The Shooting

The shootings at Virginia Tech didn’t effect me, I think, because I was waiting to have some information to hang my feelings onto. I don’t seek out the news much. Almost never on TV, and if I’m looking at news on the net I’m likely half a minute away from finding something better to do. I gathered it was the “worst shooting in modern American history,” and that’s bad, but these things are bound occasionally to be the worst so far. Thirty-three people, that’s awful. Could have been twice as many if it was a bus driver went off his nut rather than a kid with a handgun.

Something clicked when I heard on NPR while driving in to work that the shooter was a student from South Korea. Not someone who’d spent a lifetime steeped in America’s alleged gun-crazy culture (a culture which, by the way, I’ve had almost zero contact with despite having at home several firearms). Not someone who was bullied throughout high school and finally reached the end of his rope and picked up a trenchcoat and a list and a shotgun. Not someone who was desperate to maintain his place amongst local gangsters. Just a kid from another country, smart and hard-working enough to get into a prestigious American university, a kid who, sometime in the past year or so, completely lost his way.

It may be the Columbine incident offers the nearest similarity. I can imagine the young man far from home, feeling isolated hence resentful, possibly subject to occasional barbs from the local rednecks. Maybe a girl dumped him in a particularly cruel way. Maybe he lost himself in endless rounds of Doom or something similar and at some point in his private journey, nursing his need to lash out, simply lost all fellow feeling. That he was from another country shows this is not a peculiarly American trait. That he was in western Virginia might have made the guns easier to get than in, say, New York City, but not a lot easier. Even Seoul has gun crime.

I am very sorry that so many families were torn apart and will remain so. But I’m not giving their pain special attention because horrific crimes that slaughter innocents happen every day, and I’m numb. There is nothing about being at Virginia Tech that makes a person’s death more significant than in some marketplace or bus stop in Baghdad. The entire world is awash in a terrible sense, spreading throughout the human tribe, that at some weird personal level it is acceptable to kill total strangers, people who have done nothing to deserve it. Whether this happens to students in the U.S. or to Shia worshippers in Iraq or to Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand makes no difference to me. It happens, for different reasons, for reasons that make an evil sort of sense to the perpetrators, but it happens, every damn day. I’m aware of it one way or another, every damn day, and I’m very sorry for the students' families and for the people of Blacksburg, Virginia, but their pain, our pain, my pain, once it soaks into their lives, will simply be more of the same. They say America is a violent place but the truth is, the entire world is a violent place, and all this incident shows us is that America is not immune.