Virginia Tech

~ Laura

I had a long, rambling post yesterday that brought up the Virginia Tech massacre, but it was lost in another discussion. I’m wicked tired, but I want to set up a Virginia Tech-only thread. Talk here about gun control or whatever.

I want to also put up some links. In between Lost and Idol, I’ve been running up the stairs following links about how this disaster has unfolded on the internet. Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber started the dominos by linking to a story at BookTruck.org. Booktruck has a wealth of information and links to another excellent link-fest over at MTV. One thing that is coming out of this analysis is that MySpace has come of age. We have focused so much of our energy writing about blogs and been all snoberoo about myspace. Maybe it’s not greasy, kid’s stuff after all.

And the analysis continues. Seen some posts and commentary that say that the campus didn’t shut down, because domestic violence doesn’t raise red flags anymore. (links to come)

My pet issue of the evening is campus anomie. The guy was clearly unhinged. The profile in the Times today was haunting. Where were the support system for this guy? Do large, impersonal campuses push border line personality disorders into horror shows? I’m at small, small college right now. Many of the kids transferred to my school from large, impersonal colleges, because the atmosphere was too cold and lonely. Someone should have been taking better care of this guy.

Published by Laura

46 thoughts on “Virginia Tech”

  2. It’s obvious that we need to have Classroom Marhalls present in every university and high school, just like we have Air Marshalls on every flight. Gun control is not the issue, it’s student control. Period.

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  9. Some people are afraid this will lead to a racial issue. At least, that’s what some Koreans fear, according to the New York Times.
    I recently recored a video on this subject. The Virginia Tech massacre & racism. If you have a minute, please watch the clip.

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  10. People *did* look out after this guy. That’s the interesting thing about it: VT’s support systems flagged him, did what they could, and came up against an inability to go further without any further evidence of his intent to harm others or himself. To do any better, we’d have to alter laws to allow the state or institutions to act on more tentative evidence of possible dysfunction than they’re presently allowed to act. And there are some serious dangers there–after Columbine, there was a lot of overreaction in that direction where all it took was being a weird kid to get a principal calling you in to be disciplined, expelled or monitored. About the only thing I can see VT could have done under the current legal framework might have been to expel him. Expelled because he was silent in class, signed in with a question mark, took pictures of other people, wrote creepy violent shit in creative writing classes, and had had a psychological episode in the past. (I think the university knew about that when they investigated his case based on promptings from Lucinda Roy.) If that’s the standard, I think universities will start expelling a lot of students with mental disabilities. I think you could argue for that, but there are some serious legal and moral problems with that as a course of action.

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  11. Didn’t he set his room on fire, too?
    By the way, I know there are pretty strict privacy rules about not telling parents student grades. How much of an obstacle are privacy policies when dealing with students with mental health issues. If (absent clear evidence of violent intention) an administrator picked up a phone and told mom and dad, “your kid is having trouble, please take hime home?” would that administrator run into problems?

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  13. Incidentally, in the past I worked a bit as an ESL teacher with Asian students. It’s a stereotype, but true that it’s very hard to get them talking in class. I had a class or two of female Japanese students and it was hard but not impossible, and they were nice girls. Later, I had a male Korean student who was the despair of our little English school. He wouldn’t talk and he was a bit weird. It was like dealing with a brick wall. So there are probably some cultural, rather than simply individual issues in play.

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  14. Yeah, I would certainly not endorse expelling all kids with mental disorders from campuses. But maybe universities should have more support system built in.
    College students are a weird gray area between adulthood and adolescence. As a society, we recognize that. We don’t let them drink until their 21. Some students can handle the complete independence of college life and others can’t. 99.9% of the kids who can’t handle the independence don’t become suicidal or homicidal, but they have other problems. Maybe instead of student RAs, there should be more adult residents keeping an eye on them. Maybe parents should be brought in when there are warning signs.
    When I was an undergraduate, I worked for the school newspaper for a couple of years. I started off writing the police blotter. I was told to not report all the suicide attempts and there were several. I wonder if mental health problems at college campuses have been seriously under reported.
    I’m not a mental health expert and, in the past, I would have been really against babying students, but I’m just throwing that idea out right now.

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  15. I think it is very easy for us to sit here now and say, “the campus should have shut down”…but Tech is a huge and sprawling campus. I’m not sure that a lock-down would have prevented a tragedy of some sort in this case. It may not have been in Norris Hall, but I’m guessing this guy would have come unhinged somewhere. Would it have been any better if it were in a parking lot or the drill field or a coffee shop?
    I find myself getting slightly annoyed by those taking this tragedy and immediately pinning it to their particular cause (gun control [both sides], domestic violence, whatever.) I don’t know why that is bothering me, but it is getting to me this week.

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  16. I know of at least one instance where the campus counseling services place was infamous for just handing out anti-depressants, rather than making an effort to figure out first what was bothering the college students.
    Even if campus counseling is first-rate, what do you do with people who don’t want a “support system”? If I’m reading the VT shooter right, the last thing he wanted was “help”.

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  17. Oh, I am steamed at the insensitive coverage the news has been broadcasting on VT. Those poor people haven’t even been able to claim the bodies of their lost loved ones and the media jocks are asking stupid, obvious questions or making assumptions that are ill timed and stupid, all for “ratings”. Having siblings that have taught in and administered schools for years, I know what the problems are. Parents who don’t want to be accountable for lazy parenting but run to the lawyers when their brat’s rights are violated because the schools try to discipline the little jerks, have “disabled teachers and schools”. The victims are the kids in the classrooms that are there to learn and that have supervision at home and have parents who work with the school. Those kids that have “sue happy” parents who don’t monitor anything and are never to blame for thier kids behavior, produce troubled kids who know no boundraies or accountability and they grow up and at some point victimize the innocent. I have seen my sister (taught 4th grade) have an entire school year disrupted and ruined by one little brat that threatened the principal in front of the mother, and was told he couldn’t do anything or she’d sue the school system! I wonder how the recent generation of parents got the idea that they could pop out babies, and pursue “their dreams” and let them “raise themselves” was ever acceptable? What has happened at schools and businesses directly relates to the “I and Me Generations” disabling discipline and accountability in our society in the name of “protecting rights” because it has been conveient for them.
    It really ticks me off that the “media is hot to blame Virginia Tech” and blast “gun control” across the waves.
    I think this “Godless, self-centered society” that has emerged is to blame, and it makes me sick. The prisons get filled to the brim, lives are destroyed everyday by sick people who have never learned moral values or accountability, and when it happens on a grand scale, there is the rush to shift the blame on the “band aid mental health agencies and the schools”. Certain members of our society have tied the hands of our institutions by limiting their right to maintain discipline and protect the rights of the innocent. What worked so well for our grandparents and parent’s generation has been tossed out and replaced with a chaotic system that empowers the dysfunctional in our society.

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  19. Hoosier, if “What worked so well for our grandparents and parent’s generation has been tossed out and replaced with a chaotic system that empowers the dysfunctional in our society”, how do you explain something like the Bath school bombings, which happened in 1927?

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  20. Sandy, that is most interesting. I am not saying that bad things have not taken place in every generation, but from what I read about the 1927 bombing, it was perpetrated by a school board member (adult) because of taxes being raised to build the new building.
    I would much rather look back on the last 20 years and have one isolated incident of violence agaist our society than see what has happened over the last several years with children and young adults acting out violently. We need to go back to protecting the rights of our schools and institutions to do their job without fear of legal ramifications, loss of income (job), etc.
    Also, we need to quit shifting the blame on institutions that are not empowered by law to fix the problems in the first place. I know there are no easy answers, but am feeling somewhat disillusioned right now. I would love to live in the kind of world my parents lived in. Of course If I did, I might find it to not be that different. Thanks for the interesting question and link. It does help to exchange thoughts and questions when sorting out ones feelings on an emotionally charged subject like this one.

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  22. AmyP
    From what I read and heard, this guy was a deranged and unhinged psychopath who had completely lost all his moral bearings. He was along the lines of BTK killer, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, etc.
    There are millions of Asian kids (I know one of them, my colleague’s son) who are shy, introvert and difficult to communicate with. However, when they are in their own social circle and talking in their own language, they are open and talkative.
    You would have difficulty in communicating with both psychopaths and Asians, however that does not make them similar.

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  23. motilal,
    Sure. I’m an introvert myself, and I certainly resent it every time some shooter is described as “a bit of a loner.” However, the cultural stuff can’t have helped. Imagine how it feels to be a reserved person in the midst of a sea of extroverts. Add in a bit of mental illness, and it’s a recipe for disaster. There’s no way that someone like that is willingly going to seek “help.”
    By the way, drhelen.blogspot.com has some very good posts up right now and I’ve seen some very good comments in various places about the difficulties of being the relative of a mentally ill person, given that a person has to go pretty far before it is possible to institutionalize them these days.

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  24. Wonder how much of his life this guy spent playing video games? The pictures he left us with remind me of any number of kids I’ve observed in the last few years. I’ve watched steely eyed children of 6 and 8 ‘take out’ in cold blood countless innocent cyber images of human beings–just like you and I. Anybody talk about character training any more?

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  25. I’m not interested in anybody grandstanding off this case to their pet social and political issues, whatever those issues might be. That’s different from asking whether universities in the here and now need support systems, which seems an appropriate question to this particular case, and here again I can only observe that VT had support systems, this person was referred to those support systems, that his professors sent up flags and the authorities responded to those flags to the limit of their legal and institutional ability to do so. This is not a case of institutional absence: it is a case of the limit of what a “support system” can accomplish in the absence of a willingness on the part of an individual to seek support. This guy was not missed by carelessness, or overlooked because of a lack of a system. He was well-known as a person who had problems and posed dangers, but there was nothing more they could do to or for him without crossing some lines that are there for good reason. About the only thing I can see that’s a missed opportunity is that when the justice system instructed the student to seek counseling following his being reported for harassment, they didn’t have any way to follow up on that instruction, or to collate information about him with other institutional actors who were concerned.
    Most schools, both K-12 and universities, have mental health professionals on staff. My daughter’s elementary school has a staff psychologist. Most universities have very significant resources dedicated to counseling students: deans, psychologists, peer counselors. It’s not a question of resources. It’s a question of limits that exist in part to correct abuses in earlier generations. Hoosier, in his nostalgia for the good old days, is forgetting that practices that allowed for relatively casual forms of mandatory or coercive institutionalization led to a lot of people who were either not mentally ill or had mild conditions being locked away for large portions of their lives. As well as allowing for the casual scapegoating of non-conformists of all kinds. As well as not preventing outbreaks of sociopathy and mass violence: it’s not just the Bath bombing. How about some Leopold & Loeb for another example? They had a body count of 1 rather than 33, but the mental space they inhabited seems relatively similar. Was that an institutional failure, that they weren’t detected as sociopaths and tossed in an asylum somewhere before Bobby Franks ended up dead?
    It’s all about trade-offs. You can resource psychological support even more heavily, but it’s not going to change anything until or unless you want to grant institutions and legal systems more extensive forms of authority to coercively detain and treat people who are suspected of the capacity for violence. And doing that is not an obvious fix that comes without a social and philosophical price tag.

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  26. Anybody else got a pet peeve that they’d like to bring up using this incident as an excuse to do so? Television shows? Sexual morality among teenagers? Lack of attendance at church? Rap music? People who underline passages in library books? People who put nearly empty cartons of milk back in the refrigerator? MySpace? YouTube? Sanjaya? Let it all out, why not, everyone else is doing it. Narcissism seems to be our best memorial.

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  27. My daughter is a teacher in the US, she lives with this stuff each day of her working life. This is something she takes with her each day she enters the classroom–“..who will be next? Will it be my school?..” We have to quite blaiming the ‘system’, and start looking into our collective hearts.

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  30. I’m right there with Timothy — this guy was mean, he was fucked up, and he was unwilling to be treated. At that point I put him in the same category as Ted Bundy. It’s not the institution’s fault; it’s not really anyone’s fault per se.
    I live in Chicago, a very anti-gun town, and here Mayor Daley is asking for a public record of who owns a gun. “You can look up who owns a car,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you be able to see who owns a gun?” And this I liked. What if you could be informed when anyone on your block (or in your dorm?) bought a gun? I always worry when my kids go for play dates at a new friend’s, wondering if I should ask if they have a gun in the house. I would LOVE to be able to look that up.

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  32. I agree with Timothy on this. The kid had a profile which too many others fit for it to be useful, the school seems not to have done anything wrong (this could have happened at any institution I’ve inhabited since elementary school), etc. A society awash with guns pretty much guarantees that something like this will happen from time to time, and I even think that his comment about trade-offs is a bit too generous; doing all the things people are calling for will have lots of bad effects and there’s no real reason to suppose they’ll stop this.
    On the other hand, laws which hold gunmakers and gunsellers criminally responsible for the killings done with their guns would slow the gun trade considerably.
    By the way there is a reason why laura was told not to report all the suicide attempts, and it is because reporting does, indeed, spawn copycats. The journalists involved in the current frenzy are willing another event like this.

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  33. I agree that little could have been done to stop this particular incident. No need to spread blame. This guy would have killed people with a butter knife, if he couldn’t get his hands on a gun. Still, it’s times like these when we have that rare opportunity to examine problems and to make some rather useful policy changes. Gun control hasn’t been discussed this widely since Reagan was shot. I am glad that this topic is back on the agenda. So, while all this searching around for answers is a little silly (ie, video games made him do it), it may have some good outcomes.

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  35. You might have all saw the killers video…well what did he mean by “you” in that video…was he talking about a person or all…I watched and started to thing about it…

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  36. Laura,
    “People with severe mental health issue” ALREADY can’t legally buy handguns. The issues are “How severe” and “How do you know”?
    The current standards for severity are high; “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective or have you ever been committed to a mental institution?” is the question on the 4473.
    The bigger problem is “How do you find out?” Criminal convictions are entered into national databases that can be searched (and are when you buy a gun); due to HIPPA and its state analogues, mental health information is not entered in any searcheable national database.

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  37. The guy bought one of the guns over the internet from a Wisconsin gunseller. They had the seller on TV last night saying how shocked he was. SamChevre’s point answers my question about how it was that he managed to pass the check: the sellers just take people at their word. I guess I’m unimpressed by the idea that due care has been taken when you take someone you have never seen at their word when they are buying a gun, and doing so from a distance wen they could perfectly easily have gone somewhere local and bought it face to face. I know that occasional massacres are a small price to pay for enabling people to play with guns. But maybe we could require that sellers have some psychological training and that purchasers have to look them in the eye when answering the questions?

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  38. harry b,
    Psychological training for gun sellers? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a national registry of those with moderate to severe mental problems or anybody who had been stalking, threatening, etc, even if they had not been prosecuted. Maybe the system could be set up so that if two or three people made a petition saying that they felt that John B. Smith should not be allowed to purchase a firearm, a hold would be put on his right to purchase or possess a gun. John B. Smith could appeal, perhaps presenting a psychological evaluation and character references.

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  39. Harry B,
    Where do you get the info that “the guy bought one of the guns over the internet?” The LA Times article says he bought them both locally.
    Also, you can’t buy guns from a dealer online. I suppose private sellers could sell via online classifieds, but a licensed dealer has to have a signed, complete 4473 to sell a gun, and can only sell to residents of certain states. (I can’t–or at least, couldn’t a few years ago–buy a gun in Virginia with a Tennessee ID; only licensed dealers can buy guns and have them shipped across state lines.)

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  40. I got it from a local news report (Wisconsin) which interviewed the Green Bay gun dealer from whom he bought it. The gun dealer said soemthing to the effect of “I can’t believe anyone would do such a thing with one of my guns. I have three children, and I know how terrible it must be”. So the gun dealer certainly believed that he had sold the gun to the killer. I may be misremembering that it was online — but it was certainly by mail, and without any face-to-face interaction.
    Of course, I now realise that just about every news reporter is looking for a local action, and they may have paid an actor to do this (it was the Fox affiliate, after all)!
    I was being flippant about the psychological training, Amy P. Sorry, it was probably in bad taste.

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  41. Found it on CNN.

    Cho bought one of the guns he used in the shootings from an out-of-state dealer, according to Joe Dowdy, the owner of the pawnshop across the street from campus where Cho picked up the Walther P22 pistol on February 9.
    Under federal law, a weapon purchased from an out-of-state dealer must be shipped to an in-state, federally licensed gun dealer, who runs a background check. The buyer must appear in person to pick up the gun, and the dealer receives a small fee — usually between $20 and $40 — for facilitating the pickup.

    This is a pretty typical transaction; technically, the Virginia dealer (the pawnshop) bought the gun from the Wisconsin dealer, and sold it to Cho. Only dealers can buy across state lines in the dealer market. So he did buy it somewhere local and face-to-face–even though it originated in Wisconsin.

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  43. (First – When I saw “11d” and linked from physics-interested Crooked Timber, I was sure you meant the 11 dimensions of string theory. If you care about dimensions, pls. visit http://tyrannogenius.blogspot.com.)
    It is interesting for some perspective to consider that the worst school *killings* were committed by a guy protesting *taxes* back in 1927, and he used bombs and not guns. More importantly, *he blew himself up*! He was one of our first “suicide bombers”! This is something to throw at arrogant righties complaining about Cho’s gripes against rich kids, or that if everyone there had a gun they could have stopped him (our local ex-marine talk show host at WNIS 790 pointed out that many could die in a cross fire from untrained kids at that time, and in fights before such a tragedy), or Cho’s having an ostensibly Islamic-themed “Ismail Ax” tattoo on his arm, etc.
    One of the questionable thoughts coming from that side is that many “chickenhawk” types are complaining that the students should have rushed the gunman etc. I have to wonder at their ability to judge people in such difficult situations, paralleling their spectator’s view of it being no big deal to ask soldiers to serve so long in Iraq under such danger for questionable reasons now (since when is endangering someone longer a form of “support,” and wanting them out of it “not supporting” them?) Yet, they won’t or would not serve. In any case, I still don’t think the general public should give up basic gun rights. We do need to tighten up on what sort of person can get them.
    http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~bauerle/disaster.htm
    On May 18, 1927, 45 people, mostly children, were killed and 58 were injured when disgruntled and demented school board member Andrew Kehoe dynamited the new school building in Bath, Michigan out of revenge over his foreclosed farm due in part to the taxes required to pay for the new school.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
    The Bath School disaster is the name given to not one but three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history. The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.
    …

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  44. Neil B.,
    I think you’re at the wrong blog. This is a place for engaging other people’s best ideas rather than talking to imaginary people in your head. Why don’t you go somewhere else, track down those people you disagree with, and argue with THEM.
    Sorry, Laura!

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  45. We’ve discussed the bolting the classroom issue, and the consensus is that it’s just as likely to get you locked in with a psychologically unstable person as to keep one from getting into your classroom. I think the likelihood of a woman being raped in a locked classroom is surely higher than the locked door keeping out the mass murderer, if only because one event is far more common than the other.
    bj

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  46. But it would isolate the problem, and make it less possible to follow the current shooter script, which is wander-around-large-building-shooting-helpless-people-with-impunity. I’d add a panic button, too.
    There has been, I believe, a drop-off in rape in the US (as well as other crimes). I wonder if part of that isn’t due to the ubiquity of the cell phone. I hear that GPS-enabled cell phones should be widely available very soon, which should make it much easier to respond to 911 calls, as well as making a cell phone a much less attractive item to steal. Even now, you can (and should) set up your cell so that pressing one button connects you to 911 or other security.

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