Hokie Nation

The shootings at the Virginia Tech campus were a really bad thing.

I needed to get that out of the way.


Much of the coverage and the concurrent coverage of the rest of the world makes me a bit loopy.
Sure, lots of people were hurt or killed. I am sure they are/were very nice people.

There were the same "experts" that say the same things about the people who shoot people. The exact same rap we heard after Columbine, the various Post Office shootings, the McDonalds that got shot up, the Washington sniper shit.

Sometimes, in spite of expert opinions, people shoot people. There are probably more than 40 violent deaths where you live a year, aren't their? Maybe not. There are here.


There is a lot of that going on in other parts of the world, too. There are those college age kids over in Iraq and Afganistan, the ones who maybe couldn't afford to go to Va-Tech and signed up for the GI bill.

There are about 4000 of them dead. There are quite nearly as many who are double amputees.
I have never seen coverage of their struggle as graphic as what we have seen from Virginia.

I wonder if people think about what we are, as a nation, engaged in. I wonder if we would so casually address the wars we have started - if we saw the kids getting shot up, on the news every night...