Taking a Time-Out from Work, Due to Current Events

[rhopalocerienne]

BLACKSBURG, Va. - A gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech dorm and then, two hours later, in a classroom across campus Monday, killing at least 30 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, government officials told The Associated Press. The gunman was killed, bringing the death toll to 31....My coworker, a person who has taught me a

Comments

[tompurdue]

For the same reason you do.

I know you haven't actually done it, but you know you've joked about it. We all have. We get frustrated and we want to take our frustrations out on somebody or something, no matter how unrelated.

But take that frustration, and imagine that one time in a hundred billion you actually lost control. With so many millions of people in this country, and so many of them frustrated for whatever reason on any given day...

I went to Virginia Tech. I still have friends there. I've heard from them and they're safe, but just because it doesn't touch me personally doesn't change a damn thing.

[rhopalocerienne]

Yep, I've joked about it. And yes, I get frustrated. But I can't help but think that there's a vast difference between losing my shit and kicking out a window (which I have done, once)... and finding a gun, loading it, packing extra ammunition, driving to a college campus, and proceeding to shoot not just one person, but 30 people over the course of several hours.

Yes, I've told jokes about taking the Chicken Bus and going down to Mexico to be a bandito. But that ridiculously phrased joke was never meant to suggest that I'd ever actually wanted to DO it...

(Okay, I might, if I completely lost my shit, hotwire a bus and run away to Mexico. But I wouldn't shoot anybody...)

If it were one person killed, I'd get it. Especially if I knew them, and they'd hurt me somehow, and I already had a loaded gun, and all I had to do was walk down the hallway. I can understand that.

Thirty people, most of them several hours after the first and half a mile away, I can't. I don't get it. I honestly, genuinely don't.

[tompurdue]

My guess is that killing the first one is probably the hard part. Once you've killed the first one, you're in a whole new level of grief. You'll probably realize that your life will never, ever, ever be good again, and you might as well go on shooting.

Despair... it's a hell of a drug.

[tjekanefir]

*admits* I kinda get it too. I'd never DO it, but I can get the furious impulse to make somebody else hurt as much as you do. And, like tomperdue, I suspect that the first killing is the hardest one... once you've broken the ultimate taboo, there's nothing left to stop you from killing more people. I suspect there are more murderers out there who have killed two or more people than murderers who have killed only one. Once you've killed one person, what's to stop you from killing another one

[rhopalocerienne]

You know, I just went and looked it up, and statistically speaking, that's not the case? Only about one-quarter of victims are killed by a stranger, three-quarters of the crimes only involve one victim and one offender, and something less than 2% of murderers, when released from prison, will be arrested for homicide again in the next five years. Half the recidivism rate of rapists, scarily enough.

The one that really throws me is the fact that it's usually someone who knows you. It's most often a spouse or significant other, apparently... followed by, chillingly, a parent.

*Rho shivers and goes and gets a glass of wine*

...Your description of the person who did this today sounds all too plausible, though, I have to admit. Get Wyvern out of your head, please. ;)

[tjekanefir]

Oh, I don't necessarily mean that most murderers go on killing sprees all at once. But for real-- don't you think that a man who kills one girlfriend is much more likely to kill another one later in his life? The natural moral barrier against killing another human being has already been eroded. He's already talked himself into believing that one woman "had it coming." How easy do you figure it would be for him to decide another one does?

Let's put it this way: *I* sure as hell wouldn't marry Eric Tremontagne at this point. Roxy is so totally deluding herself. People who are morally capable of treating their loved ones like shit are, well, morally capable of treating their loved ones like shit. "He's different with me" is just a matter of time.

And yes, *sigh*, I blame Wyvern for all this eerily plausible deconstruction of the criminal mind stuff. Who would have thought that Doug riffing off of Hannibal Lector would leave such a permanent groove in my mind? :P

[pagandenma]

Why do people do this?

They value humanity less than their own messed-up worldview. And they don't value themselves either.

Any way you slice it, it's one gods-be-damned mess.