From an NYT article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18virginia.html?hp “Lucinda Roy, an English professor, said Mr. Cho’s writing, laced with anger, profanity and violence, concerned several faculty members. In 2005, she sent examples to the campus police, the campus counseling service and other officials. All were worried, but little could be done, she said.
That's baloney.
I got banned from a university on the pretense that I was a "threat". Yes, I was angry and yelled at them. A university physician had abused his authority and stomped on my civil rights by having my driver's license suspended because I didn't agree with his diagnosis. (Which was later proved to be WRONG.)
The physician wasn't even my doctor, I had no appointment with him, and after the one time I did years before, I told the university clinic I never wanted to see him again.
The stupid university, ACLU, state, etc. didn't care about MY rights as an individual.
I do realize that excessive authority to haul people off to mental hospitals can be abused. I think the key issue is “privacy laws”. These laws are really in direct conflict with the First Amendment, and have the effect of preventing anyone from putting all the pieces of the picture together. This works against both those individuals who really need to be locked up, and those who are the target of a vindictive or unreasonably nervous person. If all the pieces of information about this young man could have been freely passed around between professors, administrators, counselors, police, and staff at the mental hospital where he was once taken, I’m sure it would have become clear that he was severely and dangerously disturbed, and needed to have responsibility for his mental health and his every day actions taken out of his own hands. In your case, free exchange of information would probably have had the opposite outcome — with assessments of the few who imagined you were really dangerous (or said so because they wanted to get rid of you for some other reason) offset by many more assessments that you were no threat at all, and that those who were “out to get you” had some other concealed agenda.
For example, I seriously doubt that there was anything like this to pass around about you, but I also seriously doubt that this information about Cho had been freely passed on to anyone and everyone who was in a position to take action:
It emerged today that at one stage students were so scared of his behaviour that only seven out of 70 turned up for class, forcing lecturers to give him one-to-one tuition.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23393119-details/article.do