Virginia Tech Massacre

Virginia Tech and my school, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, could be cousins. According to wikipedia they were founded around the same time from public land grants, and now have about the same number of student's and faculty. I've never seen a bloody stage that looked so similar to my home.
The post Columbine fear that swept through the nation and ever school, never reached me. The experts on TV and in the schools told us we should look for the symptoms of the school shooting disease. Prevention would come through kindness and ratting out the ostracized.
The experts on TV said we'd need metal detectors in schools, but that never happened in my schools. An armed police officer became a fixture of the school. His job was to someday shoot one of us.

Everyone worked very hard to convince themselves that the rashes of violence that spread across the country were not symptoms of something larger. That the Dark was not rising. But it was on the mind of the children, the parents, and everyone who was being born again, ready to vote in the next millennium.


On gun control at Virginia Tech, [via BoingBoing]
An interesting blog post, complaining that if a year earlier Virginia Tech hadn't removed all guns from students at school, then some students could have protected themselves in someway against the shooter. I'm sure my school feels vindicated for covering the campus in surveillance cameras. The psychological violence of metal detectors, constant surveillance, and increased police presence, is far less damaging then the physical violence we still can't prevent. Why must safety be so violent?

On the shooting and Ismail Ax, [BoingBoing]
List of School massacres, [wikipedia]