The killer, a 19-year-old who committed suicide, said he wanted to "go out in style."
Christe eleison.
The horror in Omaha
Wednesday December 5, 2007
Categories: Decline and fall
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I'll pray for them, Charity. Thanks.
My prayers for the families of the 8 victims. May G-d rest their souls.
And speaking of souls ... the shooter obviously had a tormented one, and your friend Favog, in calling him a "loser" (among other things), was remarkably insensitive to this fact. (Although his 6:18 post last night seemed to endorse gun control, or at least an assault weapons ban, which I liked -- given that the conservative reaction to the Virginia Tech shootings was to have students pack heat.)
Look, as someone with depression myself, I said of Cho Seung-Hui during the Blacksburg nightmare that, even in mental illness, there is still an ultimate responsibility not to take out the anger lashing one's self and reverse it onto others instead in such a horrific and murderous way.
But we are naive if we completely ignore the role of mental illness, as well, and just say (talk about oxymorons) that the shooter was "pure evil."
"Not to be grossly cynical, but what would the reaction be if this kid was a Muslim from Pakistan? We would be calling it a terrorist attack, and we would be attempting to do something about it. Instead, we talk about him being thrown out of his parents house and being dumped by his girlfriend."
This is an interesting point. No doubt if this were a man appearing to be Arab there would be calls to round up all persons of Arab appearance in the Council Bluffs/Omaha region and take them to Gitmo. When I heard of the attack yesterday I began searching for news reports on the incident. It wasn't until late in the evening that I found one that even gave a description of the killer.
I strongly suspect that, had the killer been non-white, we would have had no problem determining the race or national origin of the killer. We would have been bombarded with headlines 'Black youth attacks shoppers" or "Muslim terrorist loose in Omaha mall."
It's interesting that when the perpetrator of an atrocity looks like us, we seem to react in a more rational/thoughtful manner than when the perpetrator looks like "them" (whoever "them" happen to be).
I'm sure the [Al]Mighty Favog was reading the kid's mind while writing his self-absorbed "eloquent" commentary. For me, he cheapened the lives the kid took, rather than inspired sympathy.
I've dealt with suicidal people, directly. If I'd known his location at the time, I'd have called the police on one of them, who thankfully did not act on his words. I do not and will never condone violence, but I will offer one observation: suicidal thoughts are directly related to a feeling of being trapped. It is not rational. It is not given to rational analysis. The best any of us can do, including myself with my limited exposure, is guess about the circumstances and, simply, try to understand.
Favog scores a zero on my understanding scale. I'd give him a negative score, but I'd need to read his mind first.
ds0490,
A few years ago a University of North Carolina student who was a Muslim ran his Jeep Cherokee into a crowd of students. I don't recall anyone calling for Muslims to be rounded up then. In fact if anything the media goes out of its way to avoid reporting on the race of the perpetraitor of crimes if they are a minority. Was any mention made of the fact the Sean Taylor's killer was black? On a less serious note, the judge who sued the Korean drycleaners for losing his pants was black, yet that was never reported in the media despite the long history of emnity between black and Koreans in urban areas.
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