"People don't stop killers. People with guns do."

A column from 2007, after the Virginia Tech murders.

Instapundit has been calling attention to it, including the way it's now #1 on the “Most Popular” list at the New York Daily News.  I'm especially glad to see that, because it was the Daily News that published the editorial with the despicable (and titillating headline) "Blood on hands of Obama, Mitt and NRA!"

The subheadline was "Condolences are empty words - what actions are you gonna take?"
We can see actions Instapundit recommends.

The Tucson people were good at stopping a shooting spree that might have gone on much longer.

Remember the Virginia Tech shooting, in which the shooter was allowed to reload several times and roam from room to room until he'd shot 32 persons to death and wounded many others?

The culture in Arizona is different:

In my district and in my state, we have a very strong gun culture. I own a gun, members of my family own guns.

Those are the words of Gabrielle Gifford, interviewed in May 2010.

"Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks."

Details of the Fort Hood massacre.

Around 1:30 p.m., witnesses say a man later identified as Hasan jumped up on a desk and shouted the words "Allahu Akbar!"—Arabic for "God is great!" He was armed with two pistols, one a semiautomatic capable of firing up to 20 rounds without reloading....

Those who weren't hit by direct fire were struck by rounds ricocheting off the desks and tile floor.

I've been trying to understand why all those soldiers — I know they were unarmed — were not able to stop Hasan, how minutes passed, and it took the arrival of the civilian police to end the carnage. I thought that after the Virginia Tech shooting, it was well-known that the shooting would go on and on and that waiting was not a good strategy. Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley, the police officer who did take Hasan down, "had trained on 'active shooter' scenarios after the April 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech University." Why weren't the 300 soldiers also able to respond? How could our soldiers be set up as "sitting ducks" — arrayed and accessible to a man who had made it known that he wanted to kill them?

***

The headline of the story is "But for heroes, bloodbath could have been worse."

Pfc. Amber Bahr, 19, of Random Lake, Wis., tore up her blouse and used it as a tourniquet on a wounded comrade. It was only later that she realized she'd been shot in the back, the bullet exiting her abdomen.

Great. I'm impressed. But I'm not distracted. The bloodbath could have been worse. Noted. But couldn't it also have been less bad?

What was the biggest lie at the Clinton-Obama debate?

My son John Althouse Cohen says it's this, from ABC's moderator Charles Gibson:

I would be remiss tonight if I didn't take note of the fact that today is the one-year anniversary of Virginia Tech. And I think it's fair to say that probably every American during this day, at one point or another, said a small prayer for the great people at that university and for those who died.

Here's the transcript of the debate. I challenge you to find a bigger lie.

I mean, you could stake your life on a bet that what Gibson said was false and he knew it. He had to. Even hedged with "probably," there is absolutely no chance that "every American" said "a small prayer." Surely, some said a big prayer, there must be quite a few people who didn't realize it was the anniversary of the shootings, and plenty who never pray about anything. I'll bet Christopher Hitchens didn't say a prayer. There are atheists in America, Mr. Gibson! (Run for your life!)

On the subject of the debate and lies, didn't Hillary Clinton say she lied about the sniper fire in Bosnia? (My other son, Chris, pointed this out in the comments section of my debate live-blogging.)

From the transcript:

Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things. But I'm not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004. I laid it all out there. And you're right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks, I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book.... [I]t just didn't jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.

I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case. That's the definition of lying.

And I love the "I'm not dumb" part. Take note of this strategy for getting Hillary to confess to lying. Corner her with 2 options: either you're stupid or you're a liar. I'm a liar, dammit! Don't call me dumb!

A nicely written episode of "The Sopranos."

There was a fine new episode of "The Sopranos" last night, with two neatly paired stories.

Tony and Paulie go on a road trip. Yes, a reason is trumped up, but the idea is basically to get them on a road trip, where there's lots of comedy (beginning with Paulie packing and revealing his impressive collection of white slip-on shoes) and with that slowly accumulating feeling that something violent is about to wipe that smile off our face.

Meanwhile, Junior is in the cuckoo's nest and his counterpart is a guy named Carter (who is reminding us -- by strange accident -- of the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho). This is the opposite of a road trip, as the patients are cooped up in room doing things like playing poker with white and red buttons (and Junior will be pissed off at you if you say you think "red buttons" is amusing). Here, too, we love the comedy even as we dread the impending violence.

Only one of the parallel stories ends in violence, though, and we end with Junior accepting the medication that "numbs him down" and Carmela accepting the $2000 Williams Sonoma espresso machine.

Is Obama a gasbag?

I'm reading this commentary from Charles Krauthammer, about the things Barack Obama said on the day of the Virginia Tech massacre:

[I]t is simply dismaying that a serious presidential candidate should use it as the ideological frame for his set-piece issues.

Politico columnist Ben Smith has brought attention to a speech that Barack Obama made in Milwaukee just hours after the massacre. It must be heard to be believed. After deploring and expressing grief about the shootings, he continues (my transcription): "I hope that it causes us to reflect a little bit more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms. . . . There's also another kind of violence . . . it's not necessarily physical violence."

What kinds does he have in mind? First, "Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women [of Rutgers]. . . . For them to be degraded . . . that's a form of violence. It may be quiet. It may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn." Good to know that Don Imus's "violence" does not quite rise to the level of Cho's.

Second, outsourcing. Yes, outsourcing: "the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country."

Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur -- accusing America of conducting "foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there." Is Obama, who proudly opposed overthrowing the premier mass murderer of our time, Saddam Hussein, suggesting an invasion of Sudan?

Who knows. This whole exercise in defining violence down to include shock-jock taunts and outsourcing would normally be mere intellectual slovenliness. Doing so in the shadow of the murder of 32 innocents still unburied is tasteless, bordering on the sacrilegious.

So I go to listen to the speech. Am I offended that Obama reframes his usual material with the Virginia Tech story? He had a speech to give that day, and it would not have worked to omit the subject. Plenty of other people went out of their way to use the massacre to promote their favorite issues -- notably gun control.

What really struck me about that audio clip though was what a gasbag Obama is. I hear a tired-sounding man, who rambles on and on. I know he's speaking before a group. I hear them respond now and then, when he mentions that Iraq is a war that should never have been waged and when he says teachers deserve higher pay. But if I didn't know who he was and that there was a crowd there, I would picture an old man slumped in an armchair, expatiating for the benefit of anyone unlucky enough to be within earshot. It's formless stream of consciousness. Oh, there is that theme of hope. The stream swirls back there at predictable intervals.

So the original question was whether we should be offended that he mixed the murderous violence of the day with other things, like the "verbal violence" of the dreaded Don Imus. But a better question, I think, is why does Barack Obama have a reputation as a good speaker? From this clip, I'd say he's a gasbag.

Here's a line:

"This campaign cannot be about me. This campaign is a vehicle for you. It's a vehicle for your hopes. It's a vehicle for your dreams."

Spare me.

Well, a candidate can get weary. It was a very stressful day. Maybe that was Obama at his worst. But really, such drivel. Just listing a lot of issues and saying hope, hope, hope should not inspire real hope. I can't believe people are hearing this and thinking: brilliant rhetoric. "Intellectual slovenliness" is a much more apt phrase.

Why NBC?

Everyone wonders why the murderer chose NBC to receive his package of promotional materials. Does NBC have some special reputation for evil PR?

Well, NBC had been conspicuously in the news, as it dealt with the Imus story. But it cracked down on Imus, so if anything, its immediate reputation is for being puritanical and moralistic. Maybe Seung-Hui Cho wanted to be shamed. But maybe it was just the most famous network at the particular moment when he had to make the decision. Or maybe it's just outright offensive to try to perceive the reason in a decision by a patently deranged mind.

Should we condemn NBC? Here's the way you could go with that:

Don Imus calls some young women "nappy headed hos" and we're all supposed be to shocked, shocked I tell you. Cho blows away 32 human lives and not only do we hear no condemnation of the vile person from the big media, but NBC is going to oblige the piece of human debris by airing his "manifesto." Democrat presidential contenders refuse to appear on a Fox Network debate, citing bias, but I guess it's okay for NBC is going to realize Cho's dreams of celebrity status at the expense of 32 lives.

Cho may have been a deranged psycho, but he was sharp as a scalpel when it came to playing NBC News for his personal patsy. Anything for a point in the ratings. I'm sure the families of the deceased will appreciate the Cho Show as much as they appreciate [NBC News President Steven] Capus's inevitable defense of freedom of speech and the public's right to know. Though I don't NBC will delete any of Cho's possible references to "nappy headed hos."

There's just so much wrong with that free-swinging attack. For one thing, professional journalism isn't about expressing condemnation or praise. It's about reporting newsworthy facts. There shouldn't be extraneous statements of condemnation. Imus, on the other hand, was an employee of the company, and a business decision had to be made about whether to continue the affiliation.

Moreover, it's ridiculous to think that a mass murder demonstrates that we shouldn't also be concerned about things less horrible than killing. Of course, calling someone a bad name hurts much less than a murder, but the existence of murder doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about our more ordinary social interactions.

What Imus did is trivial compared with murder, but all normal persons already understand that murder is wrong and we're not likely to cross that line. But we really aren't sure where the lines should be with respect to speech about race and sex. We don't understand the full effect of what we say, and we don't agree about how far satire can go and when listeners are being oversensitive. So there's plenty of good reason to talk about this, much more, in fact, than about the vicious murderer.

Movies and murder.

Two weeks ago, I photographed this mural, on a video store's wall, next to the Spider House Café in Austin, Texas:



At the time, I asked Chris, "Who's the guy with the hammer?"

I've got the answer now:

The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.



The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study...

In a Times review, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film’s “body count and sadistic violence” mostly appealed to “cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome.”

Will the Virginia Tech murderer change anyone's opinion about violence in the movies? Do the people who already avoid extremely violent movies have new power to shame those who like them... or perhaps to get major studios to shun them and prestigious organizations to refrain from giving them the "Gran Prix prize"?

(In case you don't know French: "Gran Prix prize" means "Grand Prize prize.")

ADDED: More images from the murderer and the movie.

MORE: Are you worried about copycats getting inspired by the murderer's promotional materials? But the murderer looks like a complete dork with these movie fantasies! Maybe these videos will inspire some kids to get a real life and give up on their angsty nonsense.

"You loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and ripping my soul all the time."

The murderer's video. Lurid, but clearly the young man was insane.

"My parents are actually worried about retaliation against Asians."

Said Virginia Tech student Lyu Boaz, a Korean-American. “After 9/11, a lot of Arabs were attacked for that reason.”

Asian-American students at Virginia Tech reacted to news about the gunman’s identity with shock and a measure of anxiety about a possible backlash against them....

Mr. Boaz, a resident adviser at Pritchard Hall, said many Korean-American students had left campus immediately. Parents of other Korean-American students were preparing to pick up their children on Tuesday afternoon and take them home.

Is this a realistic fear? There was notably little retaliation against Arabs (or Muslims) after 9/11, and that incident was not only much larger, it involved a group of people with a particular ethnicity/religion, who acted out of an ideology that they openly tied to their group characteristics. Americans deserve credit for making the important distinctions and not succumbing to bigotry.

Let's see what Margaret Cho -- who shares the murderer's name -- has to say on her blog:

I look at the shooter's expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter." There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone's mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

So much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter, how the Korean community is reacting to it, South Korea's careful condolences and cautiously expressed fear that it will somehow impact the South Korean population at large.

What is lost here is the grief. What is lost is the great, looming sadness that we should all feel over this. We lose our humanity to racism, time and time again.

Do Americans deserve this criticism? Is "so much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter"? If we want to avoid bigotry, let's also think about whether it's right to characterize Americans this way. But, of course, it is important not to look on this madman and imagine that he represents Koreans or -- more absurdly -- Asians. Even when a person is quite ordinary, we should resist thinking of him as being the way he is because of his group.

Meanwhile, I'm not seeing a lot of attention paid to the murderer's Koreanness. On NPR this morning, they called him "the English student"! Get it? He was an English major, and attention is being paid to his writings -- which you can see here. Should we worry about bigotry and retaliation aimed at fiction writers who go in for violent fantasies? Or don't worry. Go to the movies. May I recommend "Grindhouse"?

Trying to understand the Virginia Tech murders.

This article offers a good explanation for why the Virginia Tech officials delayed for two hours before warning students after two persons had been shot.

After two people, Emily Jane Hilscher, a freshman, and Ryan Clark, the resident adviser whose room was nearby in the dormitory, were shot dead, the campus police began searching for Karl D. Thornhill, who was described in Internet memorials as Ms. Hilscher’s boyfriend.

According to a search warrant filed by the police, Ms. Hilscher’s roommate had told the police that Mr. Thornhill, a student at nearby Radford University, had guns at his town house. The roommate told the police that she had recently been at a shooting range with Mr. Thornhill, the affidavit said, leading the police to believe he may have been the gunman.

Even if they thought it was Thornhill and that he'd achieved his end, they still should have warned students that there was a gunman at large and possibly still on campus.

But this background raises another question. Why would someone commit two murders like that and then relocate to another building some distance away and perform a massacre?

It's hard to understand why someone would commit the massacre. But it's not anywhere near as hard as explaining why a person would do both things. The first murder, in the dorm, seems conventional. The second incident is horrible, but you understand it by thinking: madman.

Among the central unknowns is what prompted the gunman to move to Norris Hall, which contains engineering and other classrooms, where all but the first two killings took place. The authorities said [Seung-Hui] Cho’s preparations, including chaining the doors, suggested planning and premeditation, rather than a spontaneous event.

How do you explain a person doing both things?

"He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn’t get it in because we were pushing up against it."

"He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out."

More news of the horror at Virginia Tech.

Apparently, the murderer was a student, Seung-Hui Cho, who lived in the dorm.

“He was just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit,” one student in the class, Erin Sheehan, told [The Collegiate Times]. “He wore a tan button-up vest and this black vest — maybe it was for ammo or something.”

Ms. Sheehan added: “I saw bullets hit people’s bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don’t know maybe from shock from the pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured.”

This is such a sad story. I don't have much to say about it, and I apologize for mixing it in with other blog posts that lack solemnity. The young man, it would seem, went crazy. There will be endless debates about what the University should have done and whether more gun control or less would have helped. But the stark fact remains: many people died. It's terribly sad.