My feelings aside is there anyone else here who is just completely fed up with the way the media seems to be masturbating over this whole incident?
I mean, yeah, there have been shootings since 9/11. Of course. And there have even been a few multiple murders—the Beltway snipers come to mind. But it’s been ages since we last had a good old fashioned school shooting, one that has all the media’s most talented whores standing around with their pants off and their mouths open, pleasuring themselves while drinking in the blood of as many students as possible, giving the most trivial developments the biggest headline they can and scouring campus for crying people to photograph.
“But Thor,” you might think. “Wasn’t there a school shooting just a couple of years ago?”
There have been a few, technically. There was the Red Lake High School massacre, in Minisota, but that really didn’t count since it took place on a Native American reservation. It didn’t get any media coverage because the victims weren’t white enough. Then there was the Amish school shooting just last year, in Pennsylvania, but that was no good from a media standpoint because the families of the victims were Amish and so they wouldn’t cry on camera. There have also been a couple of instances in which a single student shot another student, but these count more as murders that just so happened to occur at a school than as proper “school shootings.”
The Virginia Tech Massacre is the first real, proper school shooting we’ve seen in a long time.
Does “the Virginia Tech Massacre” work? Does “Terror in the heartland” sound better? No, that’s right. Virginia is too far south. How about “Killer Finals” or something like that, to play up the whole college angle? That—that probably would work if only two or three people got killed and this was an episode of Dateline NBC, but when the death toll is over 20 it’s usually best to avoid being clever. Let’s stick with “massacre” until a better term comes along.
Time to bring in a school shooting expert. Poor guy; he hasn’t been on TV in years. Tell me, Dr. TV Expert, what is it exactly that makes a young person snap? Is it the stress of school, the bullying, the availability of guns, or something sexual like gayness? I mean, sure, we’ve all gotten really stressed out and considered shooting up our school. Heck, many of us have gone so far as to draw up maps of our killing spree, intricately plotting out our routes through the busiest and most vulnerable areas of campus in order to get our kill count as high as possible, just like when we were in Iraq—
—Wait, I’m sorry to interrupt you but we just got some big news in: it turns out that the shooter was from South Korea! Oh this is great. I mean, it would have been better if he was an Arab or from Iran but this is pretty good, too. Of course, this begs the logical question about what it is, exactly, that makes Korean students so prone to shooting up colleges. Is it something in their DNA? Is it cultural? Some are saying that there is something about Asians, about their stress level, that makes them prone to violence. Is this true? Should we—and I mean no offense to our Korean viewers—but people are suggesting that more colleges start keeping an eye on their Korean students, just as a preventative measure.
And, now I know it’s still early, but I’m thinking we should really try and play up the Korean angle in our new headlines. The trouble is you don’t know what is and isn’t racist these days when it comes to Asians, and I’d hate to see the public turn on us during this ratings cash cow. I’m thinking something respectable that really indirectly mentions the Korean part of it. How about “Try one of Column A, try 33 of Column Murder.” Too much? Okay, fine, never mind. But keep it mind for later.
Ohh! What we haven’t been doing enough is mentioning how our hearts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We need to start doing that at least every five minutes, at the end of every story and also on the crawl at the bottom of the screen. If we’re gonna exploit these people we should at least make it seem like we care about them. Kinda like how Maury Povich hugs the girls on his show when they’re crying because their paternity test turned up negative. Best to make the viewers think we care.
See how long we can ride this out. Keep your fingers crossed that they find a freezer full of corpses in a local Korean restaurant or that there’s a copycat shooting. If this gets going over a couple of weeks we can get some ribbons printed up to remind people of it. It’s a choice between chartreuse and plaid, since those are the only colors that haven’t been taken by other ribbons. I say go with plaid, make some statement about how the shooting affected students of all colors. Great idea, I know, know; it’s like are we radically sensitive or are we racially sensitive? That’ll get us an award for this, if nothing else will.
For now, let’s try our best to stick to our usual “polemic morons screaming at each other” format. Get that one guy who thinks that everyone should be required to have a pistol on them at all times and have him yell at that lady who says that owning ammunition should be a capital offense. It’d be best if we could try and turn this into something that resembles debate, make people think they’re learning something by watching the news.
We got to make this shooting look like the best thing in the world. Misery should be made as appealing as possible. It helps you learn, it helps you live, it helps you feel. Everyone is gonna want to be crying on TV, having a whole nation feel sorry for them. Everyone is gonna want to think they’re being smart by repeating something they saw someone say on TV, and everyone is gonna want to look like they’re empathetic because they pretend to feel sorry for the 33 people who got killed while ignoring the couple dozen who get killed here every day or the half million that we’ve killed in Iraq. And you know something? We’re gonna help everyone do all of these things.
I’m telling ya, this Korean kid did a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of favors. This day and age, shooting up a bunch of innocent people is just about the best thing that a guy can do. So says the media.
all over the place every time something unusual happens, demanding to be kept "safe" even though I and 99.99999% of everyone else in this country is already safe. The only way I could be safer is if everyone else is exterminated and I'm the only person left alive.
Oh wait, was that a public display of emotion on my part? 
