That is the front page headline of The Sun newspaper with similar wording in The Mirror and in some of the local rags handed out around London. These headlines are of course related to the horrible business over at Virginia Tech and sadly, I believe they are making a bad situation worse.
These kinds of headlines demonize the attack and ultimately place the blame squarely on the gunman. Demonization has historically been used as a powerful tool for motivating armies to fight, just think about how a lot of people have described Iraqi forces or the Nazis. Fortunately the likes of Tim Collins have stood up and said this is not the right way and done something about it (meeting significant political resistance along the way).
So if the military have figured out that demonization is not a good tactic, why do we as a society allow this to be pushed through our newspapers and other channels? Perhaps because it allows us to blame someone else and move on? Make no mistake the incident at Virginia Tech is appalling but if we are to learn lessons we need to avoid blaming the gunman and start asking ourselves as a society some harsh questions like “why did we ignore the warning signs?”
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