Yeah, here's another thing I'm a little
late on. But I said I'd do a piece about it in the second issue of
the Final Fantasy 8 Text Play, so I might as well get on with it.
A couple weeks ago, there was a mass
murder at the University of California's Santa Barbara campus. As I
understand it, the shooter killed six women and then himself, saying
that he did it because he was always getting ignored by women.
With the basic facts as I understand
them, as poorly as it may be, out of the way, it's time to get down
to my thoughts on this. I remember doing a piece something like this
after the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, a few years
ago, on my uSteam Show. The same thought occurs to me now as did
then, in that I must wonder if we really didn't see any signs of this
coming, and if we didn't, why did we not? Because there certainly
had to be signs, dots to be connected, and it truly worries me that
that did not happen.
Worse yet, there's reason to believe
that in this one case, people may have indeed see it coming, and for
some reason, either could not or did not act on what they knew. This
is a case of an over-priveleged, if not downright spoiled, rich white
boy who came face to face with the fact that flashing his daddy's
credit card would no longer get him whatever he wanted and deciding
that killing a few people was the right way to go about changing
that. From what I understand, the guy who did it wrote a rather long
manifesto about it, as well as putting out several YouTube videos on
the matter in the days and hours leading up to the tragic deaths of
these people.
The thing that truly bothers me about
this is that there's evidence that people saw this coming, and yet
none of them could or would do anything to at least minimize the loss
of life. It's a frightening thing that even as this shooter was
saying that he was going to do exactly what he wound up doing, and
was buying the materials to do it with, the culture we all live in
considered him all talk until he went into that sorority house, if I
have my facts right, and started shooting.
I've got a few other marginally related
thoughts that only tangentally go along with this, but would probably
be better served in their own post, which I'm intending to get to
soon.
Until then, some video game stuff to
maybe lighten the mood a bit. See you soon.
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