Virginia Tech, Our Hearts Go Out to You: How Will This Effect Our Collective Future?

Shock, sadness, and horror and really the only words to describe how I felt, and how I'm sure most people with a heart and a pulse felt who were reading the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday and today.

One uplifting and informative article I found made some good points, because it talked about how the activists and the lobbyists are already circling around this event, taking their respective corners of the boxing ring and preparing to square off. What needs to be done right now, is give the country - and the families, especially - a chance to recover from this tragedy.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has an article on the "What if?" concern on college campuses in Richmond, and what might happen for the future of campus security in light of these recent events. The concern I have about all of this is that are people going to start having a lockdown on Universities across the country? Armed guards at the door to English Lit 201?

The fact of the matter is that this threat has always been there. Wherever you have large groups of people you have even larger percentages of someone in that group being insane. That's why, for example, there are so many real-bonafide insane people in large cities like New York City, because if you have 17 million people, there are going to be a higher percentage of those that are actually dangerous. It's just simple math.

I'm also concerned with how the gunman is going to play in all of this. To begin with, he's not a white male, so the fact that people are going to start screaming that this was somehow political/terror-related is a possiblity (thank God he wasn't Muslim). So are the Asian students in Virgina going to have to fear for their safety now? It's not out of the realm of possibility.
What also bothers me is that they are pointing to his creative writing as a source for judging his mental state and predicting that this could have happened.

THAT scares me. Now, it's not like I can see what he wrote, maybe it was disturbing in a certain way that is beyond fiction...that deals with non-fiction and fellow classmates. But they said FICTION. I would hate to see, in the near future, students getting pulled out of English and Creative Writing classes because they wrote violent fiction or horror.

When I was a young child, I had a very active imagination and wrote horror and other types of fiction that had horrific elements to it. I wrote some of these for class. The teachers were a bit disturbed...but in the end didn't cart me off as a candidate for possibly going postal on my classmates (although I was a "loner" and unpopular and would have fit the bill in other ways).

I just hope, that in the wake of this tragedy, that people stop and think about what they do before taking any "preventative action" of "future catastrophes."

I mean, it's very sweet that Bush ordered flags to be flown at half mast in honor of the victims, but how about taking care of the gun laws that might have prevented this insane man from getting a hold of a firearm in the first place?