Feeling lonely? Neglected? Go murder more than two dozen people, then yourself. Sure you’ll be dead, but the nation will be enthralled with you for a month!
Cho’s face is plastered all over Drudge. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? Poor guy didn’t have any friends!
Look, he wrote plays! There’s a lesson for you struggling playwrights out there. If you can’t get your work read, go slaughter people execution style. After that, everyone will read your stuff! How long do you think it’ll take before some pretentious underground theater produces his work? I bet the movie will be better anyway. We’ll get Gus Van Sant to direct it. I give it five years before we start seeing previews.
What of the victims? Fuck 'em. The killer is the real story!
When they originally weren’t releasing the name of the perp, I was really hoping their intention was to *never * release the name of the perp. Stop glorifying these idiots.
Eddie Murphy did a great sendup of this kind of media reaction way back when he was still on Saturday Night Live. Someone should air that episode in prime time today.
Considering that there are six different threads (including this one) based around the shootings in the Pit alone, i’d say he’s certainly a board sensation.
Um. Everybody (except loon jobs) who hear about the guy and look at photos of the guy is thinking ‘so that’s the nutcase’. Now if you think that constitutes ‘being glorified’, you got a mighty skewed sense of what ‘glory’ is.
People need to know about him. They need to know that he looked fairly regular but acted oddly - and why they should have been concerned. People need to learn from this, which will not be accomplished by pretending the guy doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t have to be glorifying, you know. And in this case, it doesn’t seem that it is. Everyone I’ve heard talking about him seems to be saying, “He was weird, pathetic, no friends, never talked.” One of the former roommates said, effectively, “You can’t ‘reach out’ to someone like that.” The descriptions remind me of the Far Side panel, “How Nature Says ‘Keep Away’.”
Of course, that carries the risk of backlash against people who don’t socialize. But that’s been going on since Columbine. And compared to this guy, Klebold and Harris were the boys next door. Point is, it doesn’t seem that Cho is being held up as any kind of misunderstood genius or tortured soul who needed understanding. How could anyone understand? Besides, it was a college. He could have modified his behavior enough to find friends. But he didn’t, and no one’s crying about that.
As I said in another thread, I feel bad for his parents. Not only do they have to mourn his physical death, they’ve probably been mourning his spiritual death for some time now. (Unless it comes out that they were brutally abusive to him. But sometimes people are just mentally ill, and it’s no one’s fault.)
Don’t forget that knowing about Cho is THE major point in helping attain closure for the families of the victims when they ask the inevitable “Why?” Nobody is glorifying the scumbag.
That this is something that couldn’t be helped. (The choice he made, that is; I will NOT get into a debate about administration and campus security’s choices.) That he didn’t want to be helped. That he was a lousy writer, and would have contributed a lot less to society than his victims, had they all lived. That, as TheLoadedDog says, the victims’ families have an answer to their “Why?” (“Because he was an asshole”). That this was truly unjustified*. That the early speculation – fight with a girlfriend – was wrong, because he never had a friend, period. That he did not snap under academic pressure either, or any of the other theories floated yesterday. That his behavior was so extreme, even for a college student, that no one, or at most a very, very few people, has to fear that they have anything in common with him.
*I’m open to the faint possibility that he was brutally abused as a child. Barring that, though, no justification whatsoever.
Cho was fucking reported to the police for “palpable anger”. “Without a clear threat, nothing could be done, however…”
Sometimes people snap. It behooves us all to learn more accurately how and when such a situation might occur. Cho needs to be studied along with all of the other people who have gone on killing sprees. He happened to have a very effective method for killing people, which is why this will go down in history. The number of people killed is one of the few quantifiable aspects of the story, and it increases the perceived level of tragedy.
The only way a thing like this can be prevented is to know what to look for, and act before things come to a head. Such a thing is damn near impossible, but every little bit of analysis and insight gets law enforcement and counselors that much closer.
Cho needs to be studied, as does the situation as a whole. We can either choose to investigate this thing further, or just hope that bad things don’t happen again. Which do you think is the better plan?
The Buckwheat Been Shot night? Yeah, that was classic.
As to the news coverage, it’s going to happen. Death is a fascination for a lot of people. So are psychopaths. Like the song said, “It’s interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry.”
Doesn’t mean the killer is being “glorified.” Just means people like to hear news of bad things that happen to other people. Well, even “like to hear” doesn’t really cover it. We’re drawn to it. Like passing a car wreck, we look. Some glance. Some slow down and gawk.
After seeing news reports all day long about VT and Cho, I turned to Discovery’s Science channel. Europa and Titan are interesting, too.
This is nothing new. People have been always more interested in the bad guy throughout history.
Hitler is a household name but only a scant few of his victims are known by name (Anne Frank, etc.).
People can name serial killers off the top of their head (Bundy, Gein, Dhamer, Son of Sam) and people study and write books about these guys. But the victims names are soon forgotten.
These guys attain the status of “infamous” which is very different than being famous.
