Kijkt u eens goed naar deze foto. Wat ziet u precies?Juist ja, dat zag ik ook meteen. Die armen zo gespreid, in elke hand een pistool, de baseballpet met de klep naar achter, een zwart jack, en een oorlogsvest, die gelaatsuitdrukking. Ja, precies, dat is een imitatie van ja... van wie? Van Bruce Willis. Die Hard. Het is een exacte kopie van een filmposter. Die jongen speelt een rol, identificeert zich met de eenzame outlaw die het recht in eigen hand neemt, Bruce Willis, Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, maar dan in het echt, Michael Douglas die flipt in Falling Down, Robert de Niro in Taxi driver, The Ground Truth, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, al die duizenden moorden op tv, en in het nieuws, elke dag weer in een samenleving die voortkwam uit genocidaal geweld, een samenleving die geweld en de outlaw verheerlijkt en waar het aantal moorden per 100.000 inwoners meer dan zeven keer hoger is dan in Nederland. Cho heeft alleen dat gedaan waar vele anderen met plezier dag in dag uit naar kijken en in oorlogssituaties meteen in de praktijk brengen. Kijk goed naar wat er gebeurt als het centraal gezag hapert, kijk naar wat een uurtje vliegen hier vandaan in het voormalige Joegoslavie gebeurde. Kijk naar wat Nederlandse soldaten net na de oorlog in Indonesie uitvraten. Begint er een context te dagen, zijn er meerdere factoren die tot deze slachting hebben geleid of is hier sprake van slechts een monocausale tragedie, met andere woorden: hebben we hier alleen maar te maken met een geisoleerde gek zoals de Volkskrant zo graag wil?
De Volkskrant:
'Cho Seung-hui was ‘geestelijk ziek’
Van onze correspondent
BLACKSBURG - Een rechter in Virginia heeft Cho Seung-hui, de 23-jarige moordenaar van 32 studenten en medewerkers van de universiteit in Blacksburg, eind 2005 ‘geestelijk ziek’ verklaard en een potentieel gevaar genoemd voor zichzelf en anderen. Die vaststelling kwam nadat twee vrouwelijke studenten van Virginia Tech klachten bij de politie hadden gedeponeerd over het gedrag van Cho. Hij is toen door de politie naar een psychiatrisch ziekenhuis gebracht en daar ter observatie opgenomen... Het televisiestation NBC maakte gisteren aan het einde van de dag bekend dat het een pakje had ontvangen, afkomstig van Cho Seung-hui. Het bevatte ondermeer video’s, foto’s van hemzelf met wapens in de handen en een geschreven filippica tegen de rijken.
Pikant is dat volgens het poststempel het stuk is verstuurd tussen de eerste moordaanslagen in een studentenflat en de tweede serie in het complex van collegezalen. NBC heeft het pakket overgedragen aan de politie. Het televisiestation noemde de inhoud ervan ''verontrustend''.'
Van onze correspondent
BLACKSBURG - Een rechter in Virginia heeft Cho Seung-hui, de 23-jarige moordenaar van 32 studenten en medewerkers van de universiteit in Blacksburg, eind 2005 ‘geestelijk ziek’ verklaard en een potentieel gevaar genoemd voor zichzelf en anderen. Die vaststelling kwam nadat twee vrouwelijke studenten van Virginia Tech klachten bij de politie hadden gedeponeerd over het gedrag van Cho. Hij is toen door de politie naar een psychiatrisch ziekenhuis gebracht en daar ter observatie opgenomen... Het televisiestation NBC maakte gisteren aan het einde van de dag bekend dat het een pakje had ontvangen, afkomstig van Cho Seung-hui. Het bevatte ondermeer video’s, foto’s van hemzelf met wapens in de handen en een geschreven filippica tegen de rijken.
Pikant is dat volgens het poststempel het stuk is verstuurd tussen de eerste moordaanslagen in een studentenflat en de tweede serie in het complex van collegezalen. NBC heeft het pakket overgedragen aan de politie. Het televisiestation noemde de inhoud ervan ''verontrustend''.'
Cho_Seung-hui_was_geestelijk_ziek
Slagwoorden van de Volkskrant zijn ‘geestelijk ziek’ en ‘verontrustend’. Het zijn kwalificaties die het complexe van de menselijke geest achter een mist van meningen verhullen. Dat iemand die 32 mensen vermoord ‘geestelijk ziek’ is, is geen nieuws. Daar hebben we geen rechter voor nodig, dat weet zelfs de grootste gek. En de kwalificatie pikant, wat doet het daar in die tekst. Pikant? Als de Volkskrant-redacteuren de Nederlandse taal niet beheersen, waarom koopt de krant dan geen woordenboek? Pikant kan lingerie zijn, of een anecdote, maar het is geen mening die je bij een tragedie gebruikt.
Voor de feitelijke verslaggeving moet u de angelsaksische pers lezen:
'Killer sent photographs and video to broadcaster between shootings
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 19 April 2007
The man who shot dead 32 people at Virginia Tech took time out after committing the first two murders to post pictures and video to a national television network, police revealed yesterday.
Korean-Born English student Cho Seung-Hui sent a CD-Rom containing video footage of himself reading out an 1,800-word profanity-laced tirade about " getting even" and 29 digital photographs of himself brandishing weapons, 11 of which show him pointing a gun at the camera.
NBC Nightly News last night broadcasted excerpts of the video, in which Cho said: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to avoid today. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
The package helped answer one of the many mysteries surrounding Cho and his motives why there was a two-hour time lag between the first two killings and the rest of them, which took place in a teaching building housing the engineering department.
It surfaced on a day when numerous warning signs that Cho was psychologically troubled and prone to unusual and alarming behaviour were revealed. Campus police disclosed that he had been investigated for the sexual harassment of two students 17 months ago and was admitted to hospital after he was diagnosed with suicidal depression.'
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 19 April 2007
The man who shot dead 32 people at Virginia Tech took time out after committing the first two murders to post pictures and video to a national television network, police revealed yesterday.
Korean-Born English student Cho Seung-Hui sent a CD-Rom containing video footage of himself reading out an 1,800-word profanity-laced tirade about " getting even" and 29 digital photographs of himself brandishing weapons, 11 of which show him pointing a gun at the camera.
NBC Nightly News last night broadcasted excerpts of the video, in which Cho said: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to avoid today. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
The package helped answer one of the many mysteries surrounding Cho and his motives why there was a two-hour time lag between the first two killings and the rest of them, which took place in a teaching building housing the engineering department.
It surfaced on a day when numerous warning signs that Cho was psychologically troubled and prone to unusual and alarming behaviour were revealed. Campus police disclosed that he had been investigated for the sexual harassment of two students 17 months ago and was admitted to hospital after he was diagnosed with suicidal depression.'
Lees verder: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2461395.ece
En als u toch niet zonder een mening kunt, leest u dan een mening die niet voor de hand ligt, want die van de Volkskrant zijn nietszeggend.
En als u toch niet zonder een mening kunt, leest u dan een mening die niet voor de hand ligt, want die van de Volkskrant zijn nietszeggend.
Bijvoorbeeld deze:
'Biggest surprise of shooting is that it's no surprise at all
By John Bogert
On Friday my Southwest Airlines flight made a quick stopover in Austin. During the long descent I could see the tall brick tower on the University of Texas campus where, in 1966, a former Marine named Charles Whitman killed 14 people at extreme long range with a hunting rifle. This was after he murdered his wife and mother with a knife, which I mention just to mollify those who might look at this -- the first of our mass school shootings -- and ask, "Then why don't we outlaw knives as well?"
I'd like to claim that my tower view was foreshadowing of the massacre at Virginia Tech, but it wasn't, not specifically. That's because the many mass killings that have come to pass since that first nation-disorienting tragedy in Texas only set in motion a sense of inevitability.
Since then there have been so many senseless gun attacks that we need to graduate the violence in order of magnitude. In 1984, 21 people were murdered in a San Ysidro McDonald's. Two years later a postal worker in Oklahoma killed 14. In 1987, 16 more were shot dead in Arkansas followed by the deaths of 23 diners at a cafeteria in Kileen, Texas, followed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold going berserk at Littleton, Colo., killing 13 and wounding 23.
For a full and terrible overview of school gun violence, see www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/School_shooting, where you'll notice that this horrible end of our murder-rampage habit began in 1966 and has devolved over the years to include children, teens and outside crazy people, with most of them not mentioned this week because they fall under the four-or-more minimum that seems to be needed to qualify as mass murder.
Most disturbing for me was the Jan. 17, 1989, attack on a Stockton elementary school by 26-year-old Patrick Purdy. A strange loner with a toy soldiers fetish, he used an AK-47 rifle to kill five and wound 30. Numbers are, of course, abstract. What drove this story home was a news photo of a 5-inch steel roof support pipe shot clean through with a bullet from a weapon made to wreak maximum havoc at minimal cost.
By then I had a small daughter in school, and if I needed an example of rampant insanity and the effects of high-powered bullets on tender flesh, I needed to look no further. Which is why the Virginia Tech massacre was at once a surprise and no surprise at all. Even there, in that pretty corner of the Blue Ridge, all it took was the usual combination of loner, unfathomable grudge and easily obtained firearms.
There was a time when I had a lot to say about that, about what Britain's John Major on Monday called a "freedom paid for with infrequent but catastrophic acts of violence." Unmentioned was the 1996 Dunblane Primary School shooting in Scotland where Thomas Hamilton killed 17 students using a nearly impossible-to-obtain handgun. Fact is, we do this sort of thing more than anyone, but mass shootings have occurred almost everywhere.
Which means what? Are we just crazier or have we made gun ownership too easy? Not that it matters because we can't seem to contain, either. Meanwhile, enthusiasts have done such a good job making guns available to people like Cho Seung-Hui that it's beginning to seem that they are right. In a nation where a shooting massacre can erupt anywhere at any time, maybe we really do need to live our lives armed.'
By John Bogert
On Friday my Southwest Airlines flight made a quick stopover in Austin. During the long descent I could see the tall brick tower on the University of Texas campus where, in 1966, a former Marine named Charles Whitman killed 14 people at extreme long range with a hunting rifle. This was after he murdered his wife and mother with a knife, which I mention just to mollify those who might look at this -- the first of our mass school shootings -- and ask, "Then why don't we outlaw knives as well?"
I'd like to claim that my tower view was foreshadowing of the massacre at Virginia Tech, but it wasn't, not specifically. That's because the many mass killings that have come to pass since that first nation-disorienting tragedy in Texas only set in motion a sense of inevitability.
Since then there have been so many senseless gun attacks that we need to graduate the violence in order of magnitude. In 1984, 21 people were murdered in a San Ysidro McDonald's. Two years later a postal worker in Oklahoma killed 14. In 1987, 16 more were shot dead in Arkansas followed by the deaths of 23 diners at a cafeteria in Kileen, Texas, followed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold going berserk at Littleton, Colo., killing 13 and wounding 23.
For a full and terrible overview of school gun violence, see www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/School_shooting, where you'll notice that this horrible end of our murder-rampage habit began in 1966 and has devolved over the years to include children, teens and outside crazy people, with most of them not mentioned this week because they fall under the four-or-more minimum that seems to be needed to qualify as mass murder.
Most disturbing for me was the Jan. 17, 1989, attack on a Stockton elementary school by 26-year-old Patrick Purdy. A strange loner with a toy soldiers fetish, he used an AK-47 rifle to kill five and wound 30. Numbers are, of course, abstract. What drove this story home was a news photo of a 5-inch steel roof support pipe shot clean through with a bullet from a weapon made to wreak maximum havoc at minimal cost.
By then I had a small daughter in school, and if I needed an example of rampant insanity and the effects of high-powered bullets on tender flesh, I needed to look no further. Which is why the Virginia Tech massacre was at once a surprise and no surprise at all. Even there, in that pretty corner of the Blue Ridge, all it took was the usual combination of loner, unfathomable grudge and easily obtained firearms.
There was a time when I had a lot to say about that, about what Britain's John Major on Monday called a "freedom paid for with infrequent but catastrophic acts of violence." Unmentioned was the 1996 Dunblane Primary School shooting in Scotland where Thomas Hamilton killed 17 students using a nearly impossible-to-obtain handgun. Fact is, we do this sort of thing more than anyone, but mass shootings have occurred almost everywhere.
Which means what? Are we just crazier or have we made gun ownership too easy? Not that it matters because we can't seem to contain, either. Meanwhile, enthusiasts have done such a good job making guns available to people like Cho Seung-Hui that it's beginning to seem that they are right. In a nation where a shooting massacre can erupt anywhere at any time, maybe we really do need to live our lives armed.'
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