I have to spread more mojo before I can thusly commend CM and STC for their statements. So I thusly commend them here.

I think STC's revelation goes a long way towards illustrating why arming everyone, or even allowing voluntary concealed weapons carrying, would be a tragic mistake among the human type.


And Coaster Matt may be right about psych treatment being more effective than gun restrictions, and neither being very effective at all. Neither would likely have prevented this particular incident, but it remains true that Cho purchased and used guns and ammo clips previously covered under the expired assault weapons ban.

Saying he would have gotten the stuff illegally, or simply reloaded more slowly is kinda changing the subject. The single life such a difference in his killing capacity might have saved is of paramount importance ... if it's your own, or your son's or daughter's.

Mental illness is still seen as a personal failing - a choice someone has made to not think "appropriately". And because it's not considered a "real" illness, there is great resistance to expanding treatment options. People who are depressed should get over it. People who are psychotic should be locked up where we don't have to interact with them. In fact, I think many people associate psychosis with criminal behavior - not that psychosis leads to criminal behavior, but that being psychotic is in itself a criminal act, justifying incarceration.

It's a choice society has made. We - not individually, but as a society - have decided that mental illness is an willful individual flaw that we're not going to support treatment for something that's all in someone's head. Of course, that means things like this happen, but that's seen as just evidence of how awful the shooter was, not how difficult it is to access appropriate mental health treatment. And we all know the shooter was awful or he wouldn't have had any psychosis in the first place, right?

I have lots of peripheral experience with guns. Working in the San Francisco Sheriff's Dept office (and the jail), I come in contact with many people who legally carry firearms every day as well as people who are currently incarcerated for illegal possession or use of guns. I work with a deputy who shot and killed a suspect who was threatening the life of his partner. I've fired guns (on a range), and I've been held up at gunpoint when I lived in New York.

Through the years, I've become more centrist in many of my beliefs, because I always try to keep an open mind and approach each situation and experience for what it is.

That's why using the Virginia massacre as an argument for or against gun control makes me sick.

In the big picture, both sides have points, to be sure. But realistically, this event was a unique and sad event, but no more. It's no more proof that gun control works than it's proof that gun control doesn't work. Within hours of the shootings, there were pundits on television proclaiming that the real culprit was the violence that young people are exposed to on television and in video games. If the interpretation of the Second Amendment is up for grabs based on one sick kid, why not toss the First Amendment into the mix, too? Bah.

Guns scare me. More guns scare me more. I've never been aware of any "well regulated" militia, except maybe that of white supremacists or survivalists, so that scares me, too. I've never made the choice to own a gun. If my neighbor wants one, I'd hope he makes the same choice, but I wouldn't know. I support the debate in theory, but I wish that the loudest arguments on either side weren't so maniacal.

While I do agree that there should be higher quality mental services available, I do not see how it could have prevented what happened this past Monday. Outside of willfully submitting oneself to therapy, treatment and counseling, there is nothing we could have done, or should have done. Up until Monday, from what I could tell, Cho had committed no crime other than being a creep - and how many creeps are out there in the world?

I do not want to see witch-hunts against those whom some perceive as having an illness.

I don't want to see us turn back to a time of forced treatments.

I'm struggling, for some reason, to find a way to explain what I'm trying to get at... I guess most of all, I believe that forcing treatment is a slippery slope. We can say now that this will be a benefit, but who is to say that it can't turn into a tool for persecution, a different sort of imprisonment - perhaps for even those who do not suffer from any mental illness... a tool to lock away the opposition. Call them crazy, and have them be gone. I know that's pretty extreme, but it is possible. Plus, my freedoms are all I really have, even if they are perceived. I don't want what shreds are left to be decided for myself to be taken away.

So yes, I think we need to have better mental services available. Forcing it, labeling people, and perhaps unnecessarily incarcerating them in a facility is not a choice we should make for people.

While such statements partake of restraint, I do wonder how much they actually fetishize firearms to an unhealthy degree. My father always had handguns, which he kept in his sock drawer. As a little kid, I would help my mother fold laundry, and I would put away my dad's socks in the drawer where his guns were. At some point, I assume that I was told "Don't touch these." So I didn't. As I teenager, long after I stopped helping my mother with the laundry, I still went into my dad's sock drawer a lot because that's where he kept his porn. I left the guns alone just as I left the papers in his den alone.

My dad was in WWII, but I'm fairly confident that he never took a course in responsible gun ownership or spent hours practicing to shoot the little girl with the switchblade instead of the masked thug with the flower. He knew where the safety was.

Now, my friend who is the most passionate Second Amendment advocate, hunter, etc. has a number of handguns. He keeps them in a safe by his bedside. This safe has a door that has been customized with the imprint of his right palm so that, supposedly only he can open it. To my mind, spending so much time thinking about guns and devising neat gadgets related to guns and devising courses related to guns only makes guns that more attractive and mysterious to inquisitive young people.

Speaking of fetishizing, how many times do I have to look at those stupid pictures the killer took of himself!? (NBC execs must have messed themselves with glee when that package arrived.) I collapsed the "lead news photo" section of my Yahoo home page just so I wouldn't have to look at the guy pointing a gun at me anymore. Naturally, my TV is off as always. But leaving my house means I will see those images again and again today, on front pages in newspaper vending machines, on the TV monitors that lurk in practically every restaurant, shop or lobby, and so on. Surely this media overexposure is exactly what this messed-up kid wanted, and damned if the media aren't accomodating. I was especially vexed by a headline I saw when I first logged on today - Va. Tech victims horrified by killer photos. Gee, no f***in' kidding! So, let's shove it in their faces for a few more days. (Then next week, they'll almost certainly feature on the covers of TIME and Newsweek. I can hardly wait.) I would have found it refreshing if instead, MSNBC had come on the air, told about the mailing it received, and announced that they weren't showing anything, just to spite the sick bastard. Instead, I imagine those documents are going to spawn books and TV specials. I'll be doing something else, thanks.

Where are the battlefield photos would turn the American people against war on a dime?

There's no actual blood in the Cho photos, so the networks and periodals can display them ad nauseum. But the photos which are somehow too offensive or not local enough for American sensibilities (according to our media nannies) are not displayed.

The Cho photos do nothing but titilate. Photos of the daily carnage in Iraq, on a daily basis and glaring in the faces of any American who turns on a computer, a tv, or glances at a newspaper ... could help save lives.


Just lives we don't happen to care about. Or, in any event, which the media assumes we don't care about ... while doing nothing to encourage us to care.

Nothing like sending the message, "If you're a pathologically depressed individual thinking that the only way you can make your mark on this world is to hand the media a litany of manifestos and then kill some innocent people...go for it, it works great!!"

Yup. Publicity 101 for psychopaths.