Wednesday - April 18, 2007

Phase II: Copycats & Hysteria

During Phase I of the VT shooting incident. The media descended on Blacksburg like a swarm of locusts, interviewing every warm body within reach to get reactions, diagnose the killer, describe the crime scene and ultimately ... assign blame.

That’s Strike One.

Now we are entering Phase II of the crime. The media have retreated back to their studios and called in all of the talking heads who will diagnose the killer, analyze the victims, discuss what could have been done to prevent it and ... assign blame.

That’s Strike Two.

The result of all of this media hysteria and endless 24/7 coverage is that a lot of warped individuals out there in the rest of this country see their chance to rise from obscurity and gain a fleeting moment of fame by either pulling off a copycat crime or at the very least, threatening one. Of course the media will have to fly off and cover those threats too and once more they will be looking to ... assign blame.

The easy target in all of this is your average, everyday firearm. It can’t defend itself but it is perceived by the liberal media as a direct threat to mankind. That is why the talking heads and newspaper editors are about to enter Phase III, wherein they hop up on their soapbox and call for the Second Amendment to be repealed or severely restricted - pressure on Congress to follow forthwith.

That’s Strike Three.

Send the media to the showers, coach. They can’t even get on base but they brag about their batting average at every Pulitzer committee meeting. When is someone going to do the research and look into our existing laws and figure out why they’re not working and why judges let killers like this go scot free? How can we better handle mental cripples like the VT killer when it seems all the signs were there that something was definitely amiss in his head?

We would be better served if the media would start asking those questions rather than blaming an inanimate object that is completely harmless without a human being operating it. For the time being though, we really need someone to explain “a 6-foot-tall man in a skirt, high heels, lipstick and a blond wig near a school drop-off area”. I’m sure the media will be all over that ....

Threats Rattle Schools in 10 States
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Apr 18, 12:03 AM (ET)

Campus threats forced lock-downs and evacuations at universities, high schools and middle schools in at least 10 states on Tuesday, a day after a Virginia Tech student’s shooting rampage killed 33 people.

Threats in Louisiana, Montana and Washington state directly mentioned the massacre in Virginia, while others were reports of suspicious activity in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan.

In Louisiana, parents picked up hundreds of students from Bogalusa’s high school and middle school amid reports that a man had been arrested Tuesday morning for threatening a mass killing in a note that alluded to the murders at Virginia Tech.

Schools Superintendent Jerry Payne said both schools were locked down and police arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly made the threat in a note he gave to a student headed to the private Bowling Green School in Franklinton. Both towns are in southeastern Louisiana. “The note referred to what happened at Virginia Tech,” Payne said. “It said something like, ‘If you think that was bad, then you haven’t seen anything yet.”

A Great Falls, Mont., high school was locked down for a time Tuesday after a threatening note was found in a girls’ bathroom. A student found the threatening note at about 12:15 p.m. on a toilet paper dispenser. It stated, “the shooting would start at Great Falls High at 12:30 and it would be worse than Virginia Tech,” Assistant Superintendent Dick Kuntz said. He said it was a hoax.

Washington State University’s branch campus in Vancouver was evacuated because of graffiti discovered in a campus restroom threatened harm likened to the Virginia slayings around 8 p.m., around the time a conference on the Patriot Act and the war on terror was scheduled, authorities said. The event was to be rescheduled.

In Rapid City, S.D., schools were locked down after receiving reports of a man with a gun in a parking lot at Central High. No shots were fired and no injuries were reported, police said. The high school students were taken to the nearby Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, where parents were allowed to pick up their children.

In Austin, authorities evacuated buildings at St. Edward’s University after a threatening note was found, a school official said. Police secured the campus perimeter and were searching the buildings, St. Edward’s University spokeswoman Mischelle Amador said. She declined to say where the note was found and said its contents were “nonspecific.” Amador said the university’s reaction was not influenced by Monday’s attack at Virginia Tech.

“No matter what day or when this would have happened, we will always take the necessary precautions to protect our students, our faculty, our staff, the entire university community,” she said.

Seven North Dakota State University buildings in Fargo were evacuated after a duffel bag was found outside a bus shelter in the main part of the campus. NDSU spokesman Dave Wahlberg said the shootings in Virginia reinforced the need to “err on the side of safety.”

In Bloomfield Hills, Mich., police attributed a 30-minute lock-down at the exclusive Cranbrook Schools complex in response to jittery nerves following the Virginia slayings.

School officials called police after parents and students reported spotting a 6-foot-tall man in a skirt, high heels, lipstick and a blond wig near a school drop-off area outside Cranbrook’s Kingswood Upper School, Lt. Paul Myszenski said. Police were unable to find anyone meeting the man’s description.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, officials ordered three campus administration buildings evacuated for almost two hours Tuesday morning in response to a telephone bomb threat. The city’s bomb squad searched the buildings but found nothing, campus spokesman Chuck Cantrell said.

- More ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/18/2007 at 09:51 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Stoopid-People •  
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