Yesterday I made the 11 hour drive to my vacation spot in about 10 hours. I would have made it in 9 hours and 30 minutes or so, but crossing one state line there’s always traffic that goes to stop/start traffic for 20 miles for no apparent reason.
Did a lot of thinking and figured out a lot going on in my life on the drive. I will say this: thank god for Sirius radio. I know XM is getting the push right now, but Sirius is the one we have and it really made a difference on the ride here. I was able to scan 5 news channels and flip to E! radio while I was driving without interruption. I just loved it.
Some things I didn’t love: The Washington D.C. area sniper is getting a lot of coverage in the press. That was THE news story yesterday. They had experts on who were saying this and that about the sniper. FOX News was especially bad as it had experts on who insulted the sniper. They had one guy on saying that he could take a little girl out into the woods for a weekend, train her with a scope, and he’d be a better shot than the sniper. All of the news channels picked up that a *real* trained sniper could hit from 300 yards or so, not the 100-150 yards that the sniper has been hitting from.
The laid out all the sniper’s patterns, devoting hours to saying what his profile would be like and gave him so much attention and expected a daylight shooting because it was his pattern. Worse yet, after dinner last night I came home and ABC had devoted a special 20/20 to sniper coverage before Monday Night Football. They detail the vans and trucks the sniper uses, tells us what to look for and profiles his victims.
Less than an hour later, the sniper shoots and kills a woman. Nighttime attack. Right after 20/20 gave him more attention. Apparently from over 100 yards away. Apparently has a new van to do it with. All I can say is D’oh.
This guy is getting off on all the attention. He’s a smart bastard who watches the news. He’s showing how insane and how dumb our press is. They take holier than though attitudes about how they need to provide coverage and how they’re always right (especially FOX news), but the more they’re giving this guy attention — the more he’s changing his patterns based on what they’re harping about and the harder it’s going to be to catch the bastard.
Lastly, a lot was made yesterday about *drum roll please* video games as a motivational factor for the sniper. Some experts were going on and on about how you can take a video game and learn to be a sniper because they’re so realistic. I’ll say this: I’ve played hours and hours of HALO, which has one of the most realistic sniper modes out there (though you’re killing monsters and not humans). Sure it’s neat and sure you can feel like a nameless faceless force of nature when you’re picking them off from so far away, but it’s a game. There’s a BIG difference between picking up a video game controller and playing sniper and picking up an actual rifle, going outside, and planning killing attacks.
NO video game (not even Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series — which features realistic squad tactics), will teach you what you need to actually kill people. Sure they can desensitize you (13 year olds playing GTA 3 demonstrate this), but they can’t put the gun in your hands and pull that trigger for you.
It’s hogwash and the experts are just trying to get face time.
With that rant, I got up late, I’m sure housekeeping is going to come to annoy me soon. That is their goal in life after all. 🙂 Got to get a shower in and go over to wal-mart to get some breakfast stuff.
k9