Well, according to the killer it was everyone's fault but his. He'd be glad to know that so many agree with him.
Posted at 2007-04-19 06:16:35 [PermaLink]Seems to me he had an organic brain disorder. In his video he refers to his own cancer of the brain, which although undoubtedly a metaphor, was proobably an acknowledgement on his part (at some level) that he suffered some underlying biological pathology.
The question should not be whose fault it is; the question should be could it have been prevented or made less likely. I attended an Ivy League school that had a rash of student suicides one year. Thereafter the administration iplemented several programs to identify and provide assistance to at-risk students. SOunds like this guy was a walking red flag that the adminstration should have been reviewing. The US is also going to have to do more about its gun laws. There must be ways to restrict access to handguns from at-risk individuals within the confines of their constitution.
Murray,
You may be correct about the US gun laws, however, it will do nothing to prevent the next shooting spree in another Montreal institute of higher learning...the current record holder for such acts.
Ecole Polytechnique, Concordia, Dawson College.
I don't mean to suggest stricter gun laws would be a cure-all, but I would expect it would reduce the frequency or carnage ratio of such incidents. I also recognize that people who live on farms or other isolated locations would have a firearm as the only realistic defence, since a police response would be far, far too slow to be of any use. Such factors could be taken into account in getting gun permits. It is harder to become a securities broker (in terms of character references, etc.) than to get handguns.
Posted at 2007-04-19 07:41:19 [PermaLink]I always wonder at the rationale of people arguing for gun control.
Let's see. This Cho nutbar bought guns legally so gun control would have made no difference. Guns are controlled in Canada and this didn't make a difference to the several Montreal shooters. Japan has the strictest gun control and the Mayor of Hiroshima was just killed a couple of days ago.
So where exactly is the correlation between gun control and gun crime?
Anyone who thinks that the "government" will protect them in case of gun violence is dreaming. Didn't work in Columbine, VT, Montreal, New Orleans or anywhere else for that matter. When an assailant strikes with no obvious prior warning and in seconds, the people there either have the weapons to defend themselves or they don't. That is the bottom line.
Think about it. Go to Israel...there are guns everywhere, many in plain view for everyone to see on soldiers' shoulders. And guess what? There is very little if any gun violence. Israel had the equivalent of VT in Maalot in 1974 where Palestinan assassins took a school hostage and assassinated 24 children. Ever since, there are weapons in schools and teachers learn to use them. There has not been a repeat incident since. I would venture a guess that this is not a coincidence.
Separate gun laws for rural people; they could be identified as the "Rural Nation." This could be fun.
Posted at 2007-04-19 07:55:38 [PermaLink]Murray,
"I also recognize that people who live on farms or other isolated locations would have a firearm as the only realistic defence, since a police response would be far, far too slow to be of any use. "
Do you mean slow like in Columbine, VT, Montreal, etc. or do you mean non-existent as in the UK?
The people wailing "we need more gun control!" haven't bothered to even learn the EXISTING laws that this psycho broke; in 2002, he was committed to a mental institution, which is grounds for a lifetime refusal under both the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the NICS check that gun buyers have to go through in the US. Someone dropped the ball big time on this fruitcake, and screaming for more "gun control" is no different than screaming "Well, let's make murder super-duper, extra-special, double-stamp, no-quitsies illegal!". Fools.
Posted at 2007-04-19 08:24:50 [PermaLink]I'm not arguing against carry permits--just tightening up who gets them.
As for Columbine, the Amish school and VT, most of the victims would be under 21 and not permitted to carry guns. Maybe that's part of the reason the nutbars go for schools rather than the local mall.
_After the crazed killer, who's paying the 4-digit credit card charges for the guns and ammo? To-date it doesn't sound like this univ. student had ever worked p-t at all.
Posted at 2007-04-19 09:12:07 [PermaLink]If the guy in fact had an organic, untreated brain disease then strictly speaking he is not to blame, not being in his right mind, assuming that like someone with Tourettes he literally could not control himself.
But: would he have done everything he did in the presence of a uniformed police officer? I doubt it somehow, and that would show a modicum of self-protection that indicates sanity of a sort.
If he didn't have an organic brain disease, then yes, it was Satan. Yeah, I do really mean that. Sorry.
any person stable or unstable with $500, the willingness to take a risk, and a local "shady side of town" can get a gun...$1000 no doubt would get you a really good gun. That's in either Canada or the USA.
There is no law saying you can't buy ammo over the age of 21 in the States is there?
So if some nut job decides to go get a gun, ammo, and has no self regard (maybe even a death wish) with no regard for the lives of others if they go on a rampage, no law writen on a piece of paper by a bunch of long dead men in a dusty office is going to stop them.
The only ones that can stop him are those that are there and choose not to be victums and face up to reality...he's going to kill you if you don't fight back... in that moment they need to decide fight rather then flight... Someone already commented on another blog that even if he shoots you while you're charging him the odds are pretty good you'll live and further your 200 lbs body is a pretty effective weapon on its own if you slam into them.
I feel very sorry for those that lost their lives and the family's of the victums... it made me very worried about my own child who will one day be attending a university campus, but if 30 people in that class room had rushed this nut job once he started firing it would have had a very different ending.
Just because he was crazy does not mean he was stupid. An organic brain disorder can induce delusions, inability to integrate social empathy into decision-making, intemperate urges, etc., but the brain can still function cleverly in many if not most other respects.
The concept of Satan does not have explanatory power for me. The concept esseential means we do not know enough yet about neurology and therefore stop asking questions. It's a debate-ending device that helps us put things behind us.
Not at all Murray. Millions more people believe in Satan than are neurological researchers, and none of us thinks those folks should stop their research or put anything "behind us".
Raising the spectre of Evil's existence and influence behooves some of us to do more to fight that Evil. If you don't want to play (or is that pray), that's ok too.
If you can't find a rational explanation for something, blame it on the supernatural! Lot of progress made there in the last millennium, Kathy.
'Berserker' works for me.
I find the discussion about Satan very interesting in this context. Was the killer "guided" by Satan? I think not. I think he was a very sick man and that is what drove him.
But I think Satan was indeed there in this situation...not in the killer but in many other areas:
- in the people who believe that disarming good people and going soft on criminals is the sign of a "tolerant" society
- in having brainwashed people that the "government" will protect you
- in a system where the paranoia about privacy is such that a mentally deranged man can buy not one but 2 guns legally even though the courts have determined that he is a menace to society
- in a system which make mentally ill people responsible for making decisions about their own well being
- by making men in our society so emasculated that no one, other than a 77-year old man try to take any defensive action (the same thing happened in Montreal when the killer asked all the men to leave and then proceeded to execute 14 women)
- by making people too shy to assign blame when clearly the "security" people blew the 2 hour window that the killer gave them and decided not to evacuate the campus,
- etc...
This is where evil is. It is in a society that has become so mushy, so incapable of taking a stand, so adverse to hurting people's feelings even when they are sick or criminal, so cowardly that it cannot protect its own children.
Well, stepping up the general fight against capital-E evil (aka Satan) sounds like an affirmation of an in-group's pre-established moral code--rally round the flag, so to speak. That assumes the moral code is ideal and the problem was simply a result of too lenient adherence. That, I suppose, is a matter of faith. Personally, to deconstruct scientifically the Cho disaster is an exercise in attempting to understand neurological malfunction better and to assess whether greater resources should be committed to prevention and how. The Satan discourse does not provide any scientific guidance in that respect. Are neurologists supposed to design Satan experiments--the science of Satan--to get to the bottom of the problem? Does not seem to be a promising way to go. Ten years of MRIs has generated much more insight than 2000 years of combating and trying to understand "Satan".
Posted at 2007-04-19 12:39:42 [PermaLink]Come on people.. I think it unfair to lump the concerns about restrictions on the public's ability to defend itself in with all of these other "reasons" that people are putting forth to blame this tragedy on. Nobody, including Ann Coulter, ever said that the gun laws were the reason for the carnage, or responsible for it.
Nobody is responsible for it but Mr. Cho himself.
But that doesn't change the fact that it could have ended differently, with possibly less deaths, if the public wouldn't stick their head in the sand and convince themselves that anti-gun laws disarm anyone but the good guys.
That doesn't mean I'm "blaming" gun-free school zone laws for this tragedy. I'm only trying to point out that there is no such thing as a "gun-free zone" law that does anything other than disarming the people who follow the law. It is senseless and it removed any chance for law abiding citizens to lessen the carnage here.
You just keep telling yourself all that Murray. And they say Christians embrace religion to "comfort" themselves. Yep, science is Our Friend, for sure. Uh huh.
Posted at 2007-04-19 13:25:53 [PermaLink]"science" as Our Friend? There you go again. Just because you can use a noun in a sentence does not mean it is a meaningful concept. (Or as Nietzsche wrote, we shall not be rid of god so long as we worship grammar. Or as Kant wrote, just because you can you have a pfeffing in your pocket does not mean you have one there.)
I am not sure what "science" means here? Are you saying I take comfort in the communal enterprise of self-motivated scientists seeking first-to-discover recognition in a grant-funded discipline that simultaneously rewards cooperation and competition to balance incentives to promote, challenge, criticize and improve theories so that the theories may generate procedures useful for practical engineering to human ends? And the mere existence of this "science" is supposed to give me comfort to assuage the sorrows induced by homicidal nutbars? Hardly. What I thought I was saying is that genuine progress in addressing matters such as these is most likely to come from better understanding of the biological causalities of the brain and how they malfunction in nutbars like the VT killer. There is no "comfort" in that, any more than I take "comfort" in believing that the most likely way of getting weeds out of my garden is to get a trowel, locate the weeds and dig them out. It's all dirty work-to-done, not a matter of comfort, and in this case, not a comforting task, deconstructing psycho-killers. I feel like the parents in Lorenzo's Oil--I'm not interested in comfort, science, or any other capital-N noun. I seek solutions and the venerable authorities continually spout nonsense.
Gerald Kaufman is blaming movies what an arse.
[External Link]
I blame Hitler
(I wanted to be the first to get there...)
More realistically, the evidence is pretty solid that Cho suffered from a severe mental disease, probably schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or schizoaffective disorder.
I think Cathy confuses the concept of insanity with that of psychosis. One can be legally sane while still suffering from a deep psychosis. The notion that if he would not have "done everything he did in the presence of a uniformed police officer" then he wasn't suffering from a severe mental illness indicates a lack of experience in dealing with persons suffering from severe mental illness. And blaming it on "Satan" denies any level of responsibility at a human level. But the signs of his illness were there
Cho had been previously involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution, he was known to be depressed, he was suffering from paranoid delusions, and he was a scary person (a stalker) who was unable to interact with others at a healthy level. Prior to the incident he was referred to the university’s counseling center, although there is no evidence he ever went. Had he received proper treatment this could almost certainly have been avoided.
This is the downside of the trend away from involuntary psychiatric treatment for those too sick to seek it themselves, and it is why persons with a history of severe mental illness are not supposed to be able to buy firearms in Virginia or anywhere else in the U.S.
This isn't a question of good or evil so much as a system that failed to identify and treat a very sick individual resulting in horrific consequences. And it is why legislation such as Kendra's Law [External Link] has been enacted in many states.
Sorry, messed up the link on my above comment. Here it is: [External Link]
Posted at 2007-04-20 14:12:21 [PermaLink]> Think about it. Go to Israel...there are guns
> everywhere, many in plain view for everyone to
> see on soldiers' shoulders. And guess what?
> There is very little if any gun violence.
This is basically correct. Another thing is that in Israel sociopathic behaviour is viewed as dangerous. If a student here were writing essays like Cho's he would suspended long ago.
Strikes me as strange that people are focusing on guns (ie. either more of them or less of them) rather than on the shooter. It's not like Cho was one of these quiet-keep-his-psychosis-to-himself kinds of people.