Commentary
Point Blank
- by shannon , February 19, 2008
I stared at the television in shock on Friday, my jaw dropped... it had happened again. I remembered back to the Virginia Tech shooting last school year. I remembered what a friend of mine said at the time: "The sad thing about this is that it will happen again somewhere else." I was repulsed by such an emotionless comment, mainly because I did not want to admit that I agreed.
This time, I was watching Good Morning America, during the switch from local news to national news.... only to be confused on why the two had been combined.... a college campus shooting was now only one state away. This was different than last year, when I was in undergrad in Oklahoma and pushed aside the notion that something like Virginia Tech could ever happen close to home.
As I began to absorb the news, I was transfixed by the scene behind the reporter, a live footage of the campus. How could this happen again?
Quickly my emotions turned to outrage as the live scene of the campus changed into a computerized demonstration of what happened earlier that day at NIU. Disgusted that the media would publicize and portray a murder in such a manner, demoralize the privacy of the victims, their families and friends, and sure of the fact that it would be showed over and over again, I turned the TV off.
Why is it so important for the public to have an imagery to go along with the shooting? What do we gain from a computer programmer patronizing the death of 5 students?
My heart goes out to the victims, injured, family, friends... and the computer programmer.
I don't want to start a guns control debate but I think the media has to be held partially to blame for the gun violence on campuses. Not only by making it seem passe' as a news item, but it is so over hyped, the weapons are always called assault weapons despite the fact that actual assault and sniper rifles are banned in the US and have been for many years accept for military, law enforcement and highly licensed gun collectors. then there are all the TV shows aimed and teens and young men that think up all kinds of creative ways to kill and again hype up the image of the killer, the thrill and the prestige of it all. Lastly, all of these shootings seem to happen in "Gun Free Zones" They never occur, never ever occur in right to carry areas (I did not say right to carry states). Where ever we have restricted guns from regular law abiding folks, campus security, teachers, professors etc. we have opened ourselves up to criminal acts. Criminals know they can go into these places and commit crimes with little concern for intervention before they have completed their damage. It's a shame to learn (often not reported by mainstream media) that often victims had access to defensive weapons but due to local restrictions did not have access to them, not even security, campus administration, or teachers. An unarmed public will always be more vulnerable and unsafe because police can never cover everywhere nor should that have to. And media needs to be held accountable for their roll in promoting and immortalizing these terrible crimes and the people who commit them.