I wasn't going to post on this

[muckefuck]

I've read a lot of sad things in the wake of Blacksburg, among them that_dang_otter's bitter point that, on average, more Americans than died there are killed every day in the USA, but since they're not all killed in one place, they don't garner the same kind of attention. We can glimpse just how inured we've become to their deaths by the fact that the officials at VA Tech weren't willing to cancel classes for 20,000 on account of only two on-campus murders. It makes me wonder what their cut-off was: Four students? Ten? Would it be the same for faculty and/or staff? What's the quota where I work? And has it changed in light of Monday's events?

But I think the saddest thing I've read so far is this:

Kim Min-kyung, a South Korean student at Virginia Tech reached by telephone from Seoul, said there were about 500 Koreans at the school, including Korean-Americans. She said she had never met Cho. She said South Korean students feared retaliation and were gathering in groups.

I so dearly wish I could say they were just being paranoid, but I'm too well acquainted with human nature--and past reactions to massacres with minority perpetrators--to say that.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Today I was musing that one of the aspects of these kinds of horrors that makes them more likely to distort most people's perceptions than "everyday murders" is not their magnitude so much as their relative unpreventability. What I mean is: Most murders, as gopower points out, are "crimes of passion". The murderer is well-known to the victim, who may even have tried to escape their assaults in the past. To the extant that we can refuse to associate with violent, unstable personalities, we can reduce our chances of being victims of such a perpetrator. But we have much less control over who our colleagues and neighbours chose to associate with, and with that uncertainty and loss of control comes a tendency to exaggerate the risks.

Now that I've laid it all out there, it looks like a pretty banal realisation. But that describes pretty much all of my reactions to the massacre.