Artificial Cheese

It only took one morning to put Imus into perspective.  CNN calls it “The deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history,” but this was far from a rampage.  One guy chained up the doors to a building and started shooting everyone inside.  This was a carefully planned assault.

So what now?  I’m sure that the media will fuel the fires of hindsight and cause everyone to start blaming people for not being able to see into the future before this happened.  Then the water cooler conversations will go from, “thats so sad” to suggestions on who is to be blamed.  We’ll start seeing pictures of the shooter dressed in fatigues and bearing assault rifles, and threatening or demonic letters that he wrote over the past few years.

Then the campaign managers for the 2008 election campaigns will chime in.  They’ll go after the popular targets, those targets that people hate because they are not understood.  Ipods, YouTube, hip-hop, video games, those big jeans that black people wear, Iraq, skateboards, marijuana, short skirts, pierced ears, bad grades, dancing, etc. etc.

Then before anyone has a chance to stop and think about the actual root causes for these sorts of incidents, the issue will be thrown into the statsictal abyss only to be used as a benchmark for future mass shootings.  Maybe some Walmarts will think twice before selling Grand Theft Auto 4 to a minor, and thats about it.

So what do I think caused this problem?  I think that its not worth trying to figure out.  With 6 billion corruptable humans wondering all over the planet, there is no way to avoid a few thousand homocidal ones.  Its a bell curve, not a bell square.  In the end, this is an issue because people fear getting shot by a mad man, but what people fear even more is that they are at the mercy of almost anyone at any time.