Friday, December 28, 2012

Virginia Tech football team to honor victims of Sandy Hook and Tech shootings with decal


The Virginia Tech football team announced that it will be ‘honoring’ the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims alongside its own 2007 campus shooting with a helmet decal during today’s game with Rutgers.[1]

According to the Roanoke Times[2], the decal is half orange to represent the shootings at Virginia Tech and half green to represent the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The decal will also have the number 58 in the center, the total number of victims from both shootings, along with the word “Prevail” written across it.

While the ‘honor’ paid by the Virginia Tech football team is a high-minded gesture and a necessary societal method of coping with unthinkable tragedies, it does little to actually solve the continuing problem of gun violence in the country. The decal also shines a spotlight on the killings during these two incidents, taking attention away from the more systemic inner-city problems with gun violence[3].

What these types of ‘memorials’ or ways of ‘honoring’ victims seems to primarily do is relieve our sense of guilt and, by extension, our drive to seek out and implement long-lasting solutions to the problems which stretch across our society.

This is not to say that the victims of these shootings should not be honored and remembered. Without a doubt, they should. But these memorials and symbols of remembrance should not be the final step in the process of ending senseless gun violence.

We live in a society where constant stimulation moves our attention from one object to the next. As a result, we oftentimes lose sight of the issues that most Americans would argue are the most important to us as a country.

We can no longer shift our focus and lose sight of this issue. We can best honor the victims of these two shootings, and those that have largely gone unnoticed, by finding long-term solutions to the issue of gun violence in America.

The solutions won’t be arrived at easily, but little in life worth achieving comes with ease. Americans have proven time and again that we can do anything we put our collective energies to. Now it is just a matter of coming together and focusing on this common goal.


[1] http://www.nbc12.com/story/20421574/va-tech-honoring-conn-shooting-victims-with-decal
[2] http://www.roanoke.com/sports/vtfootball/wb/318315
[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/story/health/story/2011/05/CDC-US-murder-toll-from-guns-highest-in-big-cities/47159990/1

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