I believe that the national press coverage of the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, should be condemned for their “total annihilation of the tragedy. While I believe it is important for the public to be informed of situations occurring in our country, it is disrespectful to both the dead and to their loved ones to see graphically explicit hour-long epics about the event when the police have barely had time to secure the crime scene. In addition, one must point out that this type of irresponsible reporting can cause irreparable damage to the reputations of innocent people especially when suspects are alluded to who will later be proven to have had no involvement with the tragedy.  

A case in point would be the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta where the media openly reported that Richard Jewell was a suspect in the case. In fact, Jewell turned out to be a hero who had found the device and tried to warn bystanders to leave the area. Unfortunately, for Jewell, his exoneration and subsequent monetary settlements from the networks has been unable to remove the suspicion of guilt from his name.  

In the case of the Virginia Tech tragedy, viewers had the option to change the channel to avoid this type of program, but they may not be able to avoid the ever-louder cry for the enforcement of gun control measures. Therefore, while most of us acknowledge that the right to own a firearm is a fundamental right, others refuse to see the danger of relinquishing this right to a government that is breaking the law under the Patriot Act. For those of you who are unaware of how the Patriotic Act is illegal one only has to look at citizens who are now being questioned without the right to an attorney in the name of Homeland Security, the illegal wire-tapping of citizen’s phones, or to the governments intention to monitor citizens, via satellite, using RFID devices. My fear would be that with the current government’s philosophy they could continue to whack away at our constitutional rights and while they would still be armed leave the American citizenry without any means to fight back to regain our civil liberties?  

Our forefathers saw this danger and choose to codify gun ownership in the Constitution to ensure that they would be able to protect “the security of a free State,” specifically the one that they had just created. Even then, they saw that threats to their freedom and individual liberties could come from both external and internal sources and I don’t think that they believed that the federal government could be trusted to protect those hard-won freedoms. It is obvious given those facts that they knew an unarmed public would not be unable to successfully resist foreign or domestic tyranny. However, they did know that a well-armed, well-informed public is less impressionable than a disarmed, uneducated one, therefore, it seems strange to me that modern society doesn’t seem to understand the basics of the issue, much less the affect it might have on them or their children.

[tags]Virginia Tech tradedy, Media Coverage, Gun Control, tyranny, Dangers of gun control, Patriot Act, Constitutional freedoms, 1996 Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, Richard Jewell, irresponsible news reporting, Danger from too much government [/tags]