine how much higher they'd be if we just let every sane adult in the UK own a gun, like in the US.

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I wouldn't be surprised if their was at least a minor backlash on Koreans, though that would be horribly misguided. After all, IIRC, the Colombine killers were white. But in search of an answer, people are going to blame that, or the violence on TV, video games etc., or alcohol or drugs. It's sad, but it seems to happen whenever their is a tragedy like this.

I also feel bad about many of the people who are only going to be loosely affected. I can bet anything that at least one senior that got accepted into Va. Tech right now is getting to work on switching the college that they are going to, which is a shame because Va. Tech is a good school to go to.

Also, I'm sorry for the loss, Laszlow.

Edit

One more thing, to Sinslayer, the way that I see it is that Prohibition banned alcohol in the '20s, and that didn't stop people from getting it. If a person really wants a gun, they can obtain it.

This post has been edited by Barrylocke on 17th April 2007 20:46

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Dead Winter. A nice comic.

I think it's foolish that someone would transfer away from VA Tech just because there was a shooting there. Matter of fact, it's probably better to stay there, because IMO there won't be ANOTHER shooting there. Criminals never strike the same spot twice, right?

As for the gun control thing, the founding fathers thought it important enough to make allowing guns the second addition to the US Constitution. I don't think they'll ever seriously consider changing this.

Then again, that's what I said about Pluto's planethood.

As for the race thing, I don't think people will even look at that. As I think it was Hamedo said, anyone of any race can go insane. Whites, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans...there are gonna be a few wackos in every group.

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FFIII
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Dragon Quest 8
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It may be foolish, but it's only to be expected.

On another forum, someone linked to this, if you care to read.

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AOL News has obtained two plays a classmate says were written by Cho Seung-Hui. Ian MacFarlane, the former classmate and current AOL employee, provided us with the plays. A note from Mr. MacFarlane and links to the works appear below.

WARNING: the plays contain profanity and scenes with disturbing content.

http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/

Basically, the student notes that Cho was "the exact stereotype of what one would typically think of as a "school shooter" – a loner, obsessed with violence, and serious personal problems."

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Dead Winter. A nice comic.

Yeah, I heard about this after I got home from school yesterday. It's a terrible terrible thing and I send my condolences to the victims and families affected by this.

I've heard two different stories why he did this:
1) Last night NBC was saying that he had a fight with his girlfriend.
2) This evening ATV said he was a deeply disturbed individual who wrote freakish things in English class and had been recommended to go to a psychologist and had no girlfriend.

Apparently, he shot a girl and a guy first before heading across campus to shoot the rest. I honestly don't know which story to believe but either way this shouldn't have happened. I don't know any of the victims but there was a lady who was a French teacher that is from the same province as me, Nova Scotia, Canada. It makes me feel really bad to know that a fellow Nova Sctoian was killed.



This post has been edited by King Eddy on 17th April 2007 23:01

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I absolute cannot stand the fact that they write this off as "another loner troubled student". Obviously he was troubled, a sane person in their right mind does not walk into a school with a weapon and take so many lives. Why is it that people feel the need to make these excuses when someone does something terrible? For once, can we stop focusing on "oh, he was a loner", "oh, his parents didn't love him." "oh, he didn't get a long with with other students." or the "was obsessed with violence" bits? There are plenty of loners in the world, there are plenty of people who had rough lives and grew up in harsh circumstances. Hell, most of us appreciate violence too, in the instances that we all watch t.v., movies and all that junk. He could have been of any ethnicity and of course, that too becomes the focus. The point is this guy was a sick bastard and should be treated as such, not as a victim of society lashing out. The victims are those injured or who lost their lives, and my heart goes out to them.

The more coverage I see about this guy, the more enraged I get over the situation. I can only imagine what it must be like for those who actually lost someone, or were in the building themselves.

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Okay, but there was a goat!

Quote (Sinslayer @ 17th April 2007 19:48)

Although I have a rant related to this. Why won't the US Government just ban guns? It would solve so many problems, and maybe there'd be less of these horrors. Of course, it would upset the rednecks who think that owning a gun actually makes you LESS likely to die.

Problem isnt so simple...

1- In the Bill of rights

2- If we banned guns, the only criminals would be carrying guns.... not so easy to just comb the US and take every gun they see.....(and do what with them???)

3- some studies show that over 65% of American homes have atleast 1 gun(where permited by local law)

4- what about the vast majority(85%) of gun owners who arent criminals, use them for sport/hunting, use them for home protection, ect.... I doubt they will vote to ban guns.....

Let's keep this on-topic, guys. If you want to discuss gun rights, start a new thread.

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Veni, vidi, dormivi.

As far as the stereotypes thing goes, speaking as a South Korean, I doubt it's going to be a huge uproar. Maybe a couple of badly thought out jokes in the future, but whatever.

Some people made a big deal when the kid was ID'd. Honestly, I could care less that he's Korean. Korean people are stupid too... surprise!

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I find your lack of faith disturbing...

Quote (Kappa the Imp @ 17th April 2007 22:25)

As far as the stereotypes thing goes, speaking as a South Korean, I doubt it's going to be a huge uproar. Maybe a couple of badly thought out jokes in the future, but whatever.

Some people made a big deal when the kid was ID'd. Honestly, I could care less that he's Korean. Korean people are stupid too... surprise!

I've not heard of any racial backlash, but the media seems damned intent on bringing up the "strong possibility" that it could happen every five minutes. It's like they are trying to spark something.

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Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them.

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For once, can we stop focusing on "oh, he was a loner", "oh, his parents didn't love him." "oh, he didn't get a long with with other students." or the "was obsessed with violence" bits?

Human beings need to try to find a reason for things, especially in times of horror like this. It's the way our brains work. Saying "sometimes an individual is just plain batshit/just plain evil" may indeed be true, but it does not compute for us. Null set. Syntax error.

That's all I know to say right now.

This post has been edited by L. Cully on 18th April 2007 23:45

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the day he is delivered.


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He sent a video to himself to NBC.

"He repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt."
Also, it talks about how he basically criticizes our "Hedonistic" culture and that he thinks he's sacrificing himself to tell us we're too self-absorbed.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_...a_tech_shooting


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You're telling me that there's no hope.

I'm telling you you're wrong.

this is so horrible...just today at school, a couple kids in my class were making fun of the whole situation.... i feel so sorry for those unlucky people and families

RIP, and god bless

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Aujourdhui a commence avec toi.

Quote (Hamedo @ 18th April 2007 18:54)

...but the media seems damned intent on bringing up the "strong possibility" that it could happen every five minutes. It's like they are trying to spark something.

The media always seem intent on sparking just about anything.

As for the actual tragedy, my condolences to everyone affected by the event, especially laszlow and FF Guru, and anyone else who may have been directly affected.

And I still contend that, regarding guns and gun rights, guns make it too easy for people to use the power of death, a power that we can never comprehend fully. I won't add anything else to the gun debate here.

I tried reading his plays but I didn't very far, partly because I actually have a paper to write tonight (on geobiology, not on gun rights or antisocial psychology).

I am still trying to figure out the guy's motive. Maybe I watch too much Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but from the start, that's been my biggest question, even more significant than things like the timeline, the death toll, and the responses of other people.

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The media isn't WRONG, persay. It COULD happen at anytime. It probably won't, mind you, but circuses draw money, and that's the way it goes.

You know, banning guns isn't the way to go about this. If anything, we should ban the jackassery that pushes these people to do such horrific things. While you have to feel bad for the families of the victims, I still have a bit of empathy in me for the kid with the gun who felt so backed in to a corner by all the crap that he lashed out like he did. People always go boo-hoo for the victims, but seldom, (it happens, just not much,) does anybody say- Why don't we just stop being pricks to people, and maybe this sort of thing won't happen.

Same with Columbine. You know, it isn't cool to thrash on kids because they're different. At the least, you can keep your mouth shut, and just not say anything. These people don't seem to be flying off the handle for no reason, is all, and at least some of the responsibility for this one lies with all the people who bullied this kid.

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
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Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way

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You know, banning guns isn't the way to go about this. If anything, we should ban the jackassery that pushes these people to do such horrific things. While you have to feel bad for the families of the victims, I still have a bit of empathy in me for the kid with the gun who felt so backed in to a corner by all the crap that he lashed out like he did. People always go boo-hoo for the victims, but seldom, (it happens, just not much,) does anybody say- Why don't we just stop being pricks to people, and maybe this sort of thing won't happen.

Same with Columbine. You know, it isn't cool to thrash on kids because they're different. At the least, you can keep your mouth shut, and just not say anything. These people don't seem to be flying off the handle for no reason, is all, and at least some of the responsibility for this one lies with all the people who bullied this kid.

While I most certainly agree that part of the blame goes to anybody that makes fun of people, I still feel that the kids that do these things could have let out any anger/malice in alternative ways. I was picked on heavily from Pre-K to 9th grade, and I seem to be a fairly stable human being. I talked to people that would listen, I just didn't let it bug me. The situation may be harder for others, but it should not need to go to violence, especially on such a grand scale.

Besides, from what these reports from the students are saying, people were trying to make friends with Cho, but he wouldn't open up to anybody.

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Dead Winter. A nice comic.

I'm not saying there aren't healthier avenues, but this happens to be the avenue that was taken. Of course, had he gone and taken some anger management, or gotten involved with something else we might be in a different position, but that ISN'T the avenue that these types of kids always take. Enough bullying could leave him with a huge trust issue and inferiority complex, too. That probably makes it a little bit hard to make friends.

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
~Frank Zappa

Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way

I do have *some* sympathy for the kid, Mog. I see your point.

BUT.... a large part of me wants to scream "suck it up, Nancy" to people like him and the Columbine boys. Life is tough. Not everyone will like you. Sometimes, they will hate you outright..... for no reason at all. You either buck up and learn to deal with it in some way, via anger management or a hobbie or through friendships or your job or religion or whatever, or you flip the f*** out and do something like this. We need to have safeguards in place to spot kids like this and help them, but saying "we as people just need to quit sucking and picking on folks" is pie in the sky.

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Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them.

~Pacifist Badge, 1978

Sorry to hear about that laz.That must suck big time.Anyway,I send my condolences to anyone hear on CoN who lost a loved one.This guy was just psyhco and sick in the head.The death toll has offcially rised to 33 people now.I found out today he was using hollow tip bullets the entire time.He'll defiantly become good friends with Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussien in the Afterlife,and burn with them as well.

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Quote (Hamedo @ 19th April 2007 17:25)

I We need to have safeguards in place to spot kids like this and help them, but saying "we as people just need to quit sucking and picking on folks" is pie in the sky.

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware how Idealistic and far-fetched it sounds, but ideally, wouldn't that be the perfect solution? You know, there really ISN'T a good solution. All this finger pointing and "WELL NEXT TIME..." is pointless. People will always have guns, the media will always have circuses, and there will always be violence. You know, I'm tired of all this "Well next time..." bullshit. This IS next time. Where are the solutions you looked in to LAST time?

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
~Frank Zappa

Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way

Quote (MogMaster @ 19th April 2007 15:26)

You know, banning guns isn't the way to go about this. If anything, we should ban the jackassery that pushes these people to do such horrific things. While you have to feel bad for the families of the victims, I still have a bit of empathy in me for the kid with the gun who felt so backed in to a corner by all the crap that he lashed out like he did. People always go boo-hoo for the victims, but seldom, (it happens, just not much,) does anybody say- Why don't we just stop being pricks to people, and maybe this sort of thing won't happen.

I second banning this jackassery.

There are way too many people in schools whose social lives depend on them bullying people. Bullying people will tend to make them fear you but hate you as well, and no matter how oh-so-awesome you are, you probably don't want to cause someone's hatred to boil over and burn you.

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