Saturday, April 4, 2009
Binghamton.
The piled-on irony of a Vietnamese immigrant taking out fellow would-be American citizens from all over the world with semi-automatic handguns (permit, license, and registration required in NYS) is really too much for me. Will Binghamton now be known worldwide the way "Columbine" is, or are we now so used to this pattern of shared suicide that it'll just be a blip on the media radar? I guess it depends on how many books and documentaries we get out of it.
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2 comments:
I vote media blip, at least nationally. If you read the papers it seems there's another mass murder every few days lately (okay, many of them are domestic as in dad taking out the whole family, but a fair number are workplace or mall or school or other non-domestic events). Hard to say if it's a sign of the depression, the apocalypse, or a mass media feedback system (as in it's suddenly in vogue to report on them). Probably all three.
Yes, I think you're right. Columbine was just unlucky in being the first in a series. The sequels never get the same attention. The fact that the perpetrator's guns were all licensed and registered just breaks my heart and means there's no stopping this, at least legislatively.
The good news is that I work at home and Paul never taught me how to shoot. When I take out a crowd at Wegman's, it will be with a loaded shopping cart, probably while looking unsuccessfully for Sponge Bob fruit snacks.
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