Another school shooting. Bush is "appalled", after all near a third as many people died as the number of civilians killed in Iraq daily. I guess that is in keeping with his "better there than here" mantra. Bless the man for being consistent.
But now the press have a problem. The gunman is reported by witnesses to have been dressed "like a Boy Scout". Clearly that won't do. He was also reported to be "Asian looking". A reporter for the Chicago Sun Times has made an assertion that he was a Chinese national from Shanghai in the US on a student visa. Well, that's better - foreign and Communist, I'll bet that's something they'll chew on. I'm just glad there is no goth-card to play this time.
For the record
The US Secret Service has said "there is no accurate or useful 'profile' of students who engaged in targeted school violence."
It reached those conclusions after studying 37 incidents of targeted school violence involving 41 attackers in the United States between 1974 and June 2000.
Very few of the attackers were failing in school and some were even on the honor roll. Nearly two thirds had never been in trouble at school and most showed no marked change in academic performance, interest in school, friendship patterns or school disciplinary problems prior to the attack.
The largest group of shooters were considered to be "mainstream" students...
-- France 24
If you think I am being heartless for not chiming on the wails of "tragedy" and the "outpouring of sympathy", consider some context. On average as many (36) innocent children starve to death every two minutes of every day. What utter hypocracy would it be to be upset over these shootings, not upset about the onging starvation, and then having my biggest gripe in life being that I am getting old and fat? Over a hundred and fifty people die every minute of every day, many of them horribly. The world is full of horror. For the most part there is nothing that can be done about it. I'll worry about changing what I can change rather than what the media flavour of the day wants me to be upset about. I'm just glad I can really have nothing more to do with this and that no reporters will be bugging me for interviews on "goth culture" and I can get on with things that are in my sphere of influence.
