…and about a mile and a half from the townhouse my ex-husband and I lived in (which we just sold in February). Less than half a mile from my son’s old elementary school.
I’ve been following **Lord Il Palazzo’s ** postings kind of closely, especially now that he’s trying to find out about the one missing student (fortunately, her name hasn’t turned up on a list of the dead – yet.) To make sure I was up to date, I pulled up all of his posts. His last post before the shootings was an entry in the lawyer jokes thread. We were all just being silly yesterday morning. Today he’s the eyes and ears on the ground for a few hundred Dopers hungry for any information that will help us understand (not that it’s understandable, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting.) Dopers have posted cites and links from news agencies all over the country. This thread has become the most informative stream of data on the internet for me.
Mods, you really need to make sure this thread gets archived somewhere. From **Rilchia’s ** first post citing one or two people killed through **Palazzo’s ** first-person accounts, even the attempts at gun debate … this thread isn’t just a snapshot of America’s reaction, it’s a Hogarthian illustration of Americans in turmoil. You can read the history of the day in this thread.
Sunrazor, you make some excellent points.
Until this afternoon, I watched these events with a distant kind of horror. (My sister’s boyfriend is at Virginia Tech, but we quickly knew he was safe. However, I think this paragraph, from blogger Rob Rummel-Hudson, changed things for me:
*
I just watched a CNN reporter completely lose his composure while he described the local emergency officials removing the bodies from Norris Hall as the dead students’ cell phones were ringing and buzzing, their frantic parents tried to make sure that they were okay. I don’t even know what to do with that image.*
Two plays written by Cho that apparently had his classmates speculating (in his absence) as to whether someday he “could snap”, become “a shooter.”
Regarding SSRI’s
That didn’t take long.
Vladimir Nabokov, he wasn’t.
I’m not speculating on the nature of any medication he was taking, or on any relationship that may or may not have had on what happened, but I will say that for many years I was on SSRI medication and had frequent psychotic episodes (usually caused by being late or skipping a dose, admittedly) that were a direct result of that medication. Mind you the unmedicated me was even worse overall, but the worst isolated spots of my life were the result of SSRI withdrawal. I’m on Wellbutrin now and it’s ever so much better (for me. Everyone’s reaction to medication is different–I’m not trying to say that Wellbutrin is inherently better than SSRIs, just that it works better for me)
Holy crap… I read the “McBeef” one… that was the lamest thing ever written… the guy may have been in his twenties physically, but he’s mentally about twelve.
I think this is where I quit reading about this case and spend my time doing something better. Aside from being comically terrible, the plays are obviously the work of an angry kid, and it’s just sad.
Something similar was reported in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings. The image has haunted me.
And there would be nothing wrong with that. The brain is just another part of the body; a psych exam should be part of your annual checkup.
And another punch in the gut…
OK, so the shooter was born overseas but otherwise just another American upper-middle-class troubled kid. One of us.
Dammit. :mad: 
Carrying the receipt around with you for your numbers-filed-off gun…OK…
That is a horrifying thought. We cannot measure and class every citizen based on something as subjective as a psyche test. The implications are enormous- where would it stop? Would the depressed be allowed to own cutlery? Would those with anger issues be allowed to drive? What about those on meds? Should they be forced to wear a monitoring device?
Look, we do the best we can based on the information presented to us. Yes, we are aware today that some teachers and students noticed that Cho’s writing was dark and violent- yet Stephen King hasn’t gone off the rails and shot up a classroom. How would you measure someone’s potential to create or destroy?
Maybe some day there will be both a test and a remedy for destructive mental illness. Maybe someday we will be able to diagnose these issues with standard genetic or blood tests. But we aren’t there yet. I am not ready to get behind a standardized psyche test until we know more than we do now.
A very brave man.
Makes good sense to me. So long as therer is stillm doctor-patient privacy I see nothing wrong with it.
I read both. He’s really angry at people he doesn’t understand, possibly with different cultural values. In McBeef, he is definately the little kid who hates the fat Ward Cleaver-ish McBeef. Its almost as if McBeef represents America and American values or generalizations that he had observed or heard repeated often enough to believe about them. He clearly hated and ridiculed McBeef…
I think silenus’ concern (as well as Beaucarnea’s and my concern) is that the test will be poorly conceived and do little good. Much like the “assault weapons ban” which is a bigger joke than anything The Simpsons ever came up with.
I can see it now:
- Have you ever been treated for depression?
- Have you ever been diagnosed as having mood swings?
- Have you ever been diagnosed with paranoia?
- Are you taking SSRI’s?
Anyone who answers “yes” to any of these questions will not be able to own a gun. Anyone who does have one of these conditions, but lies and says “no,” will probably slip through the net and get his gun anyway.
IMO, reasonable precautions for gun ownership, which should be adopted nationwide, are mandatory waiting periods (a month or two, to make sure you aren’t buying a gun impulsively), mandatory gun safety classes before a permit is issued (to minimize accidents), a limit on how often a gun can be purchased (to reduce the number of “straw purchases”) and of course the usual prohibition on convicted criminals owning guns. Restrictions of mentlly disturbed people owning guns are good in theory, but in practice I can’t see how you could do this in a way that is both effective and fair.
Here is an example. I work with at-risk teens. I have access to psyche evals on each of them and am required to familiarize myself with them, even though I am not a doctor. Most mental health records for my kids note suicidal ideation. Most note anger issues, or self-wounding. Most note self-medication with street drugs or alcohol. Most of my kids grow up to live normal, productive lives. Would you have them denied healthcare or insurance based on past evalutions? Would you have these kids denied basic human rights based on past reports of self-harm or thoughts of suicide? Would you have them denied gainful employment as adults based on irrational behavior when they were teens? Would you deny them a college education based on some erratic behavior or negative ideaology? Where would you draw the line?
Mental and emotional health can flucuate based on home environment, physical health, and myriad other factors. One bad report could prejudice an employer, an insurer, a health worker for years afterward.
The picture painted of Cho so far shows a lonely, angry, detached kid. That is a crying shame. We also know that he was recommended for counseling, and apparently, it wasn’t completely effective. Do you feel that mandatory mental health testing would guarantee a peaceful and safe society? If you want to voluntarily submit yourself for testing, you can request it. But I sincerely hope that mandatory testing for potential health problems doesn’t happen in my lifetime.
Mandatory mental heath treatment won’t work for all those reasons, and because the person being treated actually has to want to get better. Unfortunately, that’s not everybody.