Va Tech Shooter sends "images, letter" to NBC

it was sent from a post office, and not a stand-alone box?

that further surprises me.

 

NBC just got lucky. He could've sent it ABC, CBS, PBS, FOX, CNN, BET, you get the picture.
The images are very disturbing. This fucker was sick. But did anyone notice how calm he would be one minute and irrate the next? He could flip it on and off like a light switch. His roommates are lucky. They could've been victims.

 

Why NBC? Not that that's among the important issues, but, why NBC?

 

He said he loves Katie Couric.

Oops.

 

I imagine that thought has gone through their heads about a hundred thousand times over the past couple days.

 

It has to be shown. Has to. (Although, I certainly favor restraint.)

Here's why. The material proves he was a madman. Mentally ill. I've seen it hypothesized as schizophrenia.

Now that we know, we can go about the business of asking how a schizophrenic got access to, as Alma put it, weapons of mass destruction.

Uncomfortable with the images of him pointing guns? Yeah, I'd imagine most Americans are. A majority of Americans want more gun control. So why don't we have it? A majority of Americans don't vote. Don't care enough to. Perhaps these images will enable them to care a bit more.

 

For some reason when I first saw the headline about this, I thought the kid sent a copy of his play to NBC as an idea for a pilot or something.

 

Lugz, was watching the Today show this morning.
Unless I heard this wrong, the supervisor of the NBC mailroom said he actually opened the package.

 

Most rational people can look that this material and see how twisted he was, but what worries me is that he speaks in a voice that others out there understand and find common ground with.

By airing this the killer is being given the power to still control the situation and inflict further damage. In his ramblings he compares himself to Jesus and wants to be seen as an 'example' to others he feels are in whatever situation he imagined himself in. NBC is giving him exactly what he wanted. Does he deserve that?

He mentions the Columbine killers and calls them "maytars."

What can the general public as a whole learn from seeing this stuff? Is there really a need to make this public? I don't understand what the purpose truly is. The professionals who deal with this subject matter should have access to it, and I suppose it would be leaked eventually, but to air it right now, why? We know he was a monster. Do we really need to see the weapons he used to murder 32 people?

Some situations the public has a right and a need to know. This one, I just don't get it.

 

We aren't state-run media in this country who decide what the people "need to know" or not. That video was compelling and vital to trying to understand what happened that day. It was about as newsworthy as it gets. We are news people. You run it, no question. If they didn't, people would be accusing NBC of being self-righteous and congratulatory.

Plus, imaginations - including the imaginations of all of those supposed followers - would have run wild, wondering what was on there and how gruesome it must have been.

Once the stuff was in FBI evidence and put into the case file, it would have become public record eventually anyway. You run it.

 

I agree with Knute. Everyone spent two days of reporting trying to profile this guy based off very little information: guesses from students who hardly knew him, professors who had him in class and some his writings. What was the purpose of that? To try to figure out who this guy was. Then he sends out this package and you don't want that used? Doesn't this tell us more about him than anything else, especially proving he was nuts? Maybe more restraint should be/should have been considered in the airing of the material. But you can't say it's irrelevant to the story.

 

This fucker was as twisted as a pretzel. Nutjob in the first degree. You talk about knowing what a guy is going to do, but No one thought he was capable of this. Now, everyone is playing the blame game. I'm not so sure there is anyone to blame except the gunman himself.