OK. Stating the obvious, but I can let that slide.
What?
Listen, you inept excuse for a national mourner, they were not simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing, innocently going about their lives and trying to make the most of an opportunity.
This was not an accident. This was not a natural disaster. This was a massacre, assisted by lax gun laws that refuse to take even the lightest restriction as a reasonable and just limitation of a constitutional right.
But do go on.
Yes, let’s wait until some other celebrity crisis arises to divert our attention, so we can go back to worry about what some shock jock says on the air or what starlet is entering rehab. Please.We can wait until the next shooting.
You know what? I’m tired. I really am. So I will concede that we need more gun laws because all of them, upwards of 25,000 of them, are lax, and not a single one of them is a reasonable restriction on a Constitutional right. Now, if you would kindly except my reasonable restriction on your 1st Amendment right and be quiet, all will be well. Thank you.
“Looks like the SoCal kids didn’t like that foul call, the referee has taken about three bullets, but he’s crawling for the bench and he might just…no, that one got him…”
Where others see tragedy, horror, national mourning, JonScribe sees an opportunity to bait Bush. What the fuck, man, have you no sense at all of the inappropriate?
I don’t like Bush, and most any word I hear coming out of his mouth grates on my last nerve, but I can’t fault him at all for this speach. He is The President. It is expected that he talk about situations where dozens of people died. If you have ever tried to comfort someone who has lost a loved one, you know there is nothing to say. Everything that comes out will be inane, yet you still have to as part of human decency. While I often think his human decency is more of a “played one on TV.” kind of thing, he was doing his job in difficult circumstances, and I am not sure anyone could have done it better.
I think that if there is a lesson to be learned from this whole thing, it is not about gun control but how we deal with the mentally ill. From the little we know so far, this young man had exibited signs of being extremely disturbed, yet without an act of violence there was no way of dealing with it. There has to be some more acceptable medium between locking people in bad institutions with very little verification, and allowing them no process of getting out; and letting the mentally ill be a large part of the homeless population of any city, or taking out 32 people in their bid to commit suicide.
One of the truly scary things about this incident, and there are so many horrifying things about it, is the amount of damage that can be done by someone with two very simple handguns, one of them a .22.
To be fair, it is early in the investigation for us to come to conclusions.
To be equally fair, two University instructors (Nikki Giovanni and Lucinda Roy) reported him to administration officals as extremely disturbed, and students had speculated that he might become a school shooter. In one class Cho stook with 70 students, only 7 showed up one day, telling the teacher the rest were “afraid of Cho.” Ultimately the authorities declined to act without a specific threat.
**After that point, he passed an allegedly “one-minute” background investigation to spend $571 to buy the 9mm used in the killings. **
Isn’t a real, non-rubber-stamp background investigation supposed to uncover things like “everyone you know thinks you’re unstable and might be a school shooter…the police have investigated you”?
Could the fact that the investigation didn’t reveal the long-term concerns of…well…practically everyone who knew him…and didn’t prevent him from buying the gun used to kill 32 people…be considered evidence of “lax gun laws”?
Bush is a hypocrite. The man that could not find time to go to a single funeral of the 3000+ soldiers killed by his lies, the man that refuses to allow pictures of flag-draped coffins coming home on transports, all of a sudden is filled with compassion? Carnage that hurts you politically is ignored or covered up. Carnage that doesn’t hurt you politically is a photo op.
Because of course the President of the United States should be expected, by nothing more than the magical power of his voice, to say mellifluous words so inspiring that the dead will rise and all will be fixed and the sun will shine again.
Honestly, what the fuck is anyone supposed to say? 32 people were murdered for no reason. Any speech in response will be lame. I don’t like George Bush either but you’ve got to be pretty fucking stupid to try to pinthis one on him.
What are we trying to pin on him other than the fact that this was, for him, a photo op and a chance to show his (phony) compassion? He must have known, as most of us would know, that a personal appearance would provide little or no comfort to the bereaved; a five minute live TV appearance would have been more than adequate; the rest of the time wasted could have been more effectively spent on evaluating plans to get us the hell out of Iraq.
