Another Day, Another Shooting

The past few days I've been watching the coverage of what the networks have taken to calling "Massacre at Virginia Tech" and wondering what, if anything, there is to say about it.

And there really isn't, is there? That famous quote from Wittengenstein's really applies here (I'm wildly paraphrasing but you'll get the gist): When there's nothing to be said on a subject, you should say nothing.

Needless to say, no one is saying nothing on this tragedy. Not even me.

Another loser loner full of rage gets his hands on a gun and shoots up everyone he can find. This is an old story -- we've been hearing, reading about and seeing these stories for a decade now. Most people have failed to notice that this shooting came within a week of the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre. The massacre that created the template, so to speak, for all the massacres to come.

What's really struck me in watching the network coverage is how cookie-cutter it all is. It's almost as rote as the "'lottery jackpot has reached a new high and everyone is standing in line to buy a ticket" story. You know exactly what the coverage is going to be to the point where you can yell out the shots in advance while you're watching it. You know the last shot is going to be the correspondent holding up the lottery tickets they've just bought and then they're going to throw it back to the anchor desk where they'll all ask each other whether or not they bought lottery tickets themselves and they'll all answer in the affirmative. Yawn.

Well, school massacre stories have become just as rote, which really tells you something about where we are as a country. News outlets can produce them in their sleep: from the first reports of gunshots to their anchors all scrambling to get to the site of the shooting to the hasty press conferences where nothing is disclosed to the revelation of the identity of the killer to all the speculation as to why a quiet guy who was a loner and kept to himself would commit such a horrible atrocity. It's paint-by-the-numbers journalism.

People have asked why this incident happened, but it seems to me that the more pertinent question to ask is why they keep happening over and over and over again.

And is anyone asking that question?

Tom Moran