Beyond planting a suicide in the headlines

Mere mortals at NASA too

Hardly 100 hours had passed since the horror of Virginia Tech when a seriously troubled young man first gunned down two people in a dormitory, then posted a multimedia package of his thoughts to NBC and returned to snuff out another 30 including himself; another saga was playing out at NASA.

A man who had been a NASA contractor for 12 years took two people hostage and ended up kill both himself and one of the hostages. He had a bad job review, but is that all there is to it?

In the passed few months it would appear there is an underbelly of troubled NASA personnel who till recently had probably been sent to the NASA sanatorium but are some are now escaping detection and playing out their desperately flawed humanity for all to see.

There would be inquiries as to how security was breeched in a premier Ministry of Defence location, what psychological frame of mind the man was in, what triggered it and how to avoid such embarrassing shows of instability.

The fear of dying unsung

However, there is a deeper issue to be reviewed here which is now beyond the right to bear death (arms), this is the way fragile people with a grievance now seem to assuage their troubles with a suicide mission and a suicide.

Suicides occur everyday, but are seriously under-reported and they never allow for a decent professional analysis of why it happened as the fear of dying unsung and uncelebrated clouds the mind of the person. So, it has been become a standard activity in America for suicides to include innocent people in their demise as if to properly highlight why they killed themselves.

Whether that gets adequate airing as others grieve for their lost loved ones and recriminations fly as blame is apportioned all around is left to be seen. But a good study of why and the social underpinnings of what lead to the outrage and carnage has to be objectively taken to be able to see the early signs of a disintegrating human before they take out themselves and innocent bystanders.

David in Thoughts of a Naija man begins an analysis of what could have lead to the massacre at Virginia Tech.

References

Inside Cho's head