You know, as the discussion about the Virginia Tech massacre goes along, a lot of debates have come up. Gun control, national security, the like. I expected all of that even if I don’t consider it terribly appropriate, but what surprised me was something that came up in a video I caught on ThinkProgress. It’s a comment on the situation by University of Michigan professor Juan Cole.

Remember that we’re all concerned, as we should be, about these events at Virginia Tech today. In Iraq this is a daily event. Imagine how horrible it would be if this kind of massacre were occurring every single day. And the people of Iraq feel that either the Americans are not stopping it or they’re actually causing it.

For the moment I’m going to ignore the last half of that, as it’s the beginning that really struck me. It’s entirely accurate, of course. Suicide bombers have killed over 100 students at Iraqi universities, a couple dozen civilians die daily from random attacks and about the same number of American soldiers die each month (give or take) in such incidents. Not shootouts on the battlefield, mind you, but sporadic attacks in the middle of cities. Not a real problem.

Around 43,000 people will die this year from car crashes. Between 15,000 and 20,000 will be murdered. Nearly 30,000 will kill themselves. Nearly 5,000 will drown. Over 3,000 will die of accidental poisoning. Roughly 3,000 more will die from complications related to medical care or surgery. This is even ignoring the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands dying from cancers, heart disease, etc.

In Darfur, the death toll climbs up closer and closer to one million, topping 600,000 so far. For every 10,000 people, there is more than one death per day. In a city the size of New York, with over 8,100,000 people, that would equate to 972 people violently dying every single day.

People die by the tens of thousands on this planet every day. Disease takes millions, starvation, murder, freak accidents. The human population shifts drastically by the hour. But reading and watching the news here one would conclude that the only deaths we’ve seen in a month or so have been the 33 in Virginia and Anna Nicole Smith.

Which is not to belittle either tragedy, they have their victims and my heart goes out to them. But is it really worth the national frenzy? Friends of mine said they were going to go and get guns right now so they could protect themselves. As though the nation were currently swarming with maniacs just waiting to break into homes and onto college campuses to recreate this tragedy.

George W Bush has recently made an appearance in Virginia, made an obligatory speech and posed for photo ops. He did the same for Terri Schiavo. When New Orleans drowned, Darfur sank into Hell, and a tsunami wiped out a chunk of Asia, Bush played guitar and sat around until forced to make a perfunctory statement.

We can’t simply say that domestic terrors grip us more than international, given that we watched Terri Schiavo more than even the New Orleans drownings, and we certainly don’t pay much attention to the deaths that occur every day. In fact, in the day that those 33 died in Virginia, more than 32 died elsewhere in the nation.

Again, the tragedy is real, the pain of the victims and their families is real. But is it worth the media circus, or is it more that the story is dramatic and exciting?