Virginia Tech tragedy hits close to home

Life is such that you never know what tomorrow will bring.

The killing of 32 students at Virginia Tech last week certainly brought that point home as people around the world were horrified at the tragedy that took place.

Students and professors gunned down by a madman is a scene acted out far too many times in a country that clings to a gun culture and quickly justifies the right to bear arms no matter how many bodies are carted away.

Guns don’t kill people, people do….is what they keep saying. When what they should be saying is people with guns kill people.

Be that as it is, the tragedy at Virginia Tech, like the Afghanistan situation we wrote about in this corner last week, hits home.

Jocelyn Coutere-Nowak a French professor at Virgina Tech is one of the victims of the shooting.

She’s a graduate of Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School and has many relatives, including her mother, in the Yarmouth area. The Mooney family is related to her; Muriel Mooney being her aunt.

As news of a Yarmouth connection to this story made the rounds and we started probing we spoke to numerous people who knew Jocelyn Coutere. And all of them spoke highly of her. Their memories were of a person who loved life, loved children and was the last person they would have imagined making the news as a victim of such an overwhelming tragedy.

Many words have been written about her and the others who met their end when a shooter roamed the Virginia Tech campus firing away at innocent people.

And since the shooting there have also been many words written about the shooter, some of those words attempting to analyze what makes someone walk into a classroom to shoot people.

We don’t much care about why someone does that. We don’t care to name him, just as we never in this newspaper name the person who killed the women at the college in Montreal.

These stories ought not be vehicles through which the gunmen gain notoriety playing to more disturbed people who seek to copy their actions. The shootings ought not live on identified opnly by the killer’s name.

And last week when the television networks aired clips from the killer and he mentioned the two people who killed students at Columbine and referred to them as martyrs did it not beg a correction? Martyrs? Try another M word—murderers.

Making the people who do these acts out to be anything other than what they really are-crazy killers- does nothing to keep alive the memory of people like those who died last week. Joceyln Coutere-Nowak among them.

As the world focusses on that tragedy it ought to keep their memory foremost in mind and quickly relegate the shooter to far less than an equal footing with the victims.

There is no need to compound the tragedy.