The Killing Fields of Virginia

"Killing Innocent Civilians" copyright © Austin Cline.

Todays poster seems particularly apt.

It could’ve happened anywhere, so don’t blame Virginia. Hell, don’t even blame the stupid school administration for failing to lock down the campus when they discovered the first two victims. Why would they have assumed anything other than what they did, that it was a horrific lovers quarrel?

And I don’t think that the immediate fix is more gun control laws either (although I’m the first to rally behind strict gun control laws that would keep weapons out of the hands of felons AND crazy people in general – and that would include Chuck Heston in his bat-shit-crazy latter years, not to mention quite a few members of the NRA).

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

We, and by that I mean the collective National Corpus, left, right & center, crazy or sane, capitalist or socialist, fans of John Birch or Emma Goldman, Southern Baptist or Scientologist, drunk or sober, Park Avenue or park bench… every single one of us… have perpetrated a national failure, somehow, on the youth of America.

Because,

a. We have failed to inculcate in our youth:

a respect for life (including, importantly, their own!)

AND

b. We have further failed our youth by neglecting to beat out of them, if necessary:

self-centeredness and a sense of entitlement

Because I believe that only someone with an ego as wide as the Mississippi could’ve perpetrated the horrors of yesterday.

All mass killers had this in common, they absolutely believed they were entitled to do what they did.

So whether it’s a crazy kid whose love life has suddenly gone awry, or a President of the United States with unresolved Daddy-Approval issues, they both need to learn that it’s “not okay” to be pissed off and to kill people over it.