Virginia Tech: Blame it on the Internets

China's "leading information technology expert," Li Ji-bing;

In examining the campus shooting incident in Virginia, it is clear that the personality of the murderer, Cho Sheung-hui, was withdrawn, eccentric and twisted. This young man's mentality is a reflection of the fact that over past 10 years, the rapid development of information technology has not only brought great opportunity and wealth, but a perversion of the human spirit due to the influx of distorted information. With the Internet culture and virtual world under constant development, the ability of individuals to communicate and interact with the surrounding society has steadily weakened.

Scientific experiments prove that communication skills are inversely proportionate to the degree of reliance on the Internet. More importantly, when people increasingly rely on the Internet and the virtual world, not only do his communications skills weaken, but his ability to make rational judgments in response to changes in the real world tend to weaken as well.

A good argument for China's policy of Internet censorship, no doubt.

Her name is Chastity

Somehow I can't get past that name when reading about the escort who spent an hour at a local motel with the Virginia Tech slayer. Is it just me? Maybe it's like one of those nicknames that guys give other guys? Like Curly for bald guys. Or Tiny for big guys.

Killer sent packet to NBC in between slayings

Package was postmarked 9:01 am on day of Virginia Tech massacre.

NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package in Wednesday morning's mail delivery and immediately turned the material over to FBI agents in New York. The FBI is assisting Virginia State Police in the investigation.

The package included a long, “rambling, manifesto-like statement embedded with a series of photographs,” Capus said. The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” he said.

...

Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera about his hatred of the wealthy, Capus said.

Creepy.

It's all about them

Korean students fear backlash.

Is this a realistic fear? There was notably little retaliation against Arabs (or Muslims) after 9/11, and that incident was not only much larger, it involved a group of people with a particular ethnicity/religion, who acted out of an ideology that they openly tied to their group characteristics. Americans deserve credit for making the important distinctions and not succumbing to bigotry.

At no time during any of the wall-to-wall coverage I saw of the massacre yesterday did anyone pay especial attention to the fact of Cho Sueng Hui's Korean-ness. Not students at Virginia Tech, not families of students, not reporters and not the talking heads. In fact thee only people who cared particularly about his Korean-ness were these guys--the Asian-American Journalist's Association.

"There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people," the journalists' group said in a statement. "The effect of mentioning race can be powerfully harmful. It can subject people to unfair treatment based simply on skin color and heritage."

Additionally, the group's statement said that it wished to remind the media that "the standards of news reporting should be universal and applied equally no matter the platform or medium, including blogs."

Just plain wrong

James Bowman compares the Virginia Tech students to the British sailors and marines taken hostage by Iran.

Bowman riffs on this piece in the Telegraph in which the behavior of the sailors and marines is contrasted with the behavior of earlier generations of servicemen. The author of that piece, Simon Reff, wonders what happened in the intervening years to make their responses so different. Bowman applies that question to the students at Viginia Tech.

Heffer’s question could also be asked, I think, about the Virginia Tech students who fled as the Korean gunman, Cho Seung Hui went on his homicidal rampage on their campus Monday — or who, like Jamal Albarghouti, instead of fleeing, took out their cell phones to record the sights and sounds of the massacre. “This is what this YouTube-Facebook-instant messaging generation does,” reported the Washington Post of Albarghouti’s exploit as if it were a matter for pride: “Witness. Record. Share.” And, as the Post might have added, not fight back. It appears to have occurred to no one to do that. Or even to wonder whether or not it might have been desirable to do that. “You are one brave guy Jamal,” wrote someone on his Facebook site after his video had run on CNN.com. But the idea that any greater bravery than his might have been possible — the kind of bravery that could have saved lives by taking down the gunman earlier in his murderous career — is one that seems not to have been picked up on the LCDs of the YouTube-Facebook-instant-messaging generation.

It's one thing to expect a certain standard of behavior from soldiers and sailors in a war zone. Quite another to expect students in a classroom, who had every expectation to believe that they were in a safe haven, to put down a relentless maniac who's blasting away at them with a gun in each hand. Especially since those students were living and working in a designated gun-free zone.

I wish someone had stopped Cho Seung Hui before he'd killed more than 30 people, but I'm certainly not going to blame the victims for getting caught in his path.

Forgiveness and gun control at Virginia Tech

Forgiveness is a topic that came up with the Amish school shooting. Now, Eric looks at a film about a 50-year-old campus shooting that glorifies forgiveness.

Those who want to forgive these criminals want to do more than just forgive them and help them avoid punishment. What really adds insult to injury is something I touched on in an earlier post. Those in the forgiving school don't want people to defend themselves against the shooters. They want everyone disarmed. Then, after people shot, they can lecture the survivors about "forgiveness."

Forgive me if I consider that unforgivable.

Indeed.

Bull Dog Pundit points out that the NY Times has already editorialized in favor of gun control regarding the incident, even though the paper admits that not all the facts are in.

Steve H believes Virginia Tech's gun free policy made the victims sitting ducks.

Via Instapundit.

A Virginia Tech hero

Professor Liviu Librescu held the door of his classroom closed, enabling his students to escape through the window. The gunman shot through the door and killed Librescu.

One of Prof Librescu's students, Alec Calhoun, who was with him at the classroom when the shooting started, told AP that at about 9:05 am, he and classmates heard "a thunderous sound from the classroom next door, what sounded like an enormous hammer."

When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, they started flipping over desks for hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of the room.

Calhoun said that just before he climbed out the window, he turned to look at the professor (Librescu), who had stayed behind to block the door.

Via Pajamas Media.

The media swarm

My local NBC affiliate has been running commercials all morning about how they have their own correspondent down in Blacksburg to cover the Virginia Tech massacre. This enables them to give "in-depth" coverage of the event. I saw the guy's report and he had nothing to report, which is to say he knew no more than anyone else down there: The gunman killed himself; police haven't yet released his name and 33 are dead as a result of his actions.

In the meantime, local reporters who stayed put are scouring the area for a local angle to the massacre. About the best they could do was to find a local alumnus whose son attends Virginia Tech. The son's roommate, or friend--they seem to be unclear on that--was shot in the leg. They aired a very brief clip of an interview the gunshot victim gave to someone, followed by the reporter explaining that the friend of the son of the local alumnus was fine. She seemed rather peeved about it. Too bad she couldn't get a dead friend or roommate of the son of a local alumnus.