VTech Media Scapegoat

The shooting that occurred last Monday has shocked the nation, but the media feels the need to take advantage of that and pass out blame where they believe it is due when they should simply be reporting on the conditions of the victims and honoring their memories. All they seemed to be interested in early on was finding some random students that didn’t even know the victims or the perpetrator and interviewing them. Later on they attempted to blame the school for the crisis since the media always has to have a scapegoat.

Couldn’t it just be that nobody was to blame for this incident since it has no real precedent in US History (in that he had a documented history of mental illness)? This young man was obviously mentally ill but there have been several mentally ill people all over the US that have never shot anyone and actually ended up turning out okay with the help of some counseling. I think the state of Virginia probably should have had a law that prevented people who have been diagnosed as mentally ill in a court of law from obtaining a firearm (it could be added to their background file since every firearm sale through a dealer requires the dealer to call the FBI to give the okay for the transaction to take place), but if they had done that then he probably would have just found another way to kill a bunch of people. Some people in this country are just mentally unstable, and all we can really do is try to detect the problem and assist them as early as possible. This could just as easily happen here at UNH or any college campus around the US, and there are mentally ill people all over the country. Maybe if everyone would just be kind to everyone around them there would be less outcasts in society that end up becoming mentally ill or violent towards their peers.

Overall I just think that the media needs to give the people that were involved in the tragedy at Virginia Tech and their loved ones some time to grieve and recover to a degree, since they will probably never fully recover from an atrocity like this. Maybe they could’ve just given it a week or two before they started playing the blame game, but that’s what the media is all about: finding the scapegoat.