Suicide, murder and digital handguns

Now that all the 'snot and trane' over the Virginia Tech shooting last week is on the edge of being buried it is perhaps time to note that while suicide bombers have come to dominate the news to such an extent that they have become a cliché, we are increasingly faced with this random phenomenon of the suicide murderers.


Have you noticed how those who carry out learning institution massacres have a disconcerting tendency to end up dead? The Columbine kids for instance, and then the German kid that went amok in a German high school a while back and then there was the whacko that killed a bunch of Amish kids in a traditional one roomed school classroom, almost all the people who massacred an entire school in southern Russia and now on the campus at Virginia Tech where some allegedly insane South East Asian student apparently chains a group of kids in a classroom and then methodically guns them all down before chewing the barrel of his gun.

Interestingly the class that was the primary target was apparently also German and the Amish are of German extraction, I believe. Is this meaningful? I don't even know if it's true! The ultimate story that came out about the Amish child butcher was so absurd as to be downright improbable- Allegedly he was teased by little girls when he was a boy and now he came back to revenge himself on their daughters-. Yeah right!!!!!

What is true is that these gun slaughter fests always end with the perpetrator conveniently dead so that the living, in the form of a controlling authority, can present whatever story they want about the murderers without fear of contradiction. In this latest case the suicide murderer conveniently sends his life story to the media and achieves a bizarre posthumous notoriety, of a kind not accorded to the more 'respectful' suicide bomber- and definitely not accorded to the murderees.

So I see from the various reports and current headlines that the South East Asian American immigrant student who was responsible for the biggest mass murder in America since 9/11 was suffering from a broken heart [romantically] and killed his girlfriend allegedly and a.n.other. Then a couple of hours later he arrives at school in a highly organised state with at least two guns, illegal extended magazines and spare ammo, and other kit and proceeds to do a most professional job of taking out a room full of geeks, nerds and generally half-asleep partial adults, oh plus one convenient Holocaust victim just in case the incident fails to capture the frenzied imagination of a media starving for sensation.

He later publishes a carefully prepared hate-site piece on the Internet, in which he blathers about not being loved by the self-absorbed citizenry that surrounds him; and they therefore have forced him to commit this purging exercise. His diatribe is accompanied with rage photos of the acolyte in death's head mode ready to perform his brave act of talent cleansing.

Again - Yeah right!!!!!

Obviously fundamentalist Islamites are not the only zealots to use suicide to advance the cause of chaos and societal breakdown- given that the act of suicide itself is a negation of society.

The various knee-jerk reactions to this event are to discount the ever-ready 'Manchurian Candidate' thesis, so beloved of the conspiracy clique. Instead it becomes a modus for yet another assault on the rights of the citizen to defend itself from mad persons and the ever-encroaching State by promoting the civil disarmament agenda.

Two members of the Washington based 'McLaughlin group' almost came to blows over the issue of Gun rights, in that programme's heated debate in the aftermath of the slaughter. And a number of local chat shows and phone-in have presented the same gun control idea notwithstanding that so called gun free London has become a more gun violent city than New York, according to Pat Buchanan. [The BBC recently reported that London hospitals handled more than 4000 gun wounds last year. Various commentators have been noted over the past year referring to post-disarmament Britain being the most violent society in the Industrialised world.]

Gun crime in Britain is up about a thousand percent since private gun ownership was outlawed eight years ago, perversely proving Buchanan's hypothesis that when you outlaw guns only outlaws have guns. The anti-gun lobby refuses to see a correlation here. The politicians are also evasively avoiding the correlation; but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

I am not a proponent of the Manchurian Candidate theory either. I am more than aware that the world is full of whacked out maniacs, many of whom strap bombs to their bodies and blow people up. I also note that all the armour and protection against them in the world cannot prevent a determined wannabee murderer from executing what they believe to be their destiny.

What neither Buchanan nor his usually more voluble conservative associate Tony Blankly on the Mc Laughlin group panel manage to clarify was that the American Second amendment was specifically passed to make sure that the State authority never had a complete monopoly over the use of armed force. It was a unique act by what must be history's most selfless politicians- probably because they weren't politicians they were Statesmen- who knew that the self-serving, pork-gobbling, corruption prone politicians who infest the 21st century like the stench of an abattoir would later be around in spades.

The Second Amendment giving American citizens the right to bear arms was predicated on the premise that there are times in the affairs of the State when the citizen may need to rise up and protect the State from the actions of a usurper. Ironically George Bush would seem to have come closest to usurping the State than any politician in America's history: certainly those dangling 'chads' have a great deal to answer for.

It is doubtful that Robert Mugabe's military thugs could bully an armed populace with the impunity they demonstrate to overwhelm the disarmed populace of Zimbabwe, if it weren't for the less obvious fact that the populace of that brutalised place has been disarmed. The architects of the American Constitution did not intend that the USA should ever become the tool of aristocrats, autocrats, gangster liberationsits, or any other vested interest group. There are those who would argue that the USA is controlled by a bunch of competing vested interest groups. But the democratic rule: that the citizen has an inextricable and inalienable right to change the thieves that govern it intermittently, to give other thieves a chance to steal from the public trough, remains intact.

Of course there may be no smoking sub-text. It may be no more than what it seems to be: all random chaos - The exploding transformations that are taking place in the global economy have ripped open oozing wounds derived from personal greed, lust and avarice, crashed expectations and precarious judgements. Denied what they want - the 'me' generation throws its toys out of the cot and seeks five minutes of fame via the only medium capable of satisfying the itch.

The most recent machine-gun killer with c movie script aspirations apparently realised recently that he was a self-declared redundant and superfluous human: and so he took revenge against life.

Perhaps the real solution to the threat of random murderers is to develop a new type of digital user-restricted firearm that can only be fired for self-defence purposes; and issue them to all the planet's citizens: so anyone who finds themselves in danger of immanent murder by crazy or other people can whip out a lightweight electronically controlled derringer and defend themselves. Would our most recent forgettable South East Asian uprootee have managed to kill so many people had the room in which they were cornered contained thirty-four armed citizens?

Of course achieving this outcome would truly lie within the realm of an equally improbable future world order. Barring this, development, what we know is that the suicide murderers will strike again; and again; and conveniently each perpetrator will die: leaving only an enigmatic message of nihilistic futility.

So we find ourselves here in this opening decade caught within a new variation on the opening decades of the past half a dozen centuries with religious zealots wreaking terror in pursuit of a metaphysical agenda, random terrorists wreaking havoc in pursuit of a political agenda; and dysfunctional proto-humans committing murder because they can and because they want to.

Happy blogging
NiK