.

Blacksburg

For the first time in KPT history Jee Lee and Hana Kim, the only two Koreans in my Poker Tournament went heads up to settle the Season 9 Tournament # 8 Winner. Hana Kim emerged Victorious after they'd both flop top pair and went ALL IN. Hana needless to say had the better kicker. "I beat the North Korean" he proclaimed proudly as he held up the winning hand...

Interestingly enough (although i doubt it's connected.. i just couldn't help it haha) the very next day Cho Seung-hui, a South Korean emigrant and Student of Virgina Tech shocked the entire World. I found out about the shootings initially from msn.com, my default homepage at 8:30 am. There was 1 dead. Sadly, my initial reaction was rather ho hum. I suppose shootings have become prevalent and or somewhat routine in this Country, like traffic or something. To my credit i did give it more thought than the typical urban shootings because it happened in a Prominent College (or a School period). I suppose it dulls in comparison to Columbine which will forever be synonymous to "School Shootings" is why i reacted the way i did. After reading about the article i stepped out for a cigarette. When i stepped back into the employee vestibule that leads into the office, the TV showed the death toll rose to an unnerving 21 Dead (this is minutes from "1 dead"). I couldn't believe what i was watching, "omg this is already worse than Columbine" i pondered somberly... At the end of the day the Death Toll rose to a dizzying 33...

If you have been following the chilling events in the past two days then you must share my perplexity about the way the Campus Officers had handled the situation. After the initial shooting, believed to have been a domestic dispute where they mistakenly thought or assumed the gunman had fled the campus, the Campus was NOT shut down. Have we learned nothing from Columbine 8 years ago? If i were in-charged, the doors would be coming down if i heard so much as a whiffle of gunfire... Someone was gunned downed inside the confines of an American College, whether it's 33 people or a solitary person, shouldn't that be reason enough to pause and maybe think about saving lives? I suppose no public-address announcement was made regarding the shootings to avoid panic but to assume the gunman fled the campus is laughable, not to mention grossly neglectful. University President Charles Steger said this in defense of the University's lack of action after the initial shootings “We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur”, are ya kidding me??? Obviously there is no easy way around this tragic ordeal whether there was 1 casualty or 100 but you would think a University President would have something better to say than to admit indirectly and probably unknowingly that he had failed at his job. Obviously i am not here to criticize what Mr. Steger had to say about the tragedy because there are bigger things at stake here but one can't help but question the University's apparent inefficient and flawed emergency response system. Perhaps a public address announcement was not ideal because of the possibility of widespread panic. The mass student email two hours after the initial shootings you could say was untimely. I guess it was difficult if not impossible to get the word out to the 11,000 students and members of the faculty driving onto campus that morning, but i do not think that is the point the students, the press, and entire country is trying to make here. I think the point is that the University's attempts to help suppress the situation was meager at best and that it is simply unacceptable. Students at the University are outraged, for good reason...

I can't begin to understand this fellows psyche leading up to his last act on Earth, what he might have considered a righteous one. That's the thing about these suicidals, isn it? They think it is a righteous act. God's will or something divine in nature. The truth is these people are psychopaths, the scum of humanity, anomalies, the weak. People that can not face up to life's hardships and challenges, societies self-proclaimed victims. And when they can no longer go on living they do their last cowardly act on Earth and take lives, a payback to society maybe. Hardly logical let alone righteous.

I can only hope this tragic tragic event does not conjure up some kind of a racial tension not only in Virginia but in the entire Nation. I mean the last thing this Country needs is another Racial Controversy, especially in the wake of Don Imus' unfortunate blabber... In all honestly i was very surprised the gunman turned out not to be Caucasian. I suppose any race is capable of such an evil and explicable act but statistically you could expect these shooters to be Caucasians. Call it a stereotype but it's true... It's a shame too that this kid was an emigrant because generally emigrants turn out to be very good citizens (our Governor is an emigrant for instance).

Posted by: Marc Gabay
Tuesday, April 17, 2007