Two Secret Service officers were injured after a gun held by another Secret Service officer accidentally fired inside the White House gate, according to a spokesman, Darrin Blackford.Unfortunately, Bush himself was nowhere near the building at the time. (That's a joke, Tim)
As for the Virginia campus shootings, the main issue over the past 24 hours seems to have been whether the shooter was some white redneck wingnut (as many first assumed), or a Chinese student on a one-year student visa (as was early reported), or (as it turns out) a South Korean who had been in the USA since the age of 8.
Not that it matters, right? Mind you, as Kevin Drum says:
When stuff like this happens, people like to talk. And when they talk, they talk about all sorts of stuff. They're just being human.But a lot of people probably got egg on their faces trying to hang their prejudices on this hook.
This stuff from a former classmate was pretty illuminating:
"When I first heard about the multiple shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday, my first thought was about my friends, and my second thought was 'I bet it was Seung Cho."
Back at school, he added, "When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments."
