I’m wondering if any courageous lawyers have begun the process of making us all safer, in the wake of the VT tragedy. I’m talking about sueing the gun mfgs, and the dealer who sold the crazed perp the weapons. Would such lawsuits make sense? With 32 victims, there ought to be plenty of litigation.
has anyone stepped forward? 
The VT student government asked the media circus to leave. I don’t think they would be warm to having droves of lawyers on campus.
Can’t speak to the campus being warm to having droves of lawyers but there will be droves of lawyers and plenty of clients pursuing many more legal avenues than the two in the OP.
Yes, it’s far, far more likely that if anyone gets sued, it’ll be the university for not informing the students/locking down campus after the first shootings. I’m guessing lawyers aren’t “descending” on the campus though. They’re probably just finding ways of contacting the families of the deceased, though are likely waiting until funerals are out of the way.
ETA: Clarified that I was talking about the first two shootings.
I dunno, but I wouldn’t want to be anyone affiliated with the responsibility for background checks. The dealer, the State and everyone else is going to get dragged into this.
Ya know what? Good!
I don’t understand. What was the failure of the background check system in this case? I mean there’s a lot of speculation going around, but throwing away the silly postfactum argument “Killed 32 people = mentally ill”, I haven’t really seen anything that indicated that he was in any way mentally ill. Believe it or not that might have been just his personality and it’s not like you’re going to come up with a system of not selling guns to jerks. Background checks don’t check if you’re a jackass or an angel, they just check if you’ve ever been naughty and gotten caught. This guy brushed with the law and the mental health but I don’t think there was anything medically wrong with him nor did he have criminal convictions. Correct me if I’m wrong.
He was involuntarily committed in 2005 for being suicidal. That should have disqualified him from purchasing a handgun, but apparently this did not show up on the routine background check.
Here’s an excerpt from the NY Times:
Who was responsible? The MHMR facility where Mr. Cho spent his involuntary commitment? Do they report directly to BATF? Does that facility report to some other VA entity charged with compiling and reporting to BATF? Maybe everybody in VA did their job and BATF dropped the ball.
I imagine that the committee being assembled by Gov. Kaine will answer that question in great detail in the months to come.
Was’nt BATF consumed by HomeSec ? I would assume that its still the same agency but operating under a new federal umbrella and the same people doing the same thing, but is it possible that it simply fell through the net.
Declan
Well, I think there are a myriad of possible targets for lawsuits:
-the university (failure to report Cho’s weird behavior
-the gun dealer-selling guns to a psychopath
-the local police department 9failure to secure the campus after the first muders)
-the US post office (for not reporting Cho with his suspicious package to NBC)
-the mental hospital that released Cho prematurely
I forsee a lot of big leagl names getting involved-the only question is: what’s a decent interval of time before the ambulance/hearse chasing begins?
The complications of this situation demostrate why, when the suit is filed, everybody gets named including the kid who was riding his tricycle in front of the building that day.
The lawyers say, “We can show you that something bad happened, lots of parties contributed to it, and we want them all to be held responsible.” The judges and the courts then try to sort it out through motions, depositions, discovery, etc. Civil suits are a tedious, expensive, drawn out process.
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To whom is all of this information supposed to be sent? It’s not like there’s a “Psycho Central” database where they have time and energy to link all possible linkages.
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He wasn’t a true psychopath - on paper - prior to the shootings. Being in a mental hospital for a brief period of time isn’t the same thing as being a psycho (if it were, these shootings would happen every week).
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The local police had good reason to believe they were dealing with a lover’s quarrel - the ex bf of the first woman shot was known to have been practicing at a gun range recently, and when questioned that morning (before the second round) he was squirrely and uncooperative. That’s why they weren’t positive it wasn’t a simple (albeit bizarre) coincidence until the ballistics report confirmed it.
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So now it’s illegal to send a box to NBC? Postal workers are supposed to screen people? He wasn’t foaming at the mouth, and I doubt he told them what the package contained.
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The mental hospital that released him might have missed critical clues. But “fixing” sick people who haven’t actually done anything, against their will – how is that supposed to happen?
It only took 5 posts to derail this into another gun control debate. I was guessing at least 10.
I guess i don’t understand…this guy cho was exhibiting all the symptoms of major mental illness 9he was even evaluated and found to be a danger to himself and others). his english professor reported his bizaree behavior, and the university did nothing. So now, this rage filled pasychopath goes out and buys guns and ammunition…and tragically, murders 32 innocent people.
I
d say theres a LOT of blame to apportion!
I don’t think it’s been derailed into a gun control debate. I think it stayed on topic of mental illness (which is the implication the OP is making) – and I just don’t see it. I’ve been corrected and shown that he was, in fact, held for being suicidal. Then again, being a suicidal jerk is not a mental illness. If anybody should be sued it’s the people who pushed him that far rather than those who failed to prevent him from do what he did.
I’m sure there will be wrongful death suits filed against the university and the gun dealer. I think they’re very defensible though the dealer will have to show he was in compliance with whatever regulations applied to his sale.
You can be certain all the insurers are looking into this now and reserving their rights on any coverage issue they can dream up.
A Montgomery County jury is going to be very conservative too.
Here is the problem: the denominator of all the strange people out there is enormous. In my work I’ve had to commit a bunch of them. At some level it is a total crapshoot which ones need committing and which ones are just crazy.
When a given nutcase kills himself or others, it’s easy to criticize anyone who “let them through the cracks” or whatever. The other side of the coin is evaluating, locking up, and permanently crippling the huge number of people who seek mental health care. On the part of those of us licensed to involuntarily commit people, it’s a tricky thing. No one wants to be the medical professional whose patient was “let go” to go out and do harm. On the other hand the vast majority of suicidal/homicidal intentions go harmlessly unfulfilled. It’s only with the retrospectoscope that’s it’s easy to say, “Obviously that guy needed committing.”
I am also very confused about why so many lay people think mental health information should be just sort of out there for distribution to law enforcement. It is easily one of the most protected bits of personal health information. What mechanism would someone propose to distribute it? Whatever that mechanism is, the first howls of protest would be from everyone with mental illness (about half our society? 
) saying that such a policy of publicly labeling them prevents them from getting help in the first place.
There is plenty of blame here, all from second-guessers. Not a shred of it–not the lawyers; not the money paid; not the commissions–nothing–is going to prevent another nutcase somewhere from killing a bunch of people.
Overall, millions of classes on thousands of campuses have gone just fine, thank you, despite the unpredictable and unpreventable but infrequent Cho’s out there.
I counted down and saw that I was number 5. Explain to me how that is derailing into a gun control debate.
You might have noticed that the crime was committed with gun. As friedo showed, there are huge questions as to whether all parties complied with existing laws regarding background checks for purchasing handguns.
I didn’t suggest new laws or tighter controls. If some party in this mess dropped the ball and failed to comply then, yes, they should get sued. That’s not a debate, its the basis for a lawsuit.
Another thing - each year, about 1,500 women are killed by husbands or boyfriends. That’s out of about 2,000,000 who were abused (assuming that their murder is preceded by a prior act of violence). We haven’t yet figured out how to protect 1,500 women each year from men who have demonstrated, by past acts, that they’re a threat. And the vast majority of men who do commit those acts of violence still aren’t killers.
At the same time, every week 32 kids under the age of 10 are killed in automobile accidents. Here’s more detail on the top 10 causes of death for all age groups , and here’s a breakdown on “unintentional injury” (the #1 leading cause of death for ages 1-44). You’ll see it’s mostly car accidents.
I’d argue that the time and energy we could invest in finding that one person in 300,000,000 who’s going to shoot 32 people would be better spent on improving automobile safety.