Quote:
Originally Posted by ottopottomouse
I just thought it was funny that you said everybody should ignore him and then linked to yourself not ignoring him. Wasn't expecting it to turn into an argument  |
Yeah, to be honest, I actually thought about this while driving home last night and came to the inexorable conclusion that I owe you an apology.
All you did was make a completely valid point... and I lost my cool for some reason that still isn't really clear to me. That's not characteristic of the way I conduct myself, either in person or on the boards, and it really bothered me once I started asking myself "Now why did I go and do
that?"
The problem likely is that I'm just on edge about this whole tragedy and the media coverage of everything related to it, because this shooting hit close to home, quite literally -- I live just a couple miles from that Safeway, and the family land where I grew up is even closer. I grew up playing with my friends in the sand washes and mesquite bosques that pepper the area. To cap it off, if I hadn't been running late that morning in preparing to fly out to Vegas for Internext, my plan was to have breakfast with my wife at a place called "Beyond Bread" that's in the same shopping center as the Safeway, just about 50 yards across the parking lot.
All the media coverage, all this focus on external influences that might have affected this fucked up kid... to me, it all smacks of this need and/or desire that some people have to capitalize on situations like this politically, and to have someone to blame beyond the deranged shitheads who pull the trigger in spree shootings like this one. As a result, my hometown/state (and the character of its people) is being bandied about in the press like a badminton shuttlecock, and it has gotten under my skin a bit, I think.
At any rate, I do apologize for losing my shit a little bit there, and running with your simple quip like it was more than it was.... and my very odd momentary inability to read a message board properly, as well. ;-)