04.24.07
A few more words about Virginia Tech
Slate has an article about the networks jumping over themselves to stop showing footage of Cho Seung-Hui’s videos, and I finally find something I can agree with Michelle Malkin on.
I disagree with Shafer. I think NBC and the rest of the networks showed poor taste in showing most of this material. One only needs to see a small portion of Seung-Hui’s barely comprehensible ranting to know that he obviously had a mental illness. I think it is in poor taste to show nearly wall-to-wall footage of a mentally deranged person, regardless of the newsworthiness of his crime. It doesn’t really have as much to do with the feelings of the victims as with inhumanity of exploiting a mentally ill person’s ranting for private gain.
I think NBC would have displayed more class if they had just put the materials up on the internet for those curious enough to see them, perhaps show a short clip enough for everyone to see Seung-Hui’s psychosis (after all, that is the why? that Shafer refers to), and left it at that. In other words, the material may have been newsworthy, but it should have been opt-in, not opt-out (which, BTW, would have required one to avoid all news for last week).
In Malkin’s article, I uncharacteristically cannot find anything wrong with her logic. There’s no guarantee that someone would have been able to stop the shootings had they been armed (maybe they would have just been another casualty), but I think even college students are entitled to defend themselves with firearms, if they are deemed responsible enough to carry permits already.
In Larry Hinker’s reply to Bradford Wiles (linked in Malkin’s article), he says this:
The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat.
Curiously, I heard the same sophistry on an on-air debate on CNN last week. The gun-control advocate (or more appropriately, the person against allowing legally permitted guns on college campuses) characterized the other person’s position as wanting to “arm everyone” or “give everyone a gun”.
I call attention to that because obviously there are people on college campuses and in society at large who should not be carrying firearms, either because they are dangerous, irresponsible or just inadequately trained. However, as Bradford wrote, if the society feels he is responsible enough to have a carry permit in the first place, what is it about the college campus that makes him suddenly not responsible enough?
I imagine Larry Hinker is now eating a fair bit of crow now, since it was demonstrated on April 16 that students could not rely on “the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting” them.
