Arm the Innocents - or, It's More Guns the USA Needs, Not Fewer

Good to see you're posting again Shadow. Welcome back.

I agree with you shadows that it's a difficult subject, it's one that is wrestled with daily. It was very easy for Cho to purchase his. This is the ironic situation, the conundrum that we are tangled in. No quick and easy solution.

This sort of goes back to the fact (I had blogged on this) that Cho was never taken seriously. He was interviewed by the psychiatrists or psychologists but his problems were not addressed. He was not helped. He went deeper into his madness. There were no stop gap measures in place for someone so disturbed. This is what alarms me. That seriously mentally ill people who have these ideations of murder and mayhem, some eventually act upon them. Cho's mental problems were known and long standing, that is a fact that came out after the shootings.

I read an article yesterday where it stated that the physical scars may heal but the mental scars will not on each of Cho's victims. OK, I found it in my history and here it is.
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Saturday, April 28, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. - Senior Kevin Sterne will see the scar on his thigh every time he pulls on his pants. Freshman Hilary Strollo will have to decide whether to bare her stomach in a swimsuit. And on the day someone slips a wedding band on her finger, junior Katelyn Carney will see the healed-up hole that a Virginia Tech gunman put in her left hand.

Most of the dead from the April 16 massacre on campus are buried, their families learning to live with loss.

Those who survived will have their own struggles, from physical scars to deep wounds of the psyche, trying to figure out how to stop the most dramatic event in their lives from overshadowing everything else that happens to them.

Anne Lynam Goddard, whose son Colin was shot three times during the attack on his French class, sees his trauma the way doctors see the shrapnel embedded in the tissue of his wounded leg: trying to remove it would cause more pain and might make matters worse, so it's best to leave it be.

"Your body forms a cocoon, so it will always be part of you, but it won't hurt. That's how I started thinking about this early on," she said. "My biggest hope is that this is how my son will remember this. I hope he can form a cocoon around it and not let it be his defining moment."

The terror of those moments is nightmarish. After sneaking into a dorm and killing two students with two shots from a 9 mm handgun, Seung-Hui Cho took his time, heading to a post office to mail a package of video and writings expressing his anger.

Then he chained the doors of Norris Hall, stormed several classrooms and unloaded more than 170 rounds over nine long minutes. Students - some wounded, some not - cowered, played dead and listened in horror as 30 of their classmates and teachers died.

Cho then put a bullet through his head and dropped to the floor amid his victims.

Most of the 25 people hurt in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history are healing in private, declining or ignoring interview requests.

Justin Klein, a junior from Catonsville, Md., who survived three gunshot wounds, issued a statement saying he is progressing physically and emotionally. He's back on campus, with friends forming a buffer around his wheelchair, shielding him from reporters.

"My place is here, with my friends," Klein wrote. "The Hokie community is strong and resilient, we will persevere, we will go on and we will heal."

It will not be easy. As the weeks and months unfold, the wounded could experience depression, survivor's guilt, thoughts of suicide, anger, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Physical injuries and painful follow-up surgeries could slow students' academic progress and keep them feeling somewhat isolated, said Melissa Brymer, a clinical psychologist with the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.

"Their scars can be reminders to themselves and to others, so this may impact their peer relationships. Their peers might not be able to cope with those reminders. They might distance themselves," she said.

There is no single way for victims of a tragedy to recover and adapt to what has happened, said Mark Lerner, a clinical psychologist and traumatic stress consultant.

"For some people, getting back on the horse, getting back on the bicycle and exposing themselves to this difficult environment where this has occurred, being back on that campus will be a really good thing for them," Lerner said. "For others, it may be more than can be expected, too much for them to handle."

Patrick Strollo, brother of injured freshman Hilary Strollo, said there is no doubt she will return to campus after recovering at home in Gibsonia, Pa., from three gunshot wounds.

"What are the other options? She's not the only one who had something happen to her. Every single person who goes to that school has had something happen to them," he said. "She has a ton of friends there and she needs to stick to the people she can relate with, and they're going to get through this together."

Strollo faces a struggle similar to that of Sterne and Carney. Sterne was wounded in the leg, the image of him being carried out of the building captured in a now-famous photograph. Carney was hit in the hand during her German class, but helped fend off the gunman by barricading the door to stop him from getting back into the room.

The bloodbath at Virginia Tech was singular in its horror. But in many ways, the path the wounded must follow is not so different from the one others have traveled.

In January 2000, Alvaro Llanos was a freshman at New Jersey's Seton Hall University when two students set fire to a dormitory. Three classmates died. The flames left the upper half of his body with painful and - for some time - obvious scars.

He went through physical therapy and took a year off from school. When he returned, he found support - and scrutiny.

"I figured I'd feel more comfortable being back at school. Especially when people know what happened, it would be easier than going to a different school and having to answer questions," Llanos said.

But after walking into a Spanish class the first day back, he quickly realized it wasn't going to be that easy.

"I felt like everyone was staring at me," he recalled. "I didn't feel like one of the regular students anymore."

That was six years ago, and Llanos has not graduated. He has made a new life, different from the one he'd envisioned.

Instead of pursuing a computer science degree, his recovery process persuaded him to train as a physical therapist. He married, has a toddler daughter and expects a second child soon.

And he has found in himself an energy and positive outlook; he rarely tolerates self-pity.

Some of the Virginia Tech wounded may find it hard to summon patience, but eventually, they must push forward because so much awaits them, Llanos said.

"You have to move on. You can't be stuck because if you stay stuck you're never going to be happy," he said. "Be happy and fulfill your life."

Sitting in her son's hospital room the day after the shootings, Anne Goddard tried to pre-empt the most difficult question Colin could ask himself.

"There is no answer to the question of why some people got shot and died and why some people got shot and lived," she told him. "There is no answer to that question. Don't go looking for it."

"Yeah," he said. "You're right."

Colin Goddard is already looking ahead. In the emergency room the day he was shot, the child who was born in Bangladesh and raised in Somalia and Egypt wanted to know if he could still do his internship on a development project this summer in Madagascar.

"Some parents would be afraid to let their kid go. I'm not," said Anne Goddard, a veteran aid worker who directs the Richmond-based Christian Children's Fund. "I want him to come back in August talking about something very different."
http://home.peoplepc.com/psp/newsstory.a...
-----------------------------Truth is stranger than fiction.

stop smoking that stuff people

You want peace made by your government?

You won't get it, you will be suffocated.

Good Luck.

Paul Toronto is not Canada, and Toronto is not the world.

Grow up.

And discover the informative advantage of text markup, such as paragraph breaks.

Grow up.

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2 is not equal to 3 - not even for large values of 2

Nice to see you.

The blog I wrote about arming innocents and needing more guns is called 'satire'.
I wanted to call people's attention to what is happening with loonies with guns.
I believe that Canada has as many guns as the US but there are fewer deaths from gunshot wounds.
Why?
Are Canadians more laid back?
Are they more responsible gun owners?
I don't know what the reason is but I would like to be able to find out.
I abhor guns.
I also have come to realise that it is going to be very difficult to remove guns from people who own them.In Australia when certain weapons were banned, many people simply buried them in polypipe in their back yards.

What I am saying is that I don't know the solution.That if people are going to own guns and have such easy access to them, then I think the education should be full on.

And that's the real shadows

Pam that's a lovely story.My story concerns a rat that died out the back of the cafe my mother ran at the time.I carried it in and dressed it in doll's clothes and got smacked for my troubles.

I haven't eaten squirrels as we don't have any here in Oz, but when I lived off and on with my grandparents I ate my share of top-know pigeons and hares, goannas and wallabies.
Must have been good tucker.

shadows

Shadows

I gave a straight response. I think that some of the Police in Britain have started to carry guns in some areas. I'm not sure. But, the Canadain Mounted Police always carried side arms. In Japan, there are very strict gun laws. I Hate Guns!!!!!!!

What do you think?

cnnek

{You Can Teach People How To Think Or What To Think; But, You Can't Do Both! It Is Better To Teach People How To Think!!!}

Of course Canada and England (or Great Britain) are very different.

Canada is an unfinished country, 40 times larger than GB. There are real wild animals, and some big predators. The police won't come help you if a bear breaks into your house. And they do that, the bears.

So this sort of thing explains why high powered hunting rifles make good sense in Canada. If you shoot a big bear with a small gun, you are in more trouble than before you shot the bear.

Australia doesn't have large predators (or not that I know of). Great Britain doesn't even have small predators, other than domestic animals (read dogs).

The UK has had plenty of gun violence, originating from Northern Ireland. The IRA has had lots of illegal guns and explosives.

Germany has had serious gun violence, while they have some of the strictest gun laws you can find anywhere.

Also another factoid to put things in perspective: more people die each day in traffic in the US than in this massacre. I don't know how many die from smoking. Of course, this doesn't make the shooting victims any more alive.

One big problem is that there are deeply trouble people, who somehow go off the deep end, past their breaking point.

If we want to reduce the violence, we need to help these people. Some of them are beyond help, and need to be kept away from harm.

As for what any individual can do, I suggest to be tolerant and a little nicer to our fellow man and women. And especially to children, so they don't develop problems early in life. We should listen occasionally.

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f u cn rd ths, u r prbbly a lsy spllr.