What is it about April and crazed mass killers. Twelve years ago today, Timothy McVeigh parked a truck filled with explosives under the day care center inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 innocent people. This cowardly act of domestic terrorism was somehow justified in the warped mind of McVeigh, based upon the BATF raid on the Branch Davidian cult and its leader, David Koresh, in Waco, Texas two years to the day earlier.
Then tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where teacher Dave Sanders and twelve young students were killed in cold blood by the two misfits, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who somehow carried out their evil deeds upon their fellow students. Rather than being the "Columbine State" for the beautiful flower, Colorado was now known as that because of the horror that turned an ordinary spring day at an ordinary high school, into hours of horror and death.
Now, another twisted and warped person takes out his personal issues and turns them into an excuse to commit mass murder, this time at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. This horrible excuse of a human being takes the lives of those in his campus community with complete disregard for the sanctity of every human life.
In part, I blame our lack of adequate health care for the problem. Even when people have good insurance, mental illness is not afforded the same coverage as physical ailments. Thus, the people who could possibly be brought to some degree of normalcy through medication and treatment, are instead let loose to bring terror down on their fellow human beings.
My very deepest condolences go out to the families and friends of the victims, as well as to the entire Virginia Tech community.
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