04-17-2007, 05:16 PM
Quote:The sheepdogs were thinking far more clearly than you were in that post, a manifestation of herd animal mode.
By your logic, you should lock down any small town of 20,000 people whenever a single homicide is reported. In Corpus Christi where I live, they should lock down 10% of the city of 300,000 anytime there is a homicide. Do you realize how ludicrous that is?
The initial report was apparently a homicide call, so the cops pursued a homicide and "question people and try to find who did it." Standard police procedure. Most homicides don't turn into a follow on mass slaughter.
Your appeal to hysteria, and the control freak impulse, reflects your infestation with the victim virus. I'd recommend you do something to root that out and kill it. In a related thought, John Cleese made a comment in the "Penguin Exploding on the TV" vignette of Monty Python that I have taken to heart:
"Don't be sentimental, Mother, people {die} explode every day."
Nystul presents a very common sense and applicable approach to deal with that. You treat people right and hope for the best. You, I, the sherriff, the DHS, can't control all of life. There is chaos, which is in general good, as chaos and change are children of the same father.
Once one accepts the existence of change and disorder as natural, one can accept the simple axiom that life is not fair. You can be the finest mother or father in the world, and your kid can still die in a car accident. A truck can jackknife and kill your sister. You can get food poisoning. All of this is beyond your control. Accept that you are going to die. (Yes, we mostly like to delay that some decades beyond college age) but don't fear the fact of death. That's a negative motivation. Embrace living and life, a positive motivation.
Life would be immensly dull and empty without risk. To get out of bed in the morning and leave the room is to risk that something bad might happen. Embrace it.
Occhi
No, your right about not closing down the school. I wasn't sure if the first shooting took place on campus or not. Also, my children recently had a stabbing next to their school (very scary for a well-off, small town like mine) and the entire school went into lock-down and the police blocked off several blocks and brought out the canine units. However, this was a grade school... I guess I just assumed all schools had the same national standards in regards to when a school should and shouldn't go into lock-down, but again, I wasn't sure where the first shooting too place.
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self." -Albert Einsetin