Catcher in the Rye

It seriously has to be something in the water. Schools all over the US are quickly becomming killing fields, and still their lawmakers refuse to enact any form of legislation to stop it. Can it be put any simpler, 'NO MORE GUNS'. No more guns....it's really that easy. Ban the glocks, ban the ak47's the mac 10's the desert eagles. What do any of these things have to do with hunting. 'Oh look, a deer. ratatatatatatatatatat, fuck your dead!!!!' Oops it was actually billy down the street, and you're not in some majestic national park, you're in downtown New York.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting

Ranting about gun laws aside, you seriously have to look at the mentality of this boy. Here's a few bits of dialogue from a recorded message he mailed to NBC 45 minutes into his rampage;

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui says in a harsh monotone. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in surburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

The fact he mentions 'Eric and Dylan, the two youths that rampaged through Columbine.

If you've done any reading at all, you'll make the same association that I did. The words of this young man mirror, though not verbatim, those of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". Mind you, he was a bit more agressive in his tactics, but it almost seems as if by committing this horrible act, envisioned himself as a sort of 'savior' of the weak and downtrodden. He even associates himself with Jesus Christ, in his belief that, by slaying all of the snobs and hedonists, he is creating a better world for those less socially adept.
He fancies himself as 'The Catcher in the Rye", twisted as that may be.

I think there are some lessons that can come out of this, unfortunately I expect the wrong ones will be focused on. The legislators will lock down the schools, force detention on 'suspect' students, and mabye even institutionalize fringe thinkers, but will they ban guns? I doubt it. Will they offer help to those who feel so inferiour that they lose grasp of their reality? Not likely, they'll probably just lock them up and write them off. Most of all, will they stop the obvious belittlement, the attacks and torture at the hands of the 'more fortunate' students who, as we all know just love to put the less afluent in their place? Not bloody likely. In fact our entire society is bred on clawing your way to the top, then dumping whatever crap you can on those below you. Scumfucks like Donald Trump that breed this mentality through cut throat business ethics only serves to diminish society further, and teach our youth that this treatment of the weak is acceptable. That class and rank and privelege beats humanity and compassion.
Until we REMOVE these ideals, and people from their pedestals, then you can expect more lost souls to lose their way, only to find it again behind a bullet.