I only have a few minutes to devote to this right now.
Recent news from the Chicago Sun Times:
Authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history was a Chinese man who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa.
The 24-year-old man arrived in San Francisco on United Airlines on Aug. 7 on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said. Investigators have not linked him to any terrorist groups, the source said.
Innocent until proven guilty, definitely. And I’ve only read this report about the Chinese suspect in the Sun Times, so who knows if the “annonymous authority” knows fuck-all. But if it was a Chinese man, it wouldn’t be the first time.
In 1991, after being passed over for an academic award at the University of Iowa, Lu Gang sprayed fellow colleagues and academics, killing five. The incident has recently been made into a film by the opera director Chen Zhi-zheng. “Dark Matter” won an award this year at Sundance.
The film comments on the cultural dislocation Chinese feel in the United States.
I don’t think two shootings by two Chinese over the course of more than a decade when millions of Chinese trickle in and out of the States indicates any sort of trend, but I do think it’s further evidence that guns are way too accessible in the United States. Both Lu Gang and this shooter used hand guns — guns that are NOT traditionally used for hunting animals but instead used for killing people.
The university also must shoulder a huge burden of this responsibility. This morning on NPR, I heard Virginia Tech President Charles Steger saying the campus was too big to shut down and that they mistook it for an isolated incident. It put a rotten taste in my mouth. How tacky to make excuses in the midst of mourning.
‘‘We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,’’ Steger was reported as saying in several major news sources.
He also defended the university’s handling of the tragedy: ‘‘We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.’’
No, Steger, you didn’t have hours to reflect on it, but those families and friends will have their entire lives to reflect on how your failure to act resulted in the loss of the people they loved best.
Close the campus, put up the sirens, raise the alert, send people out to get the kids inside. Don’t send a goddamn e-mail. When it comes to terror, our nation has claimed that passivity doesn’t pass and so we go barreling into other nations with our rockets and our tanks to root out the evil. But what happens when people’s lives are threatened at home? Does Katrina ring a bell for anyone? When are we going to start really protecting ourselves?
We should mourn. And we should admit that maybe there are some things in life we can’t prepare for, but the university had room to act. And the nation still has time to act when it comes to handgun control.
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