Blame Game
Gosh, how I hate our culture where everybody makes themselves feel better by pointing the finger and saying, "But it's their fault!" You know, the "if McDonald's wasn't selling those Big Macs, my 8-year old wouldn't weigh 120 lbs" kind of thing.
The latest of which is the tragedy of the Virginia Tech shootings, where some introverted and disturbed young man kills a bunch of people and then, in typical gutless fashion, takes his own life. So now we must have answers! We must create panels and focus groups and spend lots of cash so that we can somehow feel better about blaming somebody.
My take is this: There is ONE person responsible for all of this, and he's now dead. Period. End of discussion. All this crap about "If the university had acted sooner...." is hogwash. I'm sure that VT and lots of universities have lots of things to learn from this tragedy, but you had a sicko mind who probably would've stopped at nothing until he finished doing what he set out to accomplish. The university has even said that a campus-wide "lockdown" would've been impractical and impossible....after all, this isn't your neighborhood elementary school. What would've kept this guy from going to the library or campus eatery or university center or bookstore and doing the same thing that he did in that academics building? Nothing, that's what.
Let's imagine for second that for some strange reason, VT had the cell phone numbers of every student on campus, queued up and ready to go in some super-duper text-messaging software. The freak kills his first two victims, and then the text message goes out to stay in your dorm or whatever because there's been an "incident". What about those people that think it's an isolated incident? Or those whose cell phones are plugged up charging or on vibrate at the bottom of the backback? Or simply didn't believe there was cause for concern? Same with email. You're trying to tell me that every potential target on that campus would've gotten an email within 2 hours of it being sent?
And how many times in these stories have we heard about him being mentally disturbed, but the same news article is forced to use the term "privacy laws." Heck, we now live in a world where a potential employer can't even ask, "What kind of employee was he/she?" to a former boss. I'm not saying that privacy laws are bad, but if wanna keep up this "You will not share this type of information for any reason" thing, then there will be one-off situations like this where the policy caused undesirable circumstances.
This event was a tragedy on all fronts. But it wasn't the fault of the gun shop, the university, the Dean, or anybody else any more than it would be ADT's fault for not more aggressively attempting to sell me an alarm system should my house get broken into.
The latest of which is the tragedy of the Virginia Tech shootings, where some introverted and disturbed young man kills a bunch of people and then, in typical gutless fashion, takes his own life. So now we must have answers! We must create panels and focus groups and spend lots of cash so that we can somehow feel better about blaming somebody.
My take is this: There is ONE person responsible for all of this, and he's now dead. Period. End of discussion. All this crap about "If the university had acted sooner...." is hogwash. I'm sure that VT and lots of universities have lots of things to learn from this tragedy, but you had a sicko mind who probably would've stopped at nothing until he finished doing what he set out to accomplish. The university has even said that a campus-wide "lockdown" would've been impractical and impossible....after all, this isn't your neighborhood elementary school. What would've kept this guy from going to the library or campus eatery or university center or bookstore and doing the same thing that he did in that academics building? Nothing, that's what.
Let's imagine for second that for some strange reason, VT had the cell phone numbers of every student on campus, queued up and ready to go in some super-duper text-messaging software. The freak kills his first two victims, and then the text message goes out to stay in your dorm or whatever because there's been an "incident". What about those people that think it's an isolated incident? Or those whose cell phones are plugged up charging or on vibrate at the bottom of the backback? Or simply didn't believe there was cause for concern? Same with email. You're trying to tell me that every potential target on that campus would've gotten an email within 2 hours of it being sent?
And how many times in these stories have we heard about him being mentally disturbed, but the same news article is forced to use the term "privacy laws." Heck, we now live in a world where a potential employer can't even ask, "What kind of employee was he/she?" to a former boss. I'm not saying that privacy laws are bad, but if wanna keep up this "You will not share this type of information for any reason" thing, then there will be one-off situations like this where the policy caused undesirable circumstances.
This event was a tragedy on all fronts. But it wasn't the fault of the gun shop, the university, the Dean, or anybody else any more than it would be ADT's fault for not more aggressively attempting to sell me an alarm system should my house get broken into.
posted by Eric C at 11:51 AM
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