You have to work at it.

Atv rider struck, killed by train

Ok, Anonymous commenter

I will rewrite my blog post with what I do know as reflected in the article above:

The man in the article above was riding his atv on railway tracks, where he was hit by a train.

This act of thoughtlessness resulted in his death, and left behind friends and family who mourn his loss and one engineer who will have to live with a tragedy not of his making for the rest of his life.

Moral of the story: Tons of train cannot stop on a dime and atvs do not belong on railway tracks.

Cowboy Nation

I wrote earlier about the recent massacre at Virginia Tech perpetrated by one lone man who besides being off his rocker, had extremely easy access to guns; access made all that more easy by the very lax gun legislation of The Commonwealth of Virginia. These laws (or rather lack thereof) make it possible to purchase any gun one would ever want with out permit or waiting period. In effect, in Virginia it is more difficult to adopt a cat from the local animal shelter than it is to get semi-automatic weapons.

As to be expected, the Gun Lobby claims that guns would have prevented this massacre. It seems that the Gun Lobby believes that as soon as this lunatic began firing, the students would have magically morphed into Bruce Willis and saved the day in a blinding flash of gunfire and testoserone. OOOOOOOkay.......

It is hard for one not of The Excited States of America to understand the American love affair with guns. To be sure, the right to bear arms is enshrined in their constitution. However, that said, I can't imagine that the founding fathers with their muzzle loading muskets could even conceive of the guns used by Cho Seung-Hui when he killed 32 people. Likewise, I don't think that they could envsioned in any way the carnage that happened at Virginia Tech. I believe that if they had any notion of what this amendment would have led to, the wording may have been drastically different.

I also can't figure this out: No one is asking for a ban on guns. All they want to know is who has them and waiting period to do a criminal/mental health check on the person who is buying it. That's it. No one wants to take their precious phallic symbols away. Now, that said, their government has carte blanche to tap their phones, it is even tracing the library books that people read, and they have their collective knickers in a twist because someone wants them to register their firearms.

I'd say they have a few larger problems than registering guns. But then, I'm Canadian.

And we will likely never know why

33 Dead in "horrific" campus shooting

I was 11 years old when the first occurance happened: sniper Charles Whitman killed 14 people and injured dozens at University of Texas in August of 1966 and I remember it still. Then came Columbine, and for a time it seem that every 6 weeks, as regular as clockwork, there was a shooting at some high school in the states. We in Canada were not immune, there was Taber Alberta, and L'Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and others. Now, frighteningly, it seems that there are too many occurances to list.

The thing is, there will never be a satisfactory answer to the question of "Why?" In the end, even if we could get inside the head of the shooter, we would not find an answer, because truly, there is no satisfactory answer. Were they suicidal and wanted to take a bunch of people with them? Did they want a "blaze of notoriety" that their lives otherwise would never have brought them? What is the "short circuit" in the brain that erases everything except the urge to kill, and then to die?