A Dimebag For Your Thoughts

Still reeling a bit from Wednesday's shooting in Columbus, with lots of things bouncing around my head, so let's hit it.

Guns. Obviously, with anything like this, the gun control issue is going to come up. The relevant questions are two. First, would this nutjob have been able to commit these murders if he wasn't able to get a gun? Yes and no. If he was pathologically deranged enough to want to kill Darrell and/or Vinnie for breaking up Pantera, he certainly could have found another way. Except that there's probably a better chance that he wouldn't have succeeded. And would he have been able to kill as many people without a gun? Not likely.

Which brings us to the second question. If guns were harder to obtain legally, would said nutjob still have been able to get one? This is always a tough one to answer, because enforcement of hypothetical gun laws is a massive unknown. Obtaining drugs is illegal, too, but that doesn't make them unobtainable. Would firearms suffer a similar fate? This line of reasoning works only in the local sense of this particular incident, and whether it would have happened. Using "bad people can get them anyway" seems like a dubious rationale for overall gun control policy to me, and you'll only pry that opinion away from my cold, dead hands.

Concert Security. At least from the coverage I've seen, nobody is considering this an indicator of some crisis in concert security. This guy hopped a fence and was, according to one or two reports I've seen, being followed by security after coming in through a back entrance. He didn't just walk in through the front door with a concealed weapon.

These two points combine to make up the "was it avoidable" question, and sadly, the answer to that seems to be no. Again, there seems to be an emerging consensus that this once this waste product set what passed for his mind to it, bad things were going to happen regardless of the details.

The Blaze Of Glory. When Mark Sandman of Morphine had a heart attack on stage and died, there was certainly an air of "he died onstage, doing what he loved" that gave his death a certain amount of poignance. I've seen some comments trying to ascribe this sort of aura to Abbott's death, but I have a hard time reconciling that with being shot in the head.

Coincidences. What about the timing, considering Wednesday was the 24th anniversary of the shooting of John Lennon? I don't give this guy that much credit, but I also don't know how much coverage the anniversary of Lennon's death got in the news media. If you're unbalanced, and you hear about a guy killing a rock star, it could conceivably set some wheels in motion. I certainly don't think it was planned as such, though. Not in advance.

The Stuff Of Legend. The notion that this act was perpetrated because of some psychotic allegiance to the memory of Pantera is going to be the lasting mythology of this tragedy, much more than the previous two narratives. Of course, the likelihood of anyone hearing the shooter say much of anything during the opening of a thrash metal song is somewhere between slim and none, but the lack of proof gives this legs where it doesn't the others.

Best/Worst Headline. The New York Daily News with "Band split set off slayer." I guess working Metallica or Anthrax into the headline proved too difficult.

Damageplan was supposed to play in Chicago today as part of a fundraiser for The Zone. The show went on, but I haven't heard any reports about the mood or any of the expected tributes.