Virginia Tech was one of my backup schools. I spent my formulative years in Northern Virginia, and I had many friends who went to college at Tech, and I’ve been watching news reports in the off-chance that one of them might have still been there as a teaching assistant or something. Watching the news reports has been eerie – even though I’ve never been to that campus, the climate and trees in the background reminds me so much of where I went to high school, that I’ve been depressed and distracted all week. I can only imagine how it must affect those who actually were closer to the incident, and my deepest condolences go out to those who were touched by this horrible tragedy.

In the dark days of the Katrina disaster, the only saving grace of the whole episode was that it was the media’s shining moment. The 4th estate came in, managed to capture all the right stories, conveyed the desperation to the people, and captured the outrage over how the entire thing was handled from top to bottom.

The VA Tech shooting has been pretty much the opposite of that. In fact, watching the media handle the episode has been downright embarrassing, with an utter disrespect for grief, taste, or the facts. It’s been that way from the very first day’s press conference, when the press kept repeatedly asking why he didn’t shut down what essentially is a small town of 30 thousand people on a moment’s notice. This is not to say that things couldn’t have been handled better. But at the time, nobody but the shooter was actually sure of what happened that day – 20/20 hindsight is a little easier when there are facts to be debated.

Why is there a discrepancy between how Katrina was handled and this travesty? I mean, isn’t the media doing exactly the same thing it did in Katrina? Yeah, but that’s not working. In Katrina, a lot of people (local, federal, republicans, democrats – everyone, really) was to blame, and there was a story a minute. Blame makes such a good story and fall guys make convenient villains. And so the cavalcade of so-called experts starts: gun control advocates, gun freedom advocates, theists claiming atheists are to blame, the usual slander towards video games, and so on. But in a shooting like this, NO ONE is really to blame.

It is the hallmark of the modern media to take any new and recent event, no matter how rare, and do their best to convince you that it is commonplace. Remember the summer of Shark Attacks? Turns out that you’re about 80 times more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. After Katrina, the news tried to convince us that we’d probably get two cities washed out to sea every year. Last year had no notable storms. We get constant news about teens doing extreme and violent crimes, even though as a whole, teen crime has been, well, not bad.

And so it is with school massacres. We get, on average, a couple serious attacks at a school every year. Worldwide. Most school shootings are personal attacks resulting in only a couple of dead – the school just happens to be the place the vendetta was carried out. Attacks like VATech and Columbine are anomales. Statistical blips. In most years, your children are more likely to be killed by a Dog Attack. If Counterstrike made kids killers, we should be knee deep in the dead by now.

Of the massacres that happened – a shocking number of them involved shooters over the age of 20. So there’s really no need for the media to continually try to scare us to death of our own children.

Virginia Tech was a horrible event, and I have nothing but the deepest condolences for the people who have been affected by it. But one of the reasons it is so shocking and tragic is because events like it are so rare. Don’t let the media tell you otherwise.

And then we get to Jacky Boy, who is in rare form. On Monday, he was assertively telling Fox that video games were to blame before anyone other than the police knew who the shooter was. The clips I saw described him as a ’school shooting’ expert. It failed to mention in any way, shape or form that his initiatives have cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, or that he constantly faces serious legal complaints which risk professional sanctions and/or disbarment.

Kotaku offers a more serious dissection of Jack’s latest line of bullshit (Brian Crecente being, you know, a professional journalist who does, like, research and stuff.) My favorite assertion: that a previously school shooter used Super Columbine Massacre as a training tool for his shooting. Now, I’ve played SCM. It’s a 2D overhead, sprite-based game with Final Fantasy combat. The only thing that’s even mildly tactical in nature is avoiding the security cameras so that you don’t get stopped by a hall monitor. Saying that you can be ‘trained’ by SCM is kind of like saying that ‘Defender’ will make me a better astronaut.

With that being said, this video of Chris Matthews giving Jacko the Hardball treatment is definitely worth watching. Not only is it fun to watch all of Wacky Jack’s arguments dissolve like wet tissue paper – it may be the first instance of serious and lengthy skepticism of the anti-video game crusade by a talking head so far. (Although I must admit I have to give props to Rush Limbaugh as well. I feel dirty typing that sentence)

This event may become a true coming of age moment for the video game violence debate. Jacko over-extended himself by blaming games when there were no facts to support it. Chris points out that the shooters friends and roommates seem much more freaked out that the kid spent his time on his computer, isolating himself and writing awful screenplays. Instead of, say, joining them in a nice, social and fun game of deathmatch.

Any time I see anyone blame books, tv, music or video games for a school shooting (and based on the Tech incident, perhaps we should add Microsoft Word to the list), I always feel like people forget what it’s like to be young. You know, back when you lost all perspective. When getting a ‘B’ in Humanities might ruin your life forever, and how you’d never love again after that girl next to you in Chem blew you off in front of her friends. You can’t appreciate that, in ten years, you probably won’t remember her name (although I think it was Erika). When you’re young, the highs are high, and the lows are so low that some kids get fooled into thinking that the Cure is good music.

In Gerard Jones’ excellent book Killing Monsters, he posits that kids like ‘power fantasy media’ like comic books and video games because it allows them to pretend to have some level of control in a world where they are frequently powerless. A natural extension of that theory is that bad things happen when that feeling of powerlessness is left unchecked. This is when despair sets in. Fortunately, this seems to be somewhat rare so far.

What do kids who shoot up schools have in common? I don’t profess to be a ’school shooting expert’ like Jacky Boy, but I suspect if you did an analysis, you’d find these traits kept popping up over and over again: Bullying, Alienation, Romantic Rejection and a big heaping bowl of the Crazies.