Posted on 04/21/2007 2:11:34 PM PDT by shrinkermd
Edited on 04/21/2007 4:47:41 PM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
I saw an old friend on the Acela on the way to Washington, and he told me of the glum, grim faces at the station he'd left, all the commuters with newspapers in their hands and under their arms. This was the day after Virginia Tech. We talked about what was different this time, in this tragedy. I told him I felt people were stricken because they weren't stricken. When Columbine happened, it was weird and terrible, and now there have been some incidents since, and now it's not weird anymore. And that is what's so terrible. It's the difference ...
With treatment afflicted individuals are reasonably safe to have around. Without treatment (antipsychotic drugs)they present a moral and legal hazard to those around them.
It is not possible to make a diagnosis in absentia; however, Cho surely has many characteristics suggesting he was entering, or had entered, a severe psychotic, paranoid schizophrenic state.
The problem with these individuals is that initially everyone "normalizes" their behavior although later they pejoratively shun them. In any case those supposed caregivers and supervisors act almost as irrational as a response to an irrational patient.
“Hopefully, Congress will revisit the issue so that universities and parents aren’t so powerless against mental illness in this young adult age group.”
Not gonna happen so long as the Kennedy family continues on its collective guilt trip.
I believe this was actually caused when the family of a student who committed suicide sued a university for big damages and won.
So the universities started kicking out everyone who seemed flaky, causing these laws to be passed.
Everyone wonders how this sort of thing can be prevented. It can’t be prevented entirely, but there are several obvious lessons to be drawn.
1. What Peggy Noonan says. There were clear signs that this kid was way beyond the limit, and the psychological gurus at the college were aware of it, but did nothing.
2. The president of the college appears to be an idiot. I suppose that’s par for the course, because only an idiot can stay on the right side of a politically correct faculty.
3. Making the university a gun free zone makes it extremely vulnerable to this kind of attack. At the least, they should allow qualified faculty to carry weapons, and they should have more armed guards on campus.
4. The students mostly failed to react sensibly. A few closed their class room doors and blocked them to prevent entry, but most of them seem to have just stood there and let themselves be shot. These are young people in the prime of life. They should be able to overwhelm a nerd like Cho if they had just charged in and tackled him. Instead of certain death they would have risked possible death, and it’s better to die saving others than to die meaninglessly.
I’m afraid many of our youths have been neutered by politically correct parents and teachers. And something like this is enough to paralyze a lot of people. Still, it’s rather sad that he could kill 32 people without any of them, so far as we have heard, trying to fight back. In one classroom he is said to have lined up 12 students and shot them one at a time. Surely they could have tried to tackle him instead of just standing there while he shot them one at a time.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but not this:
“There were clear signs that this kid was way beyond the limit, and the psychological gurus at the college were aware of it, but did nothing.” They did ring the bell, and he was taken before a magistrate; but that magistrate chose not to commit him involuntarily. That would have (might have) set in motion the needed actions to deny him the right to buy a gun.
TC
At the forefront of, for lack of a better term, the *rights of the mentally impaired*, have been the Kennedys. This goes back to Joe’s treatment of one of his daughters. In order to ausuage their guilt, Robert and Eunice especially, were the big pushers of de-institutionalization.
But the point here is not deinstitutionalization, but whether colleges and universities can decline to do business with those who might cause trouble. Letting people run around loose is different from requiring colleges to disregard their disabilities. That law is fairly recent.
OK, admittedly, gunning down sixty-some people, and killing thirty-two of them, then yourself, is more than a little quirky. But still, it would have been a long and drawn-out legal process, had he not died by his own hand, to have ever been able to put him through a criminal trial. Sentencing would have been even more of a nightmare.
Letting people run around loose is different from requiring colleges to disregard their disabilities. That law is fairly recent.
IMO, one just leads to the other. That’s how incrementalism works.
If true, why the pyscho buzz and not the militant Al Quaeda front that he more properly represents?
VT failed to act sufficiently in this case on a troubled youth, but the fact remains that VT failed to act to protect their students from *any* sort of attack.
Quite the contrary, VT’s leadership went out of their way to forcefully *disarm* their students in 2006...without taking on the new responsibility of securing the students’ protection via any means, firearms or not (e.g. safe rooms or guard dogs or a gunshot detection system like Chicago has in place, etc.)
“Surely they could have tried to tackle him instead of just standing there while he shot them one at a time.”
I agree completely Non-violence training from k-12+ is teaching our kids not to fight back. We have created this problem and are now seeing our children become the victims of these policies.
We must let kids fight it out within reason. I was taught you don’t start the fights, you end them. I know it’s trite, but force can only be met with equal or greater force or you become a victim.
I am troubled by all this talk. If he actually harmed someone already, that would be one thing (and maybe that’s what’s driving this, his “stalking” for example).
But suppose he was just like he is, except he had never stalked anyone. But he “seems off”. Can we punish people for what we think they might do in the future?
How many Chos are there that will never actually “go off”? If there is only one, is it better to punish that one innocent Cho than to allow this guilty Cho to be given the opportunity to kill so many people? What if it’s 10 that never act to 1 that does? What if it’s 100 that never act to 1 that does? Or 1000, or 10,000?
So far as I can tell, every day there are children in every school system in america that are flagged as possible problems. It coule well be that over a million kids now in college have been flagged at some point as a danger to themselves or others.
But of those million possible Chos, there have been, what, 10, 20, 30 Chos? While the other 999,970 troubled kids have gotten enough help, have graduated, have married, have kids, live productive lives. Should we deny all those people their chance at what the rest of us take for granted, simply because there is a .003% probability that any particular one could turn into a mass murderer? What if it’s a 1% probability?
I could be convinced that in this case, the fires, the stalking, the outbursts in class, the way so many people were threatened, should have been a flag to at least put this kid under medical care. But until he commits a real crime, we can’t throw him in jail. And unless he is truly mentally ill, and not simply “off”, we can’t imprison him in the guise of “medical care”.
It could be that there was only a 2-hour window in which society had the right to act to stop this boy — those 2 hours after he committed his first crimes of his life, the two murders.
BTW, to the degree my statements mean that we value liberty higher than security, which I think is true, that works better if people are given the tools with which to defend themselves when a person misuses his liberty such as Cho did.
If everybody in class was required to have a gun, Cho would not have gotten as far as he did. Still people would be dead, but each individual would have the liberty to defend themselves, so we wouldn’t have to lock up a million people with no cause simply to keep a few sick people from mass murder.
What do you think?
There may be a connection to islam. Then again there may not. Anytime there is the slightest question in this regard, we know which way the Gov’t. and MSM are going to lean. Seeing islam as the root of all bad things does us no good. But that is not to say that islam is not behind these bad things. With both the Gov’t and MSM alligned to dissuade us from blaming ANYTHING on islam, we are truely left in the lurch.
Virginia Tech knew.
Virginia Tech knew of Cho's medical history, knew he had been judged my psychologists to be a danger to himself and others. And yet, he was permitted to remain enrolled, and was housed in a university dormitory. Neither students (suitemates or others nearby) nor their parents were informed of the possibility of a problem.
Virginia Tech knew.
We don't know, and may never know, who was involved in the conspiracy of silence. But it is clear that Cho's condition was known at high levels of the Virginia Tech administration. And it is obvious that the presence of a clear and present danger was willfully withheld from those he could logically be expected to come in contact with.
Virginia Tech knew.
And not to be melodramatic about it, but the blood is on their hands. Virginia Tech chose to let political correctness trump common sense. How, exactly, did the "right" of medical privacy come to be more important than the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, now denied Cho's victims? Was Virginia Tech more concerned about mainstreaming Cho than they were about taking the most rudimentary steps to protect the university community at large?
Hmmmm...had not heard THAT.
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