So just after a few days of blogging about these crazy kids, this tragic Virginia Tech crap goes down. It’s disgusting and shocking. It’s as if this is now becoming an American trend. I feel bad for the victims’ families and friends. Moreover I feel bad for the poor psycho killer himself. The guy was clearly deeply disturbed. Iraqis go kaboom and kill each other, while disturbed ones in America go on a shooting rampage and kill fellow students. What a wonderful world. Some peoples’ reactions make the whole event even more wonderful. Leilouta has some good and bad ones nicely listed. Lord have mercy!
SudaneseThinker
SudaneseThinker
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Mental illness is a terrible and tragic condition…I have worked around it since the 1970’s and have seen absolute horror in so many cases.
Most folks just do not understand how deep this can go. Many think…”ah, he could control it if he really wanted to”. Well…yes and no.
I remember an incident that illustrated this better than any professional training I have ever been involved with:
About 15 years ago…I was doing some part-time counseling work at a vocational rehabilitation center. This guy comes in for an interview and we start chatting. Nice likeable guy. Then I became confused, I asked him “excuse me, are you applying to be an employee or a rehab. client here?” This is how well he presented. He responded that he wanted to be a client.
I told him he seemed perfectly normal and he replied:
“Well…I am a paranoid schizophrenic. Right now, I am on my medication and in remission, but I can get really sick”.
I told him there was something I had long wanted to ask a very high functioning schizophrenic and he told me to go ahead:
“Dude, you are smart and insightful, when you start becoming delusional…don’t you know it is not real, can’t you control yourself?”
His answer knocked me out…to this day:
“Left me put it to you this way…have you ever gone to a scary movie? (Of course). And you get scared, don’t you (Of course). The scence gets dark, the music gets creepy, the door creaks and you want to scream. And yet, you KNOW it was filmed in a studio, it is fake, there are people a few feet back drinking coffee, moving lights etc…you know this but you still become terrified…even to leave the theater at night”.
“Sure I said, we have all experienced these types of reactions”
“Well he said…multiply that experience by 1,000 and you will have some remote idea of what I experience. At some level…at least in the early stages, you know it is not real…but you go deeper and deeper and deeper until you can’t tell real from unreal”.
I was flattened…and two days later he used his belt to hang himself from a tree in front of his residential placement.
Iraq is a different kind of maddness, based on rage, hatred, power, but these guys are far more responsible for their choices then this insane creature who stepped/was pushed into hell…
God help his soul and God help those he hurt and their loved ones.
I just read Leoluota’s take and I could not disagree with her more.
Terrorism, as it is typically practiced today, is a purposeful pollitical act designed for an indivual, or more typically a group, to obtain their goals through terrorizing others into submitting. It is typically calculated and often the work of upper level “handlers” indoctrinating and exploiting the actions of idealouges.
This Korean kid was a lone, delusional madman. Did you read his manifesto? It was not political, racial or directed at any gain…just a distorted, bizzare, monolouge of confused, frustrated rage.
There is utterly no comparison and Leolouta could not be more wrong. It is the old trap of relativism and I utterly reject it.
I am sorry if some Muslims, particularly Arabs, cannot accept that at THIS POINT in history, they do lead the league in terrorism. To parahrase Chris Rock or Jesse Jackson…when you hear people whispering on the airplane and rummaging through their carry-ons you don’t say “oh my God…Mormons!!!”
Good posts, Howie, good posts. What I wonder is just why this case wasn’t handled before it exploded so violently. From what I read so far, it would seem that just about everyone he interacted with saw at least some of the symptoms. Could be it’s the standard “hindsight is 20/20″, but I’m still left wondering…
My mom is a middle school teacher and apparently the teachers warn the administration about potentially dangerous students all the time. (She works in a school system that made the national news weeks ago when a 16 year old was arrested after the police found guns and a hit list in his room)
The problem is that unless the student does something to actually prove he/she is a threat, there are no actions that can be taken unless the student volunteers him/herself (which I assume very rarely happens). So by then, the damage is often already done…
What I replied on that blog:
Most of the reactions don’t make a lot of sense.
The guy was crazy, not a terrorist. And while the media keep referring to Arab and Muslim terrorists as “militants” and “extremists” (probably because they are Muslim or Arab), using the word to describe the South-Korean guy would be wrong. He was not a terrorist. His plan was not to create fear, he wanted to take revenge (for whatever he thought society did to him).
That doesn’t make his crime any better, but the word “terrorist” means something and the meaning should not be watered down (”a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims”).
The there is the blame Bush routine. I am sorry, but George Bush is NOT to blame for the Iraqi victims of _Arab terrorists_. Many people tend to blame Americans, and especially the president for the acts of others. It doesn’t make sense. If a terrorist group blows up a mosque in Iraq, as they often do, it is the terrorists’ fault, not George Bush’s. Arabs are not children and neither are Arab terrorists.
“Hundreds of thousands” of victims in Iraq is nonsense. If that number was right, the Iraqi government would have vanished several hundred bodies a day. The Nazis needed furnaces for such a task, Saddam Hussein used mass graves (the pictures of them are quite horrible), what do the Americans use? I think one must be more careful with accusations. Think first, then accuse.
But anyway, if you believe there are too many victims in Iraq, talk to the terrorists about it. The US have no interest in killing Iraqis or do anything that could make Iraq appear as anything but heaven on earth. It’s the terrorists who want Iraq in shambles, not America.
And to those who believe that this is is America paying the price for its arrogance: Talk to the Kurds about national arrogance and see if America seems so arrogant to those who were the victims of the proud.
Look at these pictures (http://www.9neesan.com/massgraves/) and tell me again what American arrogance is. Look at these pictures (http://www.9neesan.com/halapja/) and call the Americans arrogant for defeating the government responsible for those acts!
If you are Arab, consider that it was other Arabs who did that, not Americans.
No Arab can be proud of what Saddam did then and what the terrorists are doing now in Iraq. That you still find time to call Americans arrogant is plain amazing. What about the arrogance of the Baathists and terrorists?
Howie, those quotes in Leilouta’s blog are not her own thoughts. She didn’t write any of those comments, she merely translated them for us. And I think that that was a very helpful thing for her to have done. She quoted a range of responses, not all of them negative from a Western point of view, although some of them were. Yes, the relativism of comparing this act to terrorism is clearly misplaced - there was no political plan here, no desire to change the world, just the rage of a single deranged soul with access to a weapon. And that, apparently, can happen in any society.
By the way, I realise that the Al Gore debacle has meant that no-one is even thinking about touching the gun debate on this one, but citizens of the US - wake up. There’s a huge pink elephant in your living room with a sign saying “Lack Of Gun Control” in flashing neon, and you’re all ignoring it. Everyone’s talking about how they ought to have detected this guy’s state of mind earlier. No-one’s talking about the fact that he (and millions of others) should never have been sold a gun in the first place!
That’s the real problem. Without the gun, he might have had to make do with writing depressing essays or, at worst, killing only himself …
There’s a huge pink elephant in your living room with a sign saying “Lack Of Gun Control” in flashing neon, and you’re all ignoring it.
Although I don’t like guns, and don’t own one, I’m not entirely convinced by arguments as above. The American gun lobby has some persuasive arguments, - and statistics - to the contrary.
Furthermore, to draw the immediate conclusion that America has more murders due to guns as compared to, let’s say, Europe, is to possibly draw the wrong parallel: Europe also has more legal whorehouses than America does.
The fact that prostitution is legal in Europe might be a reason why European males are less murderous, as release from sexual tension is usually quite easily available for those who need it. Americans are more repressed in this regard, leading to greater frustration levels. In the end, the answer might not lie in banning guns in the US, but in permitting more whorehouses, and adapting to a culture that condones them.
Of course, whorehouse-loving Europeans are way less economically productive than Americans, as measured by GNP, so it does seem that there is a trade-off.
If the above arguments sound rather simplistic, well then, so do the constant attempts to reduce complex problems of culture and violence to a single matter of gun control.
RK-
Let me tell what is REALLY tragic about this one…people DID do just about everything right. His professor reported him, he was referred to counseling..there was an attempt to INVOLUNTARILY place him in a psych. hospital and on and on…
In the USA…there are many laws to protect people…even criminals and the deranged. As Amy puts it…there is no law against being crazy…there is no law against potential…and having worked with this stuff for 30+ years I can tell you..there is NO reliable way to predict who is going to go over the top…most who threaten stuff DON’T do it…I don’t think he ever really threatened…more talked around the edges of it.
We also will never know how many of these we PREVENTED by the very stuff all the people tried to do here.
This is one where the fault is clearly on the perpetrator…who is barely responsible for his actions…and the god or mother nature that gave him this horrible illness.
The killing of 33 people at Virginia Tech was an individual act of murder from a person with severe psychiatric illness. It was NOT an act of War / Terror. You must be able to distinguish from murder that is an individual responsibility which is NOT condoned by society. Terrorism and War involves organized group actions over an extended period of time that have some kind of support. No one supported this deranged fellow at Virginia Tech. In this sense, a dangerous person in any society is capable of murdering people. This is not symptomatic of terrorist activities in America. Just a deranged mentally ill person who became incredibly violent. However terrorist acts throughout the Middle East are organized events by groups of people over months and years time span often for military and political purposes. There is a group of people who support these actions. THerefore they are accurately described as Terrorist Actions.
I believe they have very strict gun control on campus. The issue here was that somebody didn’t care about that rule.
Of course one might argue that gun control on campus is not enough, as the killer can get a gun elsewhere.
And then we would have made the gun nuts’ case, wouldn’t we?
Incidentally, voices in Europe blame a lack of gun control (and George Bush) for the crime. But these things happen in Germany too. And Germany has gun control.
If only Germany didn’t have gun control laws. We’d at least know why these shootings happen, like we do in America.
If he truly wanted to get a gun, he would have gotten it. He just would have paid more for it to some illegal gun dealer. And if not a gun, there are always knives, and a very large range of murder instruments he could have chosen from.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
Pundit - I’m not so naive as to suggest that by bringing in tougher gun control laws, all of the problems in the US would be solved. That would be ridiculous. All I’m saying is that in this particular case, which could have been prevented in its entirety had the perpetrator not had access to a firearm, the issue of gun control is (or ought to be) looming huge, and yet no-one is touching it, because of what it did to Al Gore way back when.
But I don’t believe that there is a need for an all-or-nothing approach. Tightening gun laws does not necessarily mean disarming everyone. But if gun ownership is made to go along with compulsory psychiatric screening, for instance, as well as, say, an appropriately high annual license fee, compulsory registration, and a requirement to account for every weapon and every bullet purchased at all times, this might at least be a deterrent to the happy-go-lucky way in which US citizens can arm themselves against each other. Take away the fun and excitement of it. Make it a bureaucratic nightmare to buy and keep a gun. And couple it with psych testing to keep out the real nutters, and I think only those who really need guns, will be bothered to go and get one.
Because, to take your example, when you legalize brothels, you don’t simply say “ok, everyone can now pay for sex”. You register them, you ensure that the sex workers are not exploited (or less exploited), you have mandatory health requirements, in short, you clean up your act. Legalized prostitution is far from a free-for-all - it is, in fact, the exact opposite. Legalized gun ownership ought to be the same.
But legalized prostitution is not a helpful parallel, because it allows people to raise moral objections which diverts the discourse. A better parallel, perhaps, is the licensing of vehicles. Cars are dangerous, in the wrong hands, and sometimes even in the right hands, yet very few people would argue that vehicles are the cause of vehicle accidents. The mantra, in this case, is that the driver causes the accident, and the driver must be penalized, to the extent of confiscation of the vehicle, and imprisonment where necessary. But including lower grade “points” penalties for lesser offenses and misdemeanors. This system instills a sense of responsibility into drivers. A similar program could be used for gun owners.
Of course, part of the problem is the all-pervasive weapons industry, which provides a steady supply of small firearms onto the market. And the fact that weapons ownership has become, in the eyes of so many in the US, a matter of right rather than of privilege. It is likely to be very difficult indeed to clamp down, if any government ever decides to risk doing that.
As for statistics, well, they usually prove very little other than the fact that they have been put together but a very good statistician.
RK - If he truly wanted to get a gun, he would have gotten it - of course, but it ought to be difficult to get one. You can’t stamp out a black market entirely, but you can at least hinder it. If the vendor of a gun was to be held responsible for the acts of the purchaser, you’d find fewer and fewer people prepared to sell guns.
Anyway, it still begs the question. How come a person who is clearly deranged, and who probably would not have passed psychiatric testing had he been submitted to it (there’s sufficient evidence of that) can simply walk into a shop and buy a gun.
And if not a gun, there are always knives. - he could have tried swatting people to death with a rolled-up newspaper also, but it would have been less effective. Guns are more effective than knives. He was able to individually shoot the entire front row of a French class with that gun. He probably wouldn’t have gotten past the first victim, had he been doing it with a knife.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
And people with guns, can kill people more effectively than people without. Particularly certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of derangements. I cannot see the argument against restricting gun ownership to people who are demonstrably sane.
You have a good point here, NC, regarding screening and instilling a sense of responsibility. But then the argument that he would have instead turned to an illegal source still holds. Yes, the police try to stop those, but how effective can one be?
What is more alarming is that, like Andrew said, he shouldn’t have managed to enter the campus while armed. By the way, I also believe that different states in the US have seperate gun licincing laws, so it could be possible to compare their effectiveness.
Of further relevance to this post are the actions of Professor Libio Libresco, God rest his soul, who prevented the murder of his own class by blocking the door while the students escaped via the windows. I guess he’d seen and underwent enough in his life to not panic…
Even in cases of such extreme tragedy we see how much good a single man can do.
“But if gun ownership is made to go along with compulsory psychiatric screening, for instance, as well as, say, an appropriately high annual license fee, compulsory registration, and a requirement to account for every weapon and every bullet purchased at all times”
What if the crazy killer fires all his bullets without accounting for them afterwards? Finding out what happened with the bullets was not the problem here.
“this might at least be a deterrent to the happy-go-lucky way in which US citizens can arm themselves against each other.”
If the citizens were indeed armed against each other, some gun nut could have shot the crazy killer before 30 people had to die.
The problem here was not too many people with guns.
If you make murder illegal, murders still happen. If you make guns illegal, people will still buy them. The law does not prevent things from happening, it only gives us a way to act against the perpetrator without giving up civilisation.
Andrew - The problem here was not too many people with guns.
That was, unfortunately, exactly the problem. The one person who had a gun, in this case, was one too many. There is something wrong with a system that allows a person with an easily diagnosed psychosis to purchase a firearm. I agree with what you say about murder happening anyway, but surely it is the job of the state to hinder the possibility of committing murder, rather than to facilitate it.
And this is why your point about “the crazy killer” who fires all his bullets “without accounting for them” is a moot point. The “crazy killer” is supposed to be screened out in advance. It may not be possible to catch every case before it happens, but isn’t the state under an obligation to try?
Roman - Even in cases of such extreme tragedy we see how much good a single man can do.
Absolutely. May his memory be blessed.
“The “crazy killer” is supposed to be screened out in advance. It may not be possible to catch every case before it happens, but isn’t the state under an obligation to try?”
How to screen out those people in advance without a police state?
Incidentally, I understand it already is illegal to sell a gun to a crazy person and for a crazy person to buy a gun. So the state did try and does try. It’s just that the crazy killer was prone to violating that law as well.
The state did not facilitate this. But I wonder if a single gun nut could not have stopped the killer with a bullet.
How to screen out those people in advance without a police state?
It appears that the law already provides for it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/us/21guns.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
It simply has not been enforced properly. Maybe now it will be.
Whether that makes the USA a police state or not is for separate debate, I think.
I wonder if a single gun nut could not have stopped the killer with a bullet.
Of course a single gun nut could have stopped him with a bullet. The police could also have stopped him - that is, after all, their job, and that is why society arms them.
Well, if the law exists and was simply not enforced in this particular case, then that is the real issue here. The provision for this eventuality was made.
And while we arm policemen, an unarmed man cannot defend himself against an armed man until the policemen arrive. In this case the single armed civilian wouldn’t have been a vigilante, NC, as you seem to imply, as a vigilante seeks out such confrontations. Here he would have simply reacted to a dangerous situation he’d have found himself in.
I smell MK ULTRA
A very worthwhile post here:
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/04/when-mass-killers-meet-armed-resistance.html
“Many students heard the shots. Two who did were Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges. Mikael was outside the school having just returned to campus from lunch when he heard the shots. Tracy was inside attending class. Both immediately ran to their cars. Each had a handgun locked in the vehicle….”
Very interesting post you’ve linked to there, Finnpundit. I’ve been thinking this over, and the US does have a system to control the legal availability of guns. This time the system failed, and that needs to be looked into, but this is not the main issue.
The main issue is that buying those guns *illegally* would have been just as easy, and that an even stricter *legal* gun policy just deters those who use legal means to buy a gun. To the great advantage of people who buy their guns illegally.
To sum it up, get the *existing* system to work rather than making it stricter, and clamp down harder on illegal gun dealers and gun-smugglers.
Only law-abiding citizens heed the law. Those who don’t just laugh at it anyway.
Hmmm… here’s some more food for thought:
http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/04/bowling_for_virginia_tech_who.php
It’s not necessarily the pro-gun right-wing that’s implicated, if we are to assume that Cho had absorbed left-wing values, which he apparently did.
That was interesting, Finnpundit… in an over-hyped kind of way. Yes, Cho latched on to class warfare. But then, he also latched on to Jesus. I suspect he was in a such a state that he would have latched onto any ideal, any ideology.
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