The latest numbing catastrophe from the schoolyard

comes again from the US, where, as the world knows, 32 were shot to death in, not a schoolyard, but the 2000 acre Virginia Tech campus.

However, not out of the blue, as the usual cliché has it – in fact, the Tech seems rather a flaky place, with a shooting incident on the first day of the academic year, and death threats to unspecified persons just this week. The CNN commentator, with unaccustomed frankness, posed the questions: why always schools or colleges, and why (usually but not always) America? Good questions. Why schools? I suppose because unstable and often affluent teenagers, sated by violent TV and websites (and NOT desperate deprived individuals, as some social apologists would have it) enact their bloody fantasies on the environment they know best – their schools And why America? Forgive us if we mention America’s gun culture. In a country where the absolute right of a wild-eyed adolescent to buy the automatic weapon of his choice, no questions of ID asked, is enshrined in the Constitution, it is somehow more likely that these incidents will take place in the US than elsewhere. Of course, the gun lobby are already rushing in. If only the kids in the college had had their own automatic weapons, this would never have happened – the assailant would not have dared to shoot etc. Funny that hours after heavily armed (as well as heavily overweight) police arrived at the campus, the gunman was still merrily shooting away.

This raises another strange point. There was at first apparently a shooting incident involving a mere two deaths, at around 7am. The authorities naturally assumed that this was a normal American college morning (“I don’t like Mondays” etc) and did not react seriously. Meanwhile, the gunman walked unchallenged to the other end of the mile long campus, and started shooting up an engineering building, two hours later! He got as far as another 30 deaths before turning his gun on himself – the authorities were still running around sending emails, updating their website and taking videos. Could not the police have taken him out hours earlier?

President Bush called on a 'loving God' to provide consolation for those bereaved. I have one question: "why did the loving God not prevent the attack in the first place. Strike the perpetrator with a heart failure, or jam his gun? Shouldn't have been too difficult.

As I said, the ‘conservatives’ are already rushing in, blaming liberal college culture etc. Actually, I think one of the solutions would be to round up conservatives and the NRA, arm them to the teeth, if they are not already, take them to an appropriate locale, say Death Valley, and let them wipe themselves out – it would leave the world a better and cleaner place (and a few fewer gun lobbyists).