30 Killed In Virgina Tech Shooting

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I'll simplify this.

If you don't have 100% confirmation that the situation is under control, and you aren't 100% sure of how to get it under control, take whatever steps necessary. If that takes canceling classes, do it. Don't err on the side of underestimation, always err on the side of overestimation of the problem. In the latter case, people might get angry. In the first case, people might get dead.

Even a faster response in terms of e-mail warnings alone would help. It would get the word out some. We received the first e-mail less than a half hour before the second shooting. Two hours after the first. Nobody was in custody from the first shooting. Assuming that it was over was a fatal mistake.

well this is what happens when a country is OBSESSED with GUNS

aparently the asian killer done it all coz of his ex girlfriend

i bet the killers family have to be afriad for their lives.

Some people just love citing everything as the cause...except the person that did it.

This kind of blanket statement is also a bit insulting. You managed slightly better than the one liberal Italian newspaper that called the shooting as "American as apple pie," that's something I guess.

insulting maybe try im sure it is, come on how many people have died coz of gun crime in the last month in america, i bet its more then anywhere else in the world other the irac, iran and afganistan due to the wars going on there

This sort of thing is the context of the cause, not the actual cause. Remove those things, and the likelihood that would happen would lessen. Not disappear, but lessen. However, I agree. These sorts of things are multifactorial, but ultimately, the buck should stop with the person who may potentially cause the shooting. He was only in America for a few years (or was it A year?), so really it was merely the easy access to the guns by American culture that helped things along. He was apparently very morbid. What sort of gun culture is there in South Korea? SFA, like in Japan? Or is there something more?

The New York Times has biographies as the victims.

ADDEDUM: Incidents such as this, while horrific, remain extremely rare statistically.

(source)

Last edited by jimservo on 18 Apr 2007, 8:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

Well, at least we don't have to worry about the killer being tagged as an ASpie. Seems he never went to counselling, even though he was told he needed to. His professors recognized his emotional problems, and warned their superiors that he was writing macabre stuff. One removed him from her classroom, and taught him one on one. She said she caught him taking pictures of the other students by holding his camera=phone under his desk. But since he was an adult, they couldn't make him get a DX. He also stalked girls on campus, and was known to do this. Obviously a disturbed young man who never tried to get any help...

Japan has extreme strong gun control laws and always has, although it is a somewhat unusual case. Japan itself has always, even today, extremely strong police powers (far stronger then in the United States). Guns were largely removed from the Japanese citizenry long ago, although not as a method primarily of crime control but of restricting social mobility and maintain authoritarian control.

(one source)

As for South Korea, I'm not sure, I would have to do some research.

This mornig they are reporting that he was in this country since he was 8.

I realize I'm not the center of the universe, but with the interviews and commentary this morning, I find myself thinking
about everytime I've been treated with suspicion just for being quite and unhappy.

So anyone that doesn't outright ban guns is obsessed with guns? Oh, and better spelling would make your arguments more well received kthxbai.

Quartermass: Your arguments are reasonable, and I appreciate that. Others seem to have a hard time understanding that the gun is no more responsible for a shooting than the pencil or laptop is for an essay getting written, or other things along those lines.

I'm not arguing against the idea that less access to guns would lead to less guns in peoples' hands. I am against the idea that making guns harder to get would make them impossible to get. If someone really wants a gun, in most parts of the world, they can get one. Most likely illegally, but it is still possible. Someone that wants to commit this kind of violence, if sufficiently motivated, would have to deal with a hassle to get the gun. That doesn't mean they won't eventually get a gun.

Yeah a gun is not high technology its something a machinist can make at ones own home. The Viet Cong could make semi-auto handguns with handtools and scrap metal.

I know most of us are wondering whether this guy had AS. It could be classic Sociopathy, I suppose. Either way, he is said to have gotten through four years of college without making many friends. Doesn't exactly sound NT. I mean, if I were more of a social person, in other words if I were "normal" / typical, and I were surrounded by peers my age for four years, many of whom liked to reach out to everyone including me, I doubt I could have remained unmoved and unattached to several different friends by the end of my fourth year. It's a bit scary to realize that, under just one or two different circumstances, I could be like this guy! It's a good thing both for me and everyone around me that I'm a Christian, because sometimes, it has been only my morals that have prevented me from turning my depression outward.

If I was at the bottom of one of my depression cycles, AND I wasn't a Christian, I would act just as weird and dangerous as this kid acted in class, when he wouldn't speak when spoken to, and was quietly beligerent to those who tried to reach out to him. There are certain times when no one can reach me, I'm so withdrawn. My behaviour would, in such a hypothetical case as I've described above, be totally off-the-hook, because if you take "I don't care what ANYONE thinks about my behaviour", and "I don't have any morals", and add them together, you have a formula for anything up to and including mass murder. There are reports he might have been on anti-depressants. If so, I wonder: 1. Which ones?, and, 2. For what diagnosis? I've taken Effexor before, and it put my conscience in neutral. Glad I'm not on it anymore! Although I know it does a lot of people good. My exwife was on Paxil for a while, and she was kicking doors to try to get to me, and another time, throwing shoes at my head. (To clarify, she was doing these things while on Paxil -- never while off it, although she got pretty close to such behaviour on her own.)

I agree with that. But the situation was unprecedented, so all I'm saying is that I don't think that people should be fired from the police or VA Tech administration for handling it the way they did. I don't know that any campus in this country would have been prepared for what happenned.

In a situation like this, I think it's easy to try to assign blame for not getting this guy in therapy, selling him a gun, allowing the gun laws to be lax, not shutting down the campus, etc. It's possible that these things could have helped the situation, but not guaranteed. The only real blame in this case should go to the guy, Cho, for deciding to shoot up the campus in the first place.

He had been referred to therapy. From what his roommates said he was kept overnight at the counseling center.

The guns were, according to the news, legally purchased.

Unprecedented or not, the university was slow to act. Several of us students have been unhappy with Steger for some time now, some due to the Malvo incident. Regardless, mistakes were made. In this kind of situation "I tried my best" may not be sufficient.

I agree, the shooter should hold the most responsibility in this. Like I said, the first victims weren't preventable. He would have possibly shot more people even if the university was put on lockdown. The only change may have been that it didn't happen in Norris hall. I (and others here, and parents, etc) am mainly upset with Steger because of how long it took to let students know anything. The situation wasn't confirmed over. Sure, scaring the students would have been seen as negative, but letting them know about it sooner might have helped. It might have gotten the word out, and people might have been more vigilant. That advantage alone would have been enough. Even when the situation is handled right, things can still go horribly wrong. Regardless of the outcome, if all of the controllable variables are dealt with right, those that took action should be free of blame.

I'm not blaming Steger for the shootings. I'm blaming him for not considering the situation to be as dangerous as it was. If the higher-ups in the police force down here did not suggest to him that it could be, they are just as responsible as Steger is. The only analogy I can think of (that I like) is weather service warnings. If you can warn people about a hurricane approaching, people can evacuate. Not everyone may get the warning, and some people may decide not to move, but they are aware of the situation. With or without the warning, the hurricane is still coming, and it could still do a lot of damage, or it could completely change directions and / or dissipate, but appropriate measures were taken on the part of the weather service.

Our warnings started around 9:30, two hours after the first shooting occurred. I can understand a delay, but whatever the cause of this substantial of a delay needs to be dealt with.

Last edited by shadexiii on 18 Apr 2007, 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Here is one wrong principle of blame that is regularly followed by much of society, particularly when there has been a catastrophe: "Find those under whose jurisdiction the catastrophe occurred, and fire them." Often, little thought is given as to whether that person or those persons in charge could have really, with their in-the-moment knowledge, prevented the tragedy. Emotions run very high, and assignment of blame is rarely accurate, in one or both of: 1. placement of blame and 2. amount of blame.

But in this specific case, when you look at what was and wasn't done -- it looks like everyone except the gunner did what they were supposed to do: they became worried of his distrubing writings and behaviour, and got him into counseling. A teacher even had him permanently removed from her class, on threat of her own resignation! I mean, you can't do much more than that to alert everyone that something is wrong with this kid. What more could / should have been done? The police going through his personal belongings before he even did anything? We all know that can't happen by law. And it probably wouldn't have turned up any convicting evidence anyway. The fact is, there are some lone nuts out there, even if, perhaps, they are blamed disproportionately I'm not convinced Tim McVeigh acted alone. But so far, "alone" seems to be this kids very definition, both in his massacre and pre-massacre behaviour. It's as if NO ONE has any connection to this guy. It may simply be a bad case of an individual's inner demons coming out. The students reported that even the way he shot and aimed seemed random, and not strategic.

I guess it doesn't matter how many times I say it, it's falling on deaf ears.
That this particular crime is unprecedented is irrelevant to the complaint that the university wasn't shut down. Shutting down school campuses, including this university, is precedented when a violent criminal is perceived to be loose in the area.
Janicka, you keep trying to suggest that we expected some fortune-telling when we (shadexiii and I) are not saying anything like that. It's just common sense that if there has been a violent crime, you close off the area. It was done at this particular school last August and many times around the country for various reasons. I live in a particular violent corner of the country and it's not unheard of to have road blocks and evacuated neighborhoods because someone is running around loose. It has nothing to do with statistics, odds of anything or anyone's belief about the nature of the original crime. It is strictly that some nut is armed and loose and there are bystanders that need to be protected.

In fact, my particular point is that the police and university made an exceptional decision not to warn people because of the perceived nature of the crime (domestic violence). I maintain that that decision is chilling.