Here’s some up-to-date information from an article on CNN today.
It seems that Cho was actually not involuntarily committed as I initially thought. Rather, he was ordered to attend outpatient treatment. Under federal law, that should have still barred him from purchasing handguns, but Virginia law only bars people who have been involuntarily committed. Thus, the Virginia courts never reported him to the BATF, even though they were supposed to. Full article is here.
Buying them in the manner he did, yes; but he still would not have been completely prevented from obtaining them:
Also, Virginia is one of only 22 states who even track mental health status as a prerequisite for purchasing handguns.
Let’s set the guns aside for a moment. I agree fully that this will and should be investigated.
Why wasn’t Cho expelled from school, given the complaints against him over the years by faculty and students alike? Many of them explicitly said they feared he’d shoot up the place.
I think that is a useful question, both for the investigation process and for the litigation that will follow this event.
As far as I’ve seen so far, he hadn’t really done anything to warrant expulsion prior to the shooting. A lot of people said after the fact that they were afraid he’d shoot up the place and that he was the first person that they thought of when they heard the news, but that was all based on a pattern of creepy behavior rather that concrete threats he’d made.
His behavior toward at least one professor was so menacing she had him removed from class. He would photograph the legs of female students under their desks, write violent, obscene poetry, and stalk female students on more than one occasion.
Now, this may not be grounds for expulsion from a college. But shouldn’t it be?
Essentially it comes down to a private/public thing. When I worked at an elite private university, I regularly sent kids to counseling as a condition of them remaining in our residence halls. We needed documentation of their bad behavior, of course, to let Mom and Dad know in case they wanted to threaten us in some way.
When I worked at a state university, it was a completely different ball game. If a student broke the law and we were able to document it, we could toss them out of the hall. But if we didn’t have proof, we couldn’t do anything. Furthermore, we trained our staff to be very careful about handling alcohol or drugs. They were never supposed to touch it, instead they needed to call a cop of staff person of legal age to take care of it. At the private school, we let our staff pour alcohol down the drain with the owner looking.
The one situation that I found a little strange was the stalking incident(s). I think the laws should be like those for domestic violence, where the state prosecutes and it isn’t up to the victim/survivor to decide to press charges. Just being creepy isn’t enough to remove someone from a public institution. And the mental health departments on college campuses operate mainly on voluntary admittance.
Funny thing is, if Cho had plagiarized a paper, that would have likely gotten him tossed. That’s about the only thing I can remember short of fighting that could get a student expelled from the state school very quickly.
Stalking laws usually are like domestic violence laws in that regard, but the two instances looked relatively minor at the time. They were unwelcome phone calls and IMs that at least one of the women described as merely “annoying,” and no overt threats were involved. If the two women come into court and say it really was no big deal and that they’d rather see the charges dropped, the prosecutor has major problems of proof. Basically he looks like an awkward and shy kid trying to get a date and failing miserably.
Fair enough. I haven’t been following the case that closely since the story broke, but I remember that there were these two cases where complaints were made about his behavior by female students. I guess it depends how high the complaints went. I’ve had plenty of students talk to me as a staff member about people harassing them in some way, but if it got to the point where it was documented, I’d say it was serious.
Either VT has a hair-trigger documentation system, the women were extremely sensitive, or he came across as being a little more sinister than just being an annoying guy asking for a date.
His tuition checks cleared the bank. /cynicism
The same due process that would have prosecuted him after the crime would have protected him before he committed it. Gone are the days of unilateral expulsion based on an administrator’s opinion. For good and ill, it’s a two-edged sword.
There are countless creeps who never rise to this level of narcissistic violence. It’s not possible to predict a priori which ones will.
In any case, expulsion from VT would have changed the names of the victims but it wouldn’t have prevented Cho from doing his thing. He just would have shot up some other place (or still shot up VT).
Moving this to IMHO. While there was a General Question, I don’t think the original forum allows for the answers this one has generated.
samclem GQ moderator