The VA Tech Massacre and one news editor’s erroneous conclusion

clipped from mail.google.com However it is dressed up, the Virginia campus massacre was only possible because the killer, Cho Seung-hui, had access to a gun. Remove the access to guns and some of the threat disappears too. Of course serious criminals will always be able to lay their hands on weapons. Criminals don’t pay attention to bans, but many of these youngsters responsible for the 19 shootings in the last decade have not been from criminal backgrounds. If guns weren’t so freely accessible, some of them at least would not have been able to carry out the atrocities that they did. Guns need to be removed from society entirely, not, as Mr Pratt suggests, integrated into all parts of it. Even if a ban on guns had prevented just one of those shooting incidents in the last 10 years, then surely it would have been worth it, as the community at Virginia Tech would no doubt agree.

The above clip is taken from an article posted on April 17th on the http://uk.msn.com website and is written by their news editor, Tom Reed. What follows below is my response.

With yesterday’s VA Tech Massacre, lots of blogs and newspapers will renew the call for a ban on guns, or at least a more stringent background check before guns are issued. As the MSN News Editor concludes above, the “Virginia campus massacre was only possible because the killer…had access to a gun.” In my opinion, that’s completely missing the point here – all of the emerging news reports are talking about how friends, family, acquaintances, and the VA Tech community missed warning signs and the opportunity to help Cho Seung-hui when complaints were registered against him.

Let me be very clear here: I’m not advocating for or against guns here. I’m simply refuting the MSN News Editor’s argument above that it’s the access to guns that caused the massacre. Again, what caused the massacre is that many people who had the power – the chance – to help Mr. Cho Seung-hui ignored his troubles. As an educator, I’d argue that ignoring warning signs in a student such as the one Mr. Cho Seung-hui has been described is failing one’s primary professional responsibility.

We need to be more proactive, not reactive, and that means helping our students not just with their academic needs but also their emotional and psychological needs.

Why I’m happy without my millions

clipped from www.nytimes.com THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?

As this op-ed in The New York Times goes on to conclude, the rich and famous become “disinhibited”. Scientists at the Univ. of California at Berkeley have conducted experiments that suggest that with power, people tend to forget social norms (“the rules don’t apply to me”) and live a rather large and reckless life, while the lack of power tends to make people play it safe. In other words, the powerless become less inhibited and more frightful of consequences of their actions while the powerful becomes less so.

But what if, one day, I do get my millions and become one of the powerful? The article has advice for that too – I’ll just hire one of the powerless!

Record numbers of college applicants get turned down by Ivy League Schools

clipped from www.nytimes.com Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. Needless to say, high school valedictorians were a dime a dozen. It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances.

As an educator who has dealt with the “Harvard Effect” where parents want to know how their 18 month-old infant can get into Harvard, this news is bad news. Blood pressure will soar, hair lines will recede quicker, aspirin sales will skyrocket, and the school counselor’s office will be flooded with phone calls for new appointments.

So what can you do to keep your hair from falling? Well, first, get Rogaine or a competing product, and then remember: it’s not just about the school, but whether the school’s a good fit for you (or your child). The same thing applies to college admissions as well.