This VI Tech things has me going over the edge. It is tragic. No doubt about it. But the news, radio callers, students etc… are trying to find as many people to share responsibility for this carnage with the killer. The cops didn’t do this. The school didn’t do that. They didn’t lock down the campus. They didn’t notify the students. Gun control failed. Background checks failed.
Why is it so hard for everyone to accept the reality that only 1 person has any responsibility for that day? The shooter. He did waht he did. No one should have controlled or monitored him before that. People are so pissed off about what the school couldh ave done, in hindsight, or what the cops could have done, in hindsight, that they forget who actually bears 100% of the responsibility for those deaths. It aint the cops or the school.
Anyway, this happens every time something bad happens. Some kids go nuts and shoot up the school. Someone blows up a market or shoots up the mall. It’s never just as simple as “that guy was fucked up” in America. It’s always about finding out who could have done what, in hindsight, and stringing them up.
Why do we have this mentality?
It’s a natural human response … people are angry and they need to find a target for their anger. Anytime something awful happens, the fingers of blame begin to be pointed almost immediately, whether or not it is legitimate to do so.
Intelligence guided by experience informs most people that few events happen in a vacuum, and that while we can’t fix the problem of, say, people going crazy, we can fix other things, like how prepared we are for them to do so.
Because you need a target for anger. Because a lot of people can’t accept the randomness of an event such as this. It’s too abstract. They need a concrete villain they can rail against.
That said, I would love to see that the lesson which comes out of this is that the help for people like Cho who are suffering is still insufficient. I would like to see people (anyone who has a good idea) come up with ideas on how to reach out to a Cho and help when he’s suffering. I saw excerpts from his two plays - sexual abuse was highlighted, among other things. I would like to see more focus on finding people like Cho and helping them long before they feel they have no other resort but violence whether it be to themselves or others.
So while I do deplore the quest to find someone to blame, I hope that at least some people will use this as a trigger to figure out ways to better help people who are troubled.
That’s a symptom, not the problem.
Part of it is people’s desire to prevent such a thing from happening again. Another part of it is to try to regain a sense of security.
The same reason people 3000 years ago needed to believe that volcanoes and lightning were not simple, unavoidable phenomena, but the temper tantrums of offended deities. To say, “there is no reason or meaning to this, no lesson to be learned from it, and probably no way to avoid it in the future that wouldn’t cause more harm than good” runs against basic human wants.
Well, it’s probably a good idea to “go over the tape” to try to learn something. The police might be able to improve their tactics, doctors may have another data point suggesting that a certain mood drug has a higher than acceptable propensity to make people start actin’ a fool, etc. After a huge engineering fiasco you don’t just shrug and move on. I think the same logic can apply to social situations as well.
I don’t think this is blaming anyone but the nut job, though.
Because if we can find out what happened and who’s to blame, not only can we punish those people (vindictiveness), we can make money off of them (avarice) and we can do everything right next time to prevent this from ever happening again (stupidity and superstition).
This sort of thing, not to diminish the tragedy of what happened, is what’s gotten us to children who aren’t allowed to play in their front yards, women afraid to walk down the street to the store and fat, fat, fat people. It’s the superstitious idea that if we do everything “right” and appease the Gods of Violence, we’ll live forever. To do that, we need to find out what “they” did wrong. (Not us, of course, it’s never our fault. It’s “their” fault, and we won’t be like “them.”)
Sure. The safety experts - the people trained in forensics and physics and how to design a better airplane and how to decode the aftermath - should certainly have a look-see.
Those aren’t the people writing or publishing or suing, however. My problem is with the reporters, editors, people who buy such uneducated speculation and spread the fear, and the lawyers who pressure grieving families to find someone, anyone to blame other than the guy holding the gun.
OK, I see your point, and would agree that there is a distinction between experts and people who like to spout off for personal gain without much knowledge or analysis.
All true, but there is one benefit to the specter of an adversarial civil trial against the college or whomever.
Relevant information is not being shared by Virginia Tech and its police department, nor was it being shared when it would have been useful: After the initial dorm incident. The first time, they were trying to prevent a panic (I’m guessing), and there was a presumption that the incident was over, that an unprecedented second spree by the same gunman would not happen.
Now, they are sitting on information to limit the school’s liability. In a criminal investigation, they don’t have to disclose every scrap of embarrassing data about how they could have handled this better. In a civil proceeding, all the facts they’re sitting on will eventually come to light.
But first they have to have those facts. And all the people spouting about what could have, or should have, been done, certainly don’t have those facts. And they aren’t saying anything useful, or in some cases, even anything sensible.
I know this is complete fantasy, but it would sure be nice if everybody who doesn’t actually know anything would just shut up.
Haven’t heard any indication of that, but I did read the CNN article today where his former roommates claimed he had an imaginary girlfriend named (I swear I’m not making this up) “Jelly,” who was a “supermodel,” and whose pet name for him was “Spanky”— which (if true) suggests a certain fixation that isn’t particularly opaque.
Say there was a plane crash, and forensic evidence showed that the cause was a previously unknown weak weld on a wing. This is publicized. Now, say one year later another plane crashes due to the same cause.
Maybe everyone should shut up until the result of the official investigation, but I don’t think cutting the management of that airline a new one is so terrible. Managers these days want the big bucks but no responsibility.
High schools throughout the country know how to lock down if there is the slightest danger. The college my daughter goes to has well understood procedures for this kind of thing. They broadcast warnings by email but they sound a siren to tell people to check email. Schools also have procedures to deal with kids whose writing indicates they are at risk. Sure, this might result in some false positives, but at least there is some examination.
It’s too early to assign blame, of course, but it doesn’t seem too early to be asking questions. Sure, the ultimate blame is on the person doing the shooting, but unless you can guarantee that no wackos will be attending your college, you better have a plan for dealing with one who does.
This isn’t even the first instance of a problem at a college. A potential problem near me got headed off when a girl working at a camera shop saw that this kid had brought in pictures of a big collection of guns. No one knows if he ever would have used them, but I seem to remember some writing that pointed that way. If we were all innocent I can see not blaming the administration of this university for not planning for the unimaginable, but sadly we are far from innocent these days.
It is my impression that this way of thinking especially is especially strong in America.
It is the converse of American’s inherent optimism and idealism; probably more than any other country, it is ingrained into our national psyche that you can do anything if you try hard enough, that all problems have solutions, that anything is possible and that mistakes are meant to be learned from.
This sort of thinking is usually true, and America has prospered enormously from it. It’s sometimes hard to deal with the fact that it isn’t always true.
Just out of curiosity, how big is your daughter’s school? I could see this happening where my daughter is, too, but it’s a very small campus. It probably could be locked down somewhat like a high school. VT is not like that, nor is pretty much any state school in the country.
I do think questions should be asked and information be given out. But let’s allow some time for facts to determined before we go off half-cocked about what should have been done, or what would work next time. Other wise we run the risk of putting procedures into place that will just make things worse because we don’t understand what really happened.