Cho Seung-hui video being kept off US TV

Yesterday my cousin in Limerick, Ireland, told me that the Cho Seung-hui, shooter at Virginia Tech, video was being played on TV all day long. This morning I searched the Internet and found the video and watched it.

You can find the video if you like but I don't want to post it here. Cho speaks quickly and with passion blaming all of us for what he is about to do. He speaks his isolation, his anger, against people ("you") who have...it's obvious he feels he doesn't have. You can say that he rambles on and on but he is sober, he isn't high. He compares himself to Jesus Christ and his suffering. He says among other angry, violent, vehement things, "you had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today, but you decided to spill my blood."

After an initial airing of some of the footage by NBC and being bashed for it, the network pulled the video and hasn't shown it again. Other networks have followed suit.

I'm glad the video is being kept off TV. To subject the parents and students of Virginia Tech to the video would be terrible. For the rest of us to have to listen to it all day would be dreadful.

"Beyond the first news cycle, it becomes little more than pornography," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider.

theteach

Shootings at Virginia Tech

From The Guardian:

To me the 3 paragraphs below are the most important paragraphs in the terrible Virginia Tech story today. For more information read the whole article in The Guardian here.

The shootings took place on an unseasonably cold day, with flurries of snow swirling around the campus, which houses 26,000 students. Virginia Tech is best known for its science and engineering courses. The campus is about 250 miles from Washington DC.

The southern corner of the state that houses the university is rural and sparsely populated, and is a bastion of hunting. Gun ownership is often regarded as a fiercely defended right.

The shooting was the second to hit the university this academic year. In August two people, including a policeman, were killed near the campus. William Morva, a convict who had escaped custody at the time, faces murder charges over the two killings. The university has also received several bomb threats in recent weeks.

theteach