Directing The Gun...

Mr.Atos

Its another sad, grimly puncuated statement on the current state of the American culture, as it is being packaged and delivered via the Public Schools and Universities, and the headline of today's Oregonian says it all,

"Run, He's Reloading The Gun!"

5 Students are reported dead this morning, plus the insect who shot them at near point blank range as they completed a geology class at Northern Illinois University on Thursday. Another 15 are wounded.

The shooter, it is being reported, was a former student of Sociology at NIU. Interesting to note, that the Department of Sociology at Northern Illinois University as of this posting seems to have disabled their own website. It might have been interesting to view their mission statement and note the particulars of the faculty that might have helped cultivate a sensibility that ultimately converted other people's children into lifeless heaps, and a boy into their sociopathic predator. You see, even as renewed cries erupt in favor of tighter nationwide gun controls and bans in the face of a growing trend of school shootings, one really must ask the most poignant question at hand. What did more damage in that lecture hall on St. Valentine's Day, 2008?.... the guns loaded with bullets?

... Or the boy loaded with bad ideas directing the gun?

UPDATE: 02.16.08

"To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don't, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening—he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

"His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

"If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he's incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there's only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another's faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic's faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by 'a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit's foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon—truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people's arbitrary wishes—a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls—and if it weren't for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

(Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957)