Maybe that's what he was after, some kind of bizarre record to put him in the Guinness Book of School Shootings because who knows what goes through the minds of these people in order to justify the mass murder of innocent young students.
Whatever the cause it is another terrible day in the United States murder record and of course it will re-ignite the all too familiar debate about gun control - and it will produce exactly the same result for the gun culture is far too well entrenched in the American psyche. Even students who had suffered the trauma of Columbine, and who were interviewed today after the Virginia Tech killings were, to British ears, surprisingly ambivalent about gun control.
There are some people who continue to say that if every university guard, teacher, student was armed the death toll would have been lower. Well I'm sorry but I don't buy it.
It has been argued over and over again why a gun is such a lethal killing machine - not just because of the obvious fact that it can fire a lot of bullets over a long distance at high speed and do incredible damage but because of the impersonal nature of the killing device. A mentally unhinged person who wants to work off his angst against the world can feel 10 feet tall in his combat jacket as he strides around with this metal pop gun - bang, bang, bang and all those irritating people who make your world a misery just fall down like dolls. Nothing messy like sticking a knife in and feeling the blade go through bone and gut, no horrible close up mess like chopping their heads off with a cleaver. It's all so clean and tidy.
This happens over and over again and every time someone tries to put a rational explanation on it. It was some anniversary worthy of perverse celebration, it was an overworked student who had problems with his work, it was two boys who had problems at home. Well for Christs sake, everywhere on earth has these same problems but they don't all end up killing their classmates.
The obvious problem is of course the elephant in the room. The existence of so many guns in the United States which are so accessible to so many that when someone does go off the rails the consequences are awful. The one thing which is the major contributor to all this is played down even by former victims of insane gun rule.
Why? Because I think the cancer is terminal. I think the number of guns in America is so great that Americans cannot see a world without them. People see the answer to hideous gun killings as 'lets have more guns'. Many Americans don't feel safe without a gun in the house and I fear that this attitude will not - cannot - ever be eradicated. Consequently, at least once a year, America will wake up to tragedies like this one and there will be a genuine outpouring of sadness, the President will make a speech of support and regret, then, after a suitable time the United States will simply forget about it and get on with business - until the next one.
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