The Convocation at Virginia Tech

It's Tuesday April 17 and by now everyone has heard of the horrible shootings that occurred yesterday at Virginia Tech. The worst in terms of number of victims in U.S. history. Pretty awful. The U-dub just had a single-shooting a couple weeks ago on campus, too, where a berieved/crazed ex-boyfriend was stalking and shot his ex in her office on campus.
So what's going on? The inevitable questions arise. People want to make sense of a senseless act. It's understandable, and of course the media is in frenzy mode, as we expect they would be. But what irk me are the ideologues who emerge out of the woodwork and try to spin a tragedy and slap their political views on it.

The many interest groups in this country think that the event speaks "only" to their issue. This is what often becomes really obnoxious to me.

The gun-control people come out and say, "see what happens when guns are legal/too available etc". I heard one guy cite a statistic that of all the gun-crimes committed in New York City, 40-some percent of those guns were purchased in Virginia. As if it is Virginia's fault what criminals do hundreds of miles away in New York?! That would be like blaming "South America" for your crack addiction...

So you have the gun-control folks, then you have anti-video game violence faction, as it were, who see the shooter - a middle-class Korean immigrant kid, and stereotype him as that "Asian kid-computer/video game junky", i.e., that he must be one of those chronic game-players whose mind has been irreparably warped. They see the tragedy as a platform for their grievances on the ultra-violence of modern video games, failing to consider that millions of people play these games without resorting to real-life violence. Take Japan, for instance. Japan is among the safest countries in the world while simultaneously consuming some of the most violent entertainment. Go figure.

I was listening to the "Convocation" on the Virginia Tech campus this morning on the radio. It functioned as a showcase of the various associated (or unassociated) politicians, local, regional and national. Yes, the politicians! We mustn't forget them! Whichever direction the cameras may turn, they follow, regardless of how incongruous and irrelevant their presence may be.
While showcasing the politicians, the Convocation had the obvious tone of a Sunday church service. But here, the minister takes the guise of a cavalcade of officials, local and national, all the way up to President Bush.

While they struggled to keep it lugubrious and grieving, this didn't stop, for example, the president of Virginia Tech, Charles Steger, from giving a shout out to the governor, Tim Kaine. And so the politicos appropriated the event for their own selfish purposes. Disgraceful, but somehow unsurprising (they probably look to Rudy Guiliani's career-boosting stint as mayor of New York during 9/11 and envision similarly promoting themselves). Disgraceful, indeed, but definitely not surprising.