Townhall | Dennis Prager | Feb. 19, 2008
Question 2: Which of these three options is more likely to prevent further murderous rampages: a) making universities closed campuses and increasing the police presence on campus (as the president of NIU has promised to do); b) making guns much harder to obtain; or c) enabling specially trained students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on campus?
Because political correctness has replaced wisdom at nearly all universities, colleges are considering options a and b. But the only thing the first option will accomplish is to reduce the quality of university life and render the campus a larger version of the contemporary airport. And the second option will have no effect whatsoever since whoever wishes to commit murder will be able to obtain guns illegally.
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Question 1: Why are murderers always counted in the victims tally? The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was: “6 Dead in NIU Shooting.”
“6 dead” included the murderer. Why wasn’t the headline “5 killed at NIU”? It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.
This is something entirely new. Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims. To give a military analogy, can one imagine a headline like this in an American newspaper after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “2,464 Dead in Pearl Harbor Attack”? After all, 55 Japanese airmen and nine Japanese crewmen also died in the attack.
One can only assume that this mode of reporting murders is part of the larger movement toward non-judgmentalism and egalitarianism. To many Americans in academia, the media, and elsewhere, all the dead constitute a tragedy. Suggesting that some dead are more important than other dead is forbidden.
At the San Francisco Zoo, after a young man was mauled to death by a tiger that had escaped its confines, the administrators of the zoo even lumped a killed animal with its human victim: the Zoo set up a memorial to both the man and the tiger. And, unsurprisingly, given the egalitarianism that now also lumps human beings with animals, the tiger received more condolence messages than the human it killed.
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