Massacre

Look at what has become national ritual: A horrific shooting in some otherwise ordinary corner of the country - this time a town in Connecticut - with many dead and wounded, shock and grief, wall-to-wall television coverage. The president and the governor ask us to pray for the victims and their families. A police chief, suddenly and reluctantly a celebrity, provides details of the killings, including the make and model of the weapons. We're told to refrain from politicizing tragedy in its immediate aftermath - that's part of the ritual, too. More grieving, more stories and magazine covers, a week of funerals.

Not everyone views National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre as sympathetically as does letter writer Steve Peters ("NRA's LaPierre makes a compelling case," Dec. 27). Following the Newtown, Conn., massacre, Mr. LaPierre first recommended not selling guns to the mentally ill, then changed that to recommending putting more armed guards in schools. Yet U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein reports there were two armed police officers at the school in Columbine, which nevertheless did not prevent a massacre there.

Katie Medley is in the hospital, having joyously given birth to her first child, baby Hugo, while one floor away the new father, Caleb Medley, lies in an induced coma after being blasted by the heavily armed gunman who attacked a crowded theater in Aurora, Colo., last week. While the shooter was stockpiling guns and ammunition, the Republican party and Maryland Rep. Andy Harris were right there fighting any attempt to limit his ability to buy thousands of rounds of ammo along with oversize magazines for his semiautomatic weapon.

I was stunned to read Susan Reimer 's remarks about the mother of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, Adam Lanza ("Nancy Lanza, Newtown's forgotten victim," Dec. 27). Ms. Reimer makes some astonishing statements. For example, Ms. Reimer writes that Ms. Lanza "apparently tried to teach her son how to use [the guns in the house] responsibly. " But a responsible mother would not have kept guns whose only purpose was to kill in the house. Later, your columnist tries to get inside Ms. Lanza's head: "I believe Nancy Lanza felt [as deeply as I would regarding my own children]

NANJING, China -- The shooting for the movie begins each day at 7 a.m., but by 6:30 a.m. people are already crowding the fences around the Zhonghuamen, the largest of Nanjing's medieval gates.The young people come to catch a glimpse of the --ing actor who plays the leading role. But the older ones are here to glimpse a rare airing of their history, the re-creation of an event of nearly 60 years ago, one so colored by politics and national pride that it is usually shrouded from view.The subject of the movie is known in the West as the Rape of Nanjing, a six-week massacre that began Dec. 13, 1937, when Japan's Imperial Army slid into barbarism.

WASHINGTON -- NATO took early steps yesterday toward launching military attacks against Yugoslavia after two top alliance generals got nowhere in calling on President Slobodan Milosevic to account for last week's massacre of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.Officials said several diplomatic steps lay ahead before the alliance would begin air strikes, but the U.S. envoy to NATO, Alexander Vershbow, said the alliance is "on the brink" of action.Asked on a British Broadcasting Corp. program whether Milosevic has a few days to maneuver, Vershbow replied, "I wouldn't guarantee that he has even that long."

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- In a city dominated by a huge memorial to dictator Chiang Kai-shek, another symbol of this island's troubled past is nearing completion: a memorial to Chiang's victims, designed by a man who tried to assassinate Chiang's son.Such a turn of events would have been unimaginable a few years ago. The 1947 massacre of up to 20,000 indigenous Taiwanese here was a taboo subject. Perhaps even more than Taiwan's blooming democracy or its phenomenal economic wealth, the story of the "228" memorial and the failed assassin Cheng Tzu-tsai illustrates the rapid-fire changes taking place on this small island of 21 million off the coast of China.

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the massacre of 45 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province, NATO's military commander met yesterday with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, offering a "blunt message" about Serbian aggression and holding out the possibility of launching allied airstrikes."

BOIPATONG, South Africa -- A large contingent of white policemen stood by at the KwaMadala hostel yesterday, across the highway from this township of modest houses and little shacks where 39 people were massacred this week.The survivors of the massacre Wednesday night say that Zulu tribesmen from the hostel committed the massacre. Many residents suspect police of complicity in the attack and say that police vans were used to protect the attackers rather than the residents, who were murdered in their own homes by a gang of 200 men wielding knives, guns, axes and spears.

Outside the auditorium, it was a typical late summer evening at Anne Arundel Community College. A young couple sat under a tree, holding hands and sharing a Coke, while other students dressed in jeans and sweat shirts strolled purposefully toward the library.But the serenity was shattered inside the modern auditorium. Rows of armed soldiers stood silhouetted in the glare of spotlights, gunshots rang out and scores of student protesters dropped bleeding to the ground.With these graphic descriptions, David Aikman, a 46-year-old foreign correspondent for "Time" magazine, transformed the dimly lighted room into a huge square in China filled with students demonstrating for democracy.

In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, people continue to ask the useless question, "Why?" We search for the shooter's "motive," as if we could discover a satisfactory explanation for why a depressed young man would decide to execute his mother, 20 first-graders and six of their teachers. Why did this latest alienated loner in our pantheon of mass murderers grab the stockpile of weapons his suburban mother had accumulated? How could people not have known? Was this a "failure of the mental health system?"

After a week of silence following the massacre in Newtown, Conn., the National Rifle Association went on the attack Friday morning, insisting that mass killings are the fault of the media, politicians who pass laws banning firearms from schools, the government's refusal to assemble a database of the mentally ill, the president for eliminating funding for some school safety grants - the fault, in other words, of everybody but the NRA, and the fault of...

Look at what has become national ritual: A horrific shooting in some otherwise ordinary corner of the country - this time a town in Connecticut - with many dead and wounded, shock and grief, wall-to-wall television coverage. The president and the governor ask us to pray for the victims and their families. A police chief, suddenly and reluctantly a celebrity, provides details of the killings, including the make and model of the weapons. We're told to refrain from politicizing tragedy in its immediate aftermath - that's part of the ritual, too. More grieving, more stories and magazine covers, a week of funerals.

I told myself I wasn't going to go here -- I wasn't going to weigh in on the pasting Matt Lauer was taking on Twitter Thursday and Friday for his less-than-stellar performance as TV host for NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. But where there is vitriol like this, there is definitely something deeper happening -- something worth thinking about. Actually, I think there are several things going on. I wouldn't call it a perfect storm, but there are some ill cultural winds blowing Lauer's way -- and it could mean some rough weather ahead for him and the "Today" show in the battle with ABC's "Good Morning America.

Katie Medley is in the hospital, having joyously given birth to her first child, baby Hugo, while one floor away the new father, Caleb Medley, lies in an induced coma after being blasted by the heavily armed gunman who attacked a crowded theater in Aurora, Colo., last week. While the shooter was stockpiling guns and ammunition, the Republican party and Maryland Rep. Andy Harris were right there fighting any attempt to limit his ability to buy thousands of rounds of ammo along with oversize magazines for his semiautomatic weapon.

Bonnie Branch Middle School eighth-graders Nick Kundrat and Matt Yagel point to a bar graph made for their school project examining security at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, which ended with 11 athletes killed. The graph illustrates the amount of money spent on security for the 2004 Summer Games in Athens ($600 million) with a large vertical rectangle. The amount of security spent on the Munich Games ($2 million) is represented with a hairline sliver. "You can barely see the line for the Munich Olympics," said Matt, 14, who along with Nick crafted the project, "The Munich Massacre: Revolution of the Games.

Through three generations, the tale was passed down. From father to daughter, to daughter again.Of how Japanese soldiers plundered the city of Nanking in December 1937, killing and torturing more than 300,000 people in less than eight weeks.Of how they stormed the streets, killing for sport, slashing people into pieces, raping thousands of women and young girls and then mutilating their bodies.Of how the Yangtze River that snakes past the city literally ran red with blood.And now, 29-year-old Iris Chang has woven her grandfather's tales of the Nanking massacre into the first English-language book on the topic: "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II."

As a psychologist who has spent more than a year in the Middle East, I have been following with great interest the commentary following the massacre in Afghanistan by the U.S. soldier last Saturday ("Killings of 16 appall Afghans," March 12). Almost all of the opinions expressed by leaders, pundits and talk show listeners betray a fundamental cultural myopia. They seek to find the pathology in the individual and not in the wider society. We think that the soldier must suffer combat fatigue from multiple deployments or suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or another mental illness and rush to declare the incident an isolated one of a rogue soldier.

Ellie Kavanagh had never been so happy to sleep through her alarm. The Virginia Tech junior had planned to go for a morning workout at the campus gym on Thursday. But instead, she was in her apartment a few miles away when her computer screen went black and the public safety message popped up. Shots had been fired on campus. A gunman was on the loose. Kavanagh, a Stoneleigh resident, was still in high school on April 16, 2007, when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and himself in the deadliest campus shooting spree in American history.