The staff of Nolan's Pop Culture Review and Crazed Fanboy dotcom wishes to express our deepest sympathies to the victims and their families who suffered tragedy at the hands of Cho Seung-Hui, 23, the deranged student-gunman who massacred 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech University, Monday, April 16, 2007, before turning the gun on himself.
There's not much more I want to add to continue the freakshow the news media has built out of this -- specifically, making some kind of monstrous folk hero out of a seriously disturbed student-murderer impressionable young people can emulate (can't wait for the T-shirts), but it would be irresponsible of me as a journalistic-type person to ignore it altogether.
At this writing, there is a video, so far not released to the public, the killer made of his last testament and ramblings, none of which makes any sense, but is being clipped onto the TV news anyway. He mailed it to NBC TV while he had time to kill (no pun intended) between his first and second murdering sprees at Virginia Tech University. Since campus security had already written his first assaults off as "an isolated incident", he had plenty of time, two and ahalf hours to be exact, to visit the post office, return to his dormitory, pick up a few things and return to the school, knowing he'd never see the end of the day.
To those who feel contempt that his runaway publicity is cementing his undeserving name in history, let me remind you that while it's truly historic in hellish terms what he did, he will NOT be around to "enjoy" his newfound fame and celebrity. He's dead.
Let me further remind you that, chances are, he didn't plan on being a record-breaker, as there was plenty of time to stop him (which he mentions on the video, albeit in a different context), but no one did. He simply killed as many as he could before turning the gun on himself. And only then because help finally arrived.
Which brings me to the final, but perhaps truest thing we have to worry about: the copycat killer youth. He who's now been told exactly what he has to do to go down in history as some kinda bad-ass. Even Cho Seung-Hui invoked the names of the Columbine killers (Kliebold and Harris) with reverence during his martyring video. So just kill 33 people or more and you, too, can break the previous record and be in history books. Though yesterday you were nobody, today and forever after, people will speak your name with awe. Try and make more sense in your final video, though, and for goodness sake, please explain to us mortal fools how brave you are to shoot yourself afterwards so as not to face any consequences, because looking from the outside-in, the whole thing about shooting innocent people and then yourself sure appears to be cowardly to me.
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