By now I am sure everyone knows of the tragic slaying of reporter Alison Parker, 24 and cameraman Adam Ward, 27 of Roanoke, VA-based news station, WDBJ Channel 7 at the hands of a former employee of the network who I refuse to name.
It is yet another tragic loss of life in the country that we are sadly getting almost immune to due to the frequency with which it happens.
Obviously, this story is different based on a number of factors. Most frighteningly, it happened on the air, while two of the more popular and talented up and comers were doing a news story. Other than the obvious reason that it was going out live on the air, it is scary that it can happen this way because of copy cats.
I now fear the next shooter who gets an idea to go on a rampage will wait until the News at 6 is there, and then we will have another major massacre.
As long as people will be people, and all of us have our biases and issues, we will always run the risk of this sort of thing happening. It can be any of number of things that can make a person snap. I would venture to say a lot of us are just one or two things going the wrong way from being the next person who could be snapping, except most of us have that little thing in our brain that separates fantasy from reality, and right from wrong.
What is going to be shame about all of this is what the aftermath will bring. For the first few days there will be a lot of remembrances of the two journalists killed, which is the way it should be. The problem comes after that, when we all find out everything there is to possibly know about the moron/a$$h#*e/douchebag/insert your own adjective here that is the killer.
I refused to name him earlier and I won’t do it here as I don’t think he deserves the credit he is about to get. It is going to come out that he had this trauma and that trauma. That he was diagnosed with some mental disorder, but hid it from everyone.
Then the political and gender blame game is going to start. It will be that the station should have done a better background check on him. Then the race—and ant-LGBT—mongers will come out and say it is because he is black—and/or gay—that we are making a big deal out of it, or not a big enough deal.
Then here comes the gun control lobby making the case that if guns were illegal or just harder to get this never would have happened. Then the other side will be heard from with some equally asinine statement about how guns aren’t the issue.
In all of this you know what will not get mentioned? That these two people, who had done nothing wrong, lost their lives for no reason. You know what else will not get mentioned? The little Asian child that was hit by a car or the Hispanic teenage girl who was gang raped on the way to school, or the Jewish man who was beaten up and left for dead because of his religion.
These will all be forgotten because this coward who killed himself after this heinous act will get all the publicity. People will know his name, will talk about him and try to figure out how he could have been stopped.
THAT’S what’s wrong with this country. It has nothing to do with gun control, one’s sexual preference or racial divide or even why this happened. It has to do with the media sensationalizing the story and making the focal point the one place that needs no focus.
If we didn’t know who Eric Harris and Dylan Klybold were, or who John Wayne Gacey was or even back to whom Leopold and Loeb were, maybe we wouldn’t have as many killers looking for their 15 minutes as we do.
It isn’t about kills for these people; it’s about being famous and not forgotten. That’s why each successive kill seems to be more and more gruesome and grandiose. Hell, they have to top the last guy who shot 30 people from a freaking bell tower.
Let’s put the focus BACK where it belongs, on the innocents who lost their lives, for what apparently is no reason. Murder is not a political agenda; it is a human trait at its basest form and does not need to be dissected on every program from here to Timbuctoo.
Maybe if we focused on the people that need focusing on, the victims of these crimes, and made them the heroes of this “Greek Tragedy” that has become the human condition, maybe, just maybe we could stop even one of these nuts from going off the deep end. #WeStandWithWDBJ #WDBJ #PrayForWDBJ