Letters to the Editor
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My title got truncated
It was supposed to read, "Perhaps Colleges Should Start to Use New Admissions Essay Questions"
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Lock from inside may not help
What if the gunman was in your classroom and had somehow gotten a hold of your keys? He could wait to be the last one in, lock the room, then all hell would break loose. To me, there's just no way to reason around this kind of insanity. If someone is hell bent on doing something like this, how do we stop it? It is hard to to feel helpless in the face of this senseless slaughter. Just pray the gunman is on the other side of the door.
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Don't assume you can kick out mentally ill students.
The more I read about this guy, the more I think he suffered from a very serious mental disorder, probably paranoid schizophrenia. I guess time will tell. However, be careful with the assumption that if only caught in time, the guy could have stopped. In the absence of clear threat or serious disruption...and disturbed writing alone doesn't count...the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow colleges to evict students for mental illness. I'm not sure that legally Tech could have done anything to dislodge the guy or force him into treatment. Most people suffering from mental illness are not a danger to anyone but themselves, so let's not rush into judgement.
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The sadly obvious (but sadly needed) point
I want to wholeheartedly support Carrie's letter and the sentiment within. I also want to add that we can -- and lord knows, will -- speculate forever on why this particular troubled person went on his particular killing spree, just as we have with similar incidents in the past. We look for commonalities amongst all these mass killers -- were they all loners? were they all bullied? did their parents love them? -- when the one basic similarity is so obvious that it shouldn't (but sadly, does) require mention: each of these mass killers had access to plenty of guns and ammunition. Until our society recognizes this simple fact and acts on it, these sorts of things will happen forever.
After the tragic loss of life, the saddest thing to me about this appalling incident is that most of our nation will respond to it the same way we've responded to all other such episodes, with piles of words and a mountain of blame for everything we can think of -- video games! Hollywood! atheism! foreigners! -- except the one thing that actually aided the mass murder, the bullets fired from his guns. To me this is the definition of insanity, responding to these tragedies over and over and over again in the same ineffectual way, as if words alone will stop them.
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The Face of Insanity
Well it sure ddn't take long to find someone to express sympathy for the killer rather than the victims. Now the endless parade of those who may have once exchanged a few words with Cho or even passed him in the hallway will try to offer some explanation for the unexplainable. What drives someone to pick up a gun and start shooting?
The simple explanation: He was insane. We can wonder if the root cause was physical, drug induced or social in nature. We can speculate on whether there were any warning signs. We can try to find ways to convince ourselves that if we had been around him, we might have figured out that he was walking time bomb and had him committed or at least stayed far from him. But the truth is far scarier. There is often no way to know in advance when another human in our vinicity is going to malfunction. His insanity would no doubt have manifested some other way if a gun hadn't been available. Saddly for his victims, the presence of the gun made his breakdown lethal for those around him.
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NPR's
Talk of the Nation devoted much of its two hours today to talking about the victims with people who knew them, and to survivors and family of earlier shootings about what they had gone through afterward. This early a lot of family and friends are still just trying to come to grips; people kept using the present tense in talking about the students and professors who'd been killed.
As for Va Tech's English department, TotN talked to its former head, who'd had Cho in class, and did recognize that he was troubled and angry.
She didn't discuss him at drunken faculty meetings--she reached out to the university and even the police seeking some kind of help or intervention. She saw his emotional problems could be dangerous. Unfortunately, nobody was able to intervene in any useful way (the police, for example, had no authority since Cho had not actually made any threats).
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He was not sane...and neither is have guns availabe everywhere.
Why does the media and populace, for that matter, always start off with the premise that these events are somehow rationally driven? Why did he do it, what drove him to it, what was he angry about? Etc. As is the case in all of these situations: He was mentally ill, angry, and because he lives in the US he has access to lots and lots of guns. Now since there are crazy and angry people everywhere, all the time, the only thing we have control of is the access to guns, which we persistently, insanely, continue to refuse to address.
Will this be our Port Arthur? No, it won't and I am never sure why. I put myself in the classic-liberal camp, individual rights, free markets, anti-authoritarian, pro-constitution,etc. I grew up hunting, my father and brother are still both liberal hunters. Anyone who has grown up hunting cannot escape one central point: Guns are for killing. Yeah you can blast away at rocks and targets etc. but those are only surrogates for living things. Guns are for killing. It's dishonest to make any other claim.
Now to the constitution. If the second amendment guarantees an individual's right to bear arms, then it is unconstituional to limit that in any way. In other words IF that is true then individuals should have the right to bear any sort of arms they wish, from handguns to nuclear weapons (just to be extreme). But it doesn't say that.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
That is the second amendment. Where does it say that indiviuals have the right to bear arms? It doesn't. It says the People, as in the the people in common or the government that represents them. In fact this has more impact on international arms reduction agreements than it does on individuals. But we continue to willfully misinterpret that ammendment. Why? I don't know. Having lived in Australia I can tell you that gun control has worked very well there. There are plenty of farmers and hunters with guns. Australians frequently win shooting medals in the Olympics. They still have a gun culture there. But the number one murder weapon is now a knife. It is much harder to murder 35 people--as in Port Arthur--with a knife than with an automatic or semi-automatic rifle. Cho Seung-hui would also have had a tough time of it.
So will this be our Port Arthur? I doubt it. The gun lobby is raving and irrational. I'm not ever really sure what motivates them deep down, other than an infantile anger at someone trying to take their toy away. But look when your child is running with a pair of scissors in his hands what do you do? You take them away.
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