Author Archives: L

Rush Blames Virginia Tech Killing on English Dept bulletin board

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I am not making this stuff up. I just heard him on his April 20 show.

Yesterday, he blamed it on critics of Walmart.

Here’s the link to Limbaugh’s website http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_041907/content/01125113.guest.html
“He’s been in the United States for 14 years. Who is it that made this guy hate the rich? Why, there’s only one answer to this! The Democrat Party, the American left and their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media, routinely portray the rich as a bunch of evil, rotten SOBs who are out to steal everybody else’s money. Wal-Mart’s an example. Big Oil is another. This guy is genuinely angry. “

Seriously. This guy is a misunderstood humorist. I wish all you lefties out there would stop criticizing him. Nothing you guys say is ever half as funny as this…………………..

Pulp Drama and Punditry: Virginia Tech, the Media and Violence

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Yesterday, the mainstream media took up the question that we unwashed Vinnies (I hereby proudly adopt Brian Williams’ contemptuous term for unpaid, solo bloggers) have been asking since Day One: What is the responsibility of the authorities (Virginia Tech and the State of Virginia) in this tragic business?

According to some people that question’s off-limits. How can you be so lacking in compassion, someone asked me.

I guess because I am too busy feeling compassion for the poor kids who got blown to bits — and for their families — to waste too much sympathy on guilt-or-angst-or-litigation-induced pangs among bureaucrats. Had Virginia Tech’s bosses been CEO’s, I doubt whether progressives would be so sympathetic. Bottom line is people at the top of organizations are paid a lot of money to take responsibility to see that things like this don’t take place. And so far, I haven’t see anyone stepping down from their posts – which in the old days would have been de rigeur. One would assume that that would be the first act of individuals prone to taking responsibility for their actions.

So, if Williams & Co. are asking a few pointed questions now, more power to them. We hope we are in for some incisive reporting on how psychiatric illness is treated in this country and what went wrong with security at V. Tech.

We wish, meanwhile, that the media had shown such keen interrogative skills when they were swallowing every lie and distortion handed down to them from the government on other matters……like the run-up to the Iraq war or the prolonged cover-up of the government’s torture policies.

Now it remains to be seen whether the rest of the coverage for the V. Tech shooting will be in the time-honored tradition of a respectable fourth estate, which is to confront and question – as vigorously as possible – the pronunciamentos of those in power. Being “nice” is not part of that job description.

Instead, it looks like we are getting more helpings of the usual pulp drama that reigns supreme on the air.

First, we had a focus on the most sensational aspects of the case – not hard to do in an obviously sensational case, filled with ambulances screeching around a lush campus and sex-and-guts-laden manuscripts. Thus, we had NBC’s re-re-replaying of the Cho video that immediately set off – what a surprise – copy-cat threats all over the country. Scores of serial killings and school shootings haven’t taught the networks that that’s what happens when you give too much prime-time air to pathological killers – it brings out all the wannabe’s in the woodwork. I guess they thought airing Cho’s berserker promo was as harmless as parading Sanjaya on American Idol.

Why not just present us with a detailed factual report/analysis of the material instead of flashing the imagery at us? Would that be too..well.. boringly factual?

Then, we had the human drama of it all, wherein seasoned reporters caught hold of traumatized twenty-year olds and ask them such gravitas-laden questions as, How did you feel when you saw your best friend blown to bits? Ah, thank god for the enhanced sensitivity which lets us be outraged, outraged by what some walking-dead tired-old has-been shock-jock says in his morning mumblings, but allows us to close our eyes to public dissections of other people’s pain. Fortunately, there are reports that that line of questioning is going to be turned off for a while.

Next, the whirring sound of axes (pun intended) of all kinds, from Jihad-opia (the manic condition of seeing jihadis everywhere) to Video-phobia and Gun-control-freakery being sharpened up on the news shows, thus Charles Krauthammer on FOX, letting us know that if Cho wasn’t actually a henchman of Osama-bin-what’s-his-name, he’d missed a hell of a chance.

Sound-bytes and sensations.

We can see monstrosity and evil when a psychotic twenty-three year old lashes out in madness and kills thirty-two of us.

Too bad we can’t recognize it when perfectly sane adults calculatedly kill over half-a-million of them.

Virginia Tech – antidepressants and violence?

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I am glad that the media is at last focusing on what, for me, was always at the heart of this story – psychiatric illness. We don’t always recognize it when it’s present, we stigmatize it, we treat it with powerful drugs that we don’t fully understand, and we fail to recognize the side effects.

For a short period I taught at an inner city school for children who are “intensity 5” level – that is, kids with behavioral problems that require a fair level of supervision and restraint.

What I saw first hand is what may have been playing out in the Virginia Tech affair….I say may, because I don’t know right now to what extent Cho’s behavior was influenced – if at all – by drugs….some reports say there were no drugs. I don’t know if they are premature or not.
At the school I saw children between the ages of, say, 6 and 14 plied with a concoction of pills. ostensibly because they had mental problems. Well, in many case, it seemed to me that it was the pill-popping that was the cause of their problems. Ritalin was given routinely to young boys who seemed to be simply bored and restless. Nor was any attention paid to the childrens’ diet, which was very poor – the cheapest white bread, poor-quality grape jelly and ultra sweet soft drinks with coloring agents in them. I was convinced that some of the children were suffering from food addictions and malnutrition, rather than mental illness.

Any signs of hyperactivity, rebelliousness, or lethargy – the normal moods of children – were promptly treated with a range of drugs, from Ritalin to Prozac, this despite the serious side-effects associated with them. Many SSRI drugs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, a class of antidepressants) are linked with side-effects worse than the problems for which they are prescribed, severe facial tics, for one.

I don’t mean that whatever Cho’s medication (if there was any), it wasn’t warranted. We don’t know that his killing rampage was at all induced by mood-altering drugs. We don’t know much of anything about this angle yet.

And, it is the case that Cho behaved very methodically in the days preceding the killing – waiting the requisite period to buy a second gun, preparing the multimedia packet, going to the gym

[– why, I wonder…. to get in physical shape for the day or to look better in the video? Does any one else see the exhibitionistic element here? Too bad the media played into it by replaying that video so many times].

His behavior doesn’t sound obviously like drug-induced mania — to a layman. But again, people can exhibit the effects of drugs – or of mental illness – in very different ways.

So, all sorts of questions need to be raised — and they are being raised, fortunately.

Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post has done a piece about the role of drugs in a numer of shootings: Kip Kinkel in Oregon in 1998 (Prozac); Red Lake Indian Reservation shooter Jeff Weise (Prozac); James Wilson in Greenwood, S. Carolina (anti-depressants); T J Solomon in Conyers, George (Ritalin); Eric Harris at Columbine (Luvox).

According to the the manufacturer of Luvox, 4% of children and youth taking the drug actually develop mania. According to studies, Prozac causes mania in 6% of cases.

I am adding this excerpt which suggests that Cho was not on antidepressants:

While the Associated Press is reporting Cho “may” have been on prescribed antidepressants, according to ABC news:

“Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.”

I am hearing now that Cho suffered from autism.

His relations describe him as being difficult to talk to from childhood, and not communicating even with his parents.

Virginia Tech Killing: Who in the World Is Ismail Ax?

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More ethnological and onomatological ruminations from the ever colorful right, cited in Media Matters:

“Responding to the April 16 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel “speculat[ed]” in an April 16 weblog post that the shooter, who had been identified at that point only as a man of Asian descent, might be a “Paki” Muslim and part of “a coordinated terrorist attack.”

“Paki” is a disparaging term for a person of Pakistani descent…” (That’s a comment from Media Matters)
(AN ASIDE: As someone originally from India, I just want to remark that the subcontinent (of India) alone contains as many different distinct languages and cultures as Europe. The equivalent of Europe is India, not Asia. There is really no equivalent to Asia. Europeans share more in common than Asians do. Just another way in which language confuses us with false equivalences).

Relatedly, Jerry Boyer (did I get this name right?) of National Review was just on Neil Cavuto on FOX, talking about the name, Ismail Ax. He was insisting on its jihadi overtones, claiming that Cho was a smart young man who made literary references in his writing. and therefore, the words he used need to be taken seriously.

Well, I think Cho was capable of literary references, too. ‘McBeef’, for example, is a subtle reference to Macbeth, as is the reference in the media package to people not being able to wash blood off their hands. But that’s precisely the reason I think Ismail is probably a general reference to Ishmael, as a symbol of the outcast and possibly a reference to Moby Dick and probably not a specific reference to a jihadi brotherhood.

It’s my belief that Cho’s fevered…and probably quite creative …imagination scrambled together a number of things he had read, like passages from Moby Dick (remember the reiteration of the name “Dick” in Richard McBeef…a name loaded with his obsession with sodomy).

The protagonist of Melville’s novel, Captain Ahab, has been wounded by the white whale — which becomes a symbol to him of the malice of the universe. To Ahab, the renegade Christian (which is how Cho also saw himself apparently), the whale is the “pasteboard mask” worn by the supreme inscrutable evil (ch. 36). Ahab proposes to strike back at all that is wrong everywhere by striking “through the mask.”

Moby Dick opens with the line, “Call me Ishmael,” one of the most famous in all literature.

Then here is another interesting chapter in the book, which even contains all of Cho’s references to idols, paganism, and axes:

CHAPTER 17

The Ramadan

As Queequeg?s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody?s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;?but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all?Presbyterians and Pagans alike?for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I went to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:-all silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don?t you speak? It’s I-Ishmael.” But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That?s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.

“Queequeg!-Queequeg!”-all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I met?the chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I thought something must the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma’am!-Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!”and with these cries she ran towards the kitchen, I following.

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.

“Wood-house!” cried I, ?which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch something to pry open the door-the axe!-the axe! he’s had a stroke; depend upon it!”and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.

“What’s the matter with you, young man?

“Get the axe! For God?s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!”

******

Here you find all the references to pagans, Christians, and axes – that were floating around in Cho’s deranged mind…he didn’t have to get any of this from jihadis.

But let’s say Cho saw himself as a kind of Captain Ahab, then what’s the physical injury or handicap he suffered? Ahab, remember, lost his leg to Moby Dick.

A poster at this blog has written in suggesting that Cho had a bad speech impediment, which might account for his introversion and silence.

“Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence“, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,“‘ Davids said. {FOX News article}

“We were concerned about him being too quiet and encouraged him to talk more.” said an uncle (Cho’s mother’s younger brother), who requested to be identified only by his last name, Kim. Cho “troubled his parents a lot when he was young because he couldn’t speak well, but was well-behaved,” recalled his grandfather, who was also identified by only his last name Kim in an interview with the Dong-a Ilbo daily. In a separate interview with the Hankyoreh newspaper, Kim, 81, said the relatives were worried that (as a child) Cho might even be mute.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, graduated with Cho from Westfield High School. “I just remember he was a shy kid who didn’t really want to talk to anybody,” she said. “I guess a lot of people felt like maybe there was a language barrier.” But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told her they recalled him getting picked on there. “There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said Wednesday. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.“ {FOX News}

And here is a report that he suffered from autism.

So, if you look at it objectively and without an agenda, there really are lots of possible explanations for Cho’s behavior and language. I am not willing to back any of them at this point, but I am pretty certain that what we know so far doesn’t support the jihadi theory.

Bo Dietl, from the (former) Don Imus show, who was also on the same FOX show today, made this point quite well. He pointed out that he too had been struck by the Muslim associations to the name until he saw the video. But the video itself was so deranged and all over the place – with its references to Christ, hedonists and rich people – that he too came to the conclusion that it did not refer specifically to jihadis.

Meanwhile, this is what is worrying the right: some of the file names in that multimedia package that Cho sent to NBC, from an NBC report:


“all of You”, “am al qaeda”, “anti terror”, “as time appr”, “blood of inno”, “congrad”, “could b victim.”

The NBC report goes on: “The rambling comments are those of an angry young man who felt persecuted, who felt that the world is against him, who felt he was a victim of personal terrorism.”

Of course, there are right-wing bloggers who think that NBC is the one rambling here:

“Felt he was a “victim of personal terrorism?” Are they fookin nuts? Who writes this psychobabble? Whoever it is must be sleeping with Geraldo Rivera,” writes one. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/

I will leave it there for now and just say that in my opinion, these bloggers aren’t too convincing.

What about the identification with Jesus Christ in Cho’s video? How does that square with the jihadi theory? And what about the reference to the Columbine school shooting? Or to hedonists and rich people? The reference to al quaed strikes me as something coming to him from the culture at large to be .taken for its oppositional stance in some general way but not indicating a definite allegiance.

People can legitimately pose theories about an event as sensational as this one – that’s natural. But at some point, they need to provide real evidence for their theories, or they begin to look like they are just making political hay from the moment.

Earlier on, I posted a report about a Korean killing spree (in the post about Cho) to remind us that mass shootings are not unique to the US (some of my foreign friends like to rib me about this….and the post is really for them). Killers can get their inspiration from any number of places, maybe even from several places. Now, it turns out that there’s a report that Cho might have been imitating an award winning South Korean movie he’d watched recently,  OldBoy,  which was ultra-violent and contained grotesque images of revenge and obssession.

We also have news of copy cat killings all over the country – like this one threatened by Jeffery(sic) Thomas Carney, who warns that he is going to go on a spree worse than Virginia Tech.

These copy-cat threats are making a lot of people – rightly – question NBC’s decision to go public with that video, which seems to be what is setting them off.

That tells you how diffiicult it is to lay the blame on any one thing – whether it’s videos… or rap music… or violent games – as an explanation of a particular act of violence. You can see that even news stories can set off deranged, attention- seeking sociopaths (I use the term as a layman).

My point is that deranged people will grasp at anything on which to model their behavior. We can’t really immediately infer that Cho was a jihadi just because some of his behavior resembled some things that jihadis might do.

The fact is the creative mind, even the deranged creative mind, travels very far afield for its imagery and then scrambles it in a way that defies daylight logic. If you’ve ever read about the creation of Coleridge’s “Xanadu,” a poem written in an “opium dream.” you’ll know what I mean. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson once wrote a very lengthy book ( I think it’s called In Search of Xanadu) tracking down Coleridge’s readings for many years before he wrote the poem. He showed how images from all sorts of unrelated reading turned up disguised in the famous poem.

Just something to think about: the immense power of the images around us to shape our thoughts……

Virginia Tech Killing: Profile of Cho Seung-Hui – Details of of What We Know

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Here is a list (with photos) from the Washington Post of the 32 victims:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/vatechshootings/victims/index.html

There were also 17 others injured.

Here is some video footage shot by Martin Arvebro and Carl Nordin, two Swedish students who were visiting the campus:

http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/wb/113323

The Virginia Tech Killer, Cho Seung-Hui – What We Know So Far

Born: January 18, 1984 in Seoul, South Korea

Physical Appearance: Described as skinny and with a short, military-style hair cut. Height – 5-8 or 5-9. according to Karan Grewal, a suite-mate at Virginia Tech, 6 ft. according to some TV news reports.

Family: Father – Cho Seong-tae, 61. Owner of a dry-cleaning business. They lived in a 2 room apartment in S. Korea where they had a book store, which didn’t well. They’d emigrated to find a better life. Well regarded by neighbors, who say he helped clean the snow off their cars. I wonder how at least some members of the family could not have known what was going on with their son. What is their responsibility in all this? I think the schools and universities have a primary culpability as they were in loco parentis, but the family bears its own share of responsibility as well. Were there efforts to treat him, or did family members simply not know?

Just heard a report on Cavuto on FOX at 4:44 that the family has made a statement that they could never have envisioned Cho committing such violence. New reports of statements from the family (grandfather and uncle, among others) that Cho had suffered from autism since childhood and did not communicate well. The mother had never said anything about it to the family but spoke of working very hard and not having much time to communicate with her son.

A pastor at a Korean church in Centerville, Virginia, once advised Cho’s mother to take him to a doctor to check for autism. The mother disagreed; instead she prayed in church for her son to crawl out of his shell.

Status: Emigrated to Detroit, MI, USA in 1992. Permanent Resident, Green Card renewed on October 27, 2003.
Siblings: One sister, Sun Cho, graduated from Princeton, 2004. Now employed as a contractor for the State Department.

High School: Westfield High, Chantilly, VA (graduated 2003), a large school which sent dozens of students to Virginia Tech. 2 of Cho’s victims were from Westfield.

Residence: Truitt Farm Drive, Sully Station II, Centreville, in affluent Fairfax County, Northern Virginia. At Virginia Tech, his dorm room was 2121 Harper Hall, which he shared with roommate, Joseph Aust, a 19 year old engineering student, and also with other suite mates, like Karan Grewal, 21. There were 6 to each suite.

Hobbies: Cho is said to have spent a lot of his free time playing basketball. He watched wrestling on Friday nights, according to Grewal, who also said he played game-shows. But Grewal noted that most of the time, he wrote in English on his computer. Otherwise, he was largely taciturn. Cho is rumored to have played the video game Counter-Strike frequently, but Grewal claimed he did not know about this. (I have linked the reference to a Washington Post article which mentions Cho playing the terrorist-counterterrorist video game, but I am not sure at this point whether this is rumor or fact, despite numerous blog references). Counter-Strike was co-designed by a Virginia Tech student, Jess Cliffe, who graduated in 2003. Here is the para in the article, which seems to have been removed since:

“Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike, a hugely popular online game, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns.”

Here is a link to an article that references research that suggests a link between violent video games and violence.

Here, on the other hand, is a link to those who argue that there is no such connection between violent video games and actual violence.

I have my own thoughts on this, but felt that in fairness to both sides in the debate I should post both arguments.

This is supposedly the South Korean movie that might have incited Cho. But a film maker disputes this.

Taciturnity: Cho would not respond if someone greeted him. Neighbors described him and his family as quiet.Grewal only knew Cho’s name from the dorm list; he said; Cho never told him. He claimed that Cho had started going to the gym recently. Some classmates of Cho say that they hadn’t heard his voice in three years. He was said to constantly whisper. His roommates reported that he acted distant and was very private, eating by himself night after night.

Speech Impediment: Some reports indicate that Cho had (or at one time had had) a bad speech impediment which made it difficult for him to speak and that he may have suffered humiliation on account of it. I have posted on this separately.

Here is a report that Cho suffered from autism.

His family describes him as taciturn from childhood onward, not communicating even with his parents.

Routines: Went to bed early, about 9 PM. Rose early and on the week of the killings rose before dawn. Watched wrestling on TV. Suite-mates say he obsessively downloaded music like Zeppelin and Nirvana on his laptop from the Internet. One of his favorites was the song “Shine,” by Collective Soul, which he played over and over

ODDITY: After the 7: 15 killings, the police burst into the dorm room and handcuffed Grewal (according to Grewal’s comments on TV on April 18).

Religion: Apparently Protestant Christian. References at the end of a lengthy letter (8 pages in some reports, 25 pages in others) found in Cho’s dorm room indicate a disappointment with Christianity and an interest in Buddhism (not sure about this). His writing includes diatribes against Catholicism and Catholic priests, specifically.

ODDITY: The name, Ismail Ax, was marked in red ink on his arm and was the name on the return address on the packet sent to NBC. Appears to be a reference to Judeo-Christian/ Muslim patriarch, Ishmael, who is a son of Abraham and described as breaking idols

ODDITY: Between the 7:15 shooting of two students (the RA, Ryan Clark and 18 yr old freshman, Emily Hilscher, with whom Cho was first rumored to have been obsessed but not it’s said there was no connection; police are checking her email for evidence presently) at Ambler Johnston Hall and the massacre at Norris Hall at around 9: 30, Cho was thought to have either returned to his room,and got more ammunition and the video packet OR just walked directly one mile to the post office and used Express mail to send the package of multiple photos, video and an 1,800-word manifesto-like diatribe addressed to NBC.

The package was time-stamped 9:01 at the VA Post office where it was received, and it reached on the morning April 18, apparently because it had been addressed to Rockefeller Ave. instead of Rockefeller Plaza. The FBI was contacted immediately after it was opened. The video statement inside was laced with profanity, rambled on and repeated, “This did not have to happen.” The packet had the wrong address and ZIP code on it. The photo of Cho inside is said to look like the iconic figure in the movie, The Matrix, with fingers bared through gloves, a vest and ammo jacket. The material was entitled ‘The Killer Speaks’. Cho makes remarks like, “Things like ‘this didn’t have to happen,” “You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

QuickTime video files show Cho talking directly to the camera. He does not name anyone specifically, but he mentions “sin” and “spilling” his blood and talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy. Rails against hedonism and dwells on revenge he seeks. Identifies with the crucified Christ.

The production of the videos is uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand him. But they show a lot of effort, because he not only “took the time to record the videos, but he also broke them down into snippets” that were embedded paragraph by paragraph into the main document, says NBC head, Capus. He appears to have taken them himself using a tripod. He is reported to have rented a hotel room outside the campus to take some of the photos.

He looks like a normal college student in only the first two photos. In the rest, he shows a stern face; in 11, he aims handguns at the camera that are “consistent with what we’ve heard about the guns in this incident,” according to Capus.

Other photographs show Cho holding a knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table.

23-page written statement, 28 video clips and 43 photos (earlier report said 29). The video is supposed to have been taped partly during one night at a room in the Hampton Inn in Christiansburg on April 8.

Legal infractions: Cho had 1 (or 2?) speeding violations given by campus police. One was given on April 7 for driving at 44 mph in a 25-mph zone on campus. His court date was set for May 23. Cho had not been tied to the two campus bomb threats on April 3 and 13, but a note detailing a third bomb threat was found near the bodies in Norris Hall. On Wednesday morning, campus police evacuated Burrus Hall, another school building, based, apparently, on a third bomb warning.

Academics: Senior English major. Author of two very graphically violent plays, Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone.

Behavior in Class:

In an ‘Introduction to British literature’ class in the fall of 2005, 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak but left a question mark where his name should have been written.

Not sure if this is the class of Professor Edward Falco who complained to other faculty members that he was extremely disturbed by Cho’s writing, which other students of his refused to critique because it was so grotesque.

Here is a student (from that same classs, I believe, although I am not certain): “Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.
Lisa Norris, an English instructor, also complained about Cho repeatedly to the associate dean at the time, who said nothing could be done because (despite all the compaints) there were no records. (Why not??? Major problem for university here. How could they have NOT kept records of complaints, even if there was no actual assault? What about the arson?).
He was referred to one- on- one tutoring by the former chairman of Virginia Tech’s English Department (presently the co-director of the creative writing program), Lucinda Roy, in falll 2005, after she took him out of his creative writing class in October with noted poet, Nikki Giovanni. There were repeated complaints about his behavior to the administration by Dr. Roy, who said Cho was also referred to counseling. Also in the fall of 2005, Dr. Roy shared her concerns with Virginia Tech Police about Cho and his writing assignments. “The threats seemed to be underneath the surface,” she said. “They were not explicit, and that was the difficulty the police had.”

She has since added: “I don’t want to be accusatory or blaming other people,” Roy said. “I do just want to say, though, it’s such a shame if people don’t listen very carefully and if the law constricts them so that they can’t do what is best for the student.”

That sounds like an honest admission that the university and law enforcement failed to so right by what looks now like the one person who made persistent efforts to do something about Cho.

Roy said she “was told [by counselors] that you can’t force anybody to go over … so their hands were tied, too,” since he had not made an overt threat to anyone. She said Cho was “arrogant” “obnoxious” insecure.” During the sessions, she said, he wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. “He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she told reporters. She also said she had been so worried about tutoring Cho that she developed a plan with her assistant — if she mentioned the name of a dead professor, the assistant would know to call campus security. Roy told ABC News that Cho seemed “extraordinarily lonely — the loneliest person I have ever met in my life.”Roy also said she did not know when, or what the outcome of his counseling was.

Nikki Giovanni, the creative writing professor, told a cable news channel Wednesday that her students were so unnerved by Cho’s behavior that she had security check on her room and eventually had him taken out of her class. Some students had stopped coming to class, saying Cho was taking photos of their legs and knees from under with his cell phone, she said. Giovanni told the Washington Post that after one instance when Cho recited his poetry in class, only seven out of 70 students showed up for the next meeting because they felt intimidated.

English department chair, Carolyn Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

Stalking: Nov. 27, 2005, Cho contacted a female student through phone calls and in person. The student notified the Virginia Tech Police Department but declined to press charges. Officers spoke with Cho concerning the incident, however, and the investigating officer referred Cho to the university disciplinary system, the Office of Judicial Affairs.

The case apparently never reached a hearing. Edward Spencer, a school vice president, said that it’s not uncommon for a complaint never to reach a full hearing. (Why? Isn’t that a failure?)

On Dec. 12, 2005, Cho instant messaged a second female student, who made a complaint to Virginia Tech Police. Later that day, police received a call from an acquaintance of Cho’s who was concerned that Cho might have been suicidal. Officers again met with Cho and talked with him at length. In both instances there was never any direct threat made.

Neither of the female students who complained about Cho were among the shooting victims, and the police said they did not know if they were in the vicinity of the shootings.
Arson: Cho had reportedly set a fire on campus. I’d like to find out more, as this is said to be a classic behavioral red flag among killers.

Suicide threats: Need to find out more about this. This report came in later on Dec 12 after the second stalking complaint.

Psychological Evaluation: Officers asked Cho to speak to a counselor, which he did voluntarily. Based on interaction with a state-certified counselor, police obtained a temporary detention order from a local Virginia magistrate, Special Justice Paul M. Barnett certifying the finding and checking the box indicating that Cho was “mentally ill” and “presenting an imminent danger to self or others.”

This finding would under federal law have prevented him from purchasing a gun, but it never found its way into the federal data base. I am not clear how the subsequent assessment by the Radford center displaces this early detention.

The magistrate directed the order to any authorized officer of the Virginia Tech police department.
Asked about the court document, the associate vice president for university relations, Larry Hincker said: “That is total news to me.”

He was and sent to a mental health facility 15 miles outside campus, Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center (Psychiatric Hospital in this report) in Radford. There, Psychologist Dr. Roy Crouse found Cho’s “affect flat and his mood depressed (I got this wrong first, assuming that Crouse was the counselor who sent him to the magistrate, this article places him at the Radford center . He was reportedly treated with antidepressants, although it’s not clear whether it was under supervision or not. He was not committed but treated as an outpatient.
Some effects of antidepressants are noted in this Mother Jones piece, which discusses tactics employed by Pfizer to squash the Zoloft defense, used by defendants who had committed violent acts while using antidepressant. Note that Eric Harris (one of the Columbine killers) was on Luvox.


General Demeanor: Sullen, taciturn, negative, isolated. Suite mates said Cho was habitually “blank, flat and withdrawn. Never had any expression.”

Behavior prior to killing: Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except that he had started getting up really early in the morning. On Saturday night the previous week, he went to the gym. He is reported to have spent a week training as a marksman before the killing.

Dr Bernadine Healey stated on Chris Matthews on April 18 that his behavior was that of a psychotic and not merely of a depressed individual. He presented the psychological profile of violent behavior and of the criminally insane.

Neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, on April 18 claimed that Ismail Ax draws inspiration from Jihadi suicide bombers. Note – Krauthammer is a strong supporter of the War on Terror. If there was such an influence, right now it seems to be more in the nature of a vague modeling on what is “in the air” rather than specific imitation.

The return address on the packet was A. Ismail. Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, said that Cho was not a schizophrenic but showed the ability to preplan.

However, another expert contradicted this assessment and called him a paranoid schizophrenic. Unclear how accurate these appraisals were and what they mean.

Other experts have pointed out that the best predictor of violent behavior is not taciturnity or depression but other violent acts.

ODDITY: Police at the time told Roy they couldn’t intervene because no specific threats had been made.

Firearm ownership/skill: Owned multiple guns, including but not limited to 2 semi-automatic handguns.

Along with a $10 box of 50 bullets, a Glock 19 9 mm was purchased for $571 on March 16 ( I saw March 5 somewhere else, March 13 here and the sum of $535 here) from John Markell, owner of Roanoke Firearms, a gun shop on Cove Road in Roanoke, 30 miles from VTech’s Blacksburg campus. Paid for with Cho’s personal credit card.

A Walther P22 was picked up on Feb. 9 from Joe Dowdy at JND Pawnbrokers on Main Street in Blacksburg near the Virginia Tech campus but paid for on a website in Greenbay, Wisconsin for $300 (?) after the mandatory 1 month wait entailed by Virginia law (the purchase through eBay has been denied. An internet company called TGSCOM admits to his having bought it from them. He is said to have practiced at a Roanoke firing range.

Not sure if I have the details if these purchases right. Watch for corrections.

It was absolutely illegal to have a gun on the campus of Virginia Tech. Will post more on this aspect.

ODDITY: Cho went to the trouble of filing off the serial number that is stamped into the weapon in three places: on the slide, on the barrel and on the frame, but meanwhile, the gun receipt from Roanoke Firearms was found in his pocket.

ODDITY: Execution style killing (he chained the doors to Norris Hall where bodies, including his, were found in four classrooms and a hallway. The high kill rate (32 out of 66 people shot) suggests training or expertise. He had purchased large quantity of ammunition, enough for a couple of hundred rounds on his killing spree. By the end of this second attack, 30 student and faculty victims lay dead The exact number of bullets is estimated at “between 175 and 225.To my mind, the expertise Cho showed hasn’t been properly explained and is what is driving a lot of the jihadi rumors. One explanation is that he rehearsed what he did using videos. I am not a marksman myself, so I don’t know how plausible that argument is. Nor do I know whether Counterstrike – the videogame with which some reports say he was obsessed (I can’t find credible confirmation of this), has any such training on it. More on this. I’d like to know more about his friends or mentors in school. New information that he practiced at least for a week before the shooting.
ODDITY: The Austrian-made Glock is popular among competition shooters and a slightly larger version of it is the preferred weapon of U.S. police and sheriff’s departments.

The 50 9-mm practice rounds are known as full metal jacket rounds because they don’t expand on contact like hollow-point rounds. These are sold for target shooting.

The Glock 19 is sold with two magazines, each capable of holding 15 rounds, double-stacked to make a compact clip not much bigger than a harmonica.

ID used for gun purchase: a Virginia driver’s license, checks imprinted with the same address and a U.S. immigration document proving that he was a permanent resident of the U.S.

Fingerprints at the scene were linked to his immigration documents.

Taken from Cho’s room:

The search warrant filed late Tuesday in Montgomery County circuit court said that the items taken from his room included a “folding knife and combination pad lock,” a Compaq computer, various documents and writings from Cho’s desktop computer and two notebooks from a shelf.

ODDITY: South Korea was the scene of one of the world’s deadliest shooting sprees, when police officer Woo Beom-gon went from house to house on an eight-hour overnight rampage in 1982 in the southeastern village of Euiryeong, killing 55 people and wounding 35 others.

ODDITY: The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to lock down the campus. In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The accused gunman, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges. (N. Y. Times – “Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead,” April 16, 2007).

Question: If they could lock down the campus for that, why not for this? Was that because in the Morva incident, the victims were police and security? I hate to ask that question, but I feel compelled to. I do understand that killings of police tend to regarded as more heinous for a variety of reasons, some of which might be defensible, but it goes to show that Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guardians) is always a relevant question.

Question: How was it that Cho’s mental impairment did not show up in the background check when he purchased his weapon. “A judge’s ruling on Cho Seung-Hui’s mental health should have barred him from purchasing the handguns he used in the Virginia Tech massacre, according to federal regulations. But it was unclear Thursday whether anybody had an obligation to inform federal authorities about Cho’s mental status because of loopholes in the law that governs background checks.”

Some key figures (will add to this):

Cho’s Creative Writing Teacher – Nickki Giovanni

Dept. of English chairman in 2005 – Lucinda Roy

Current Dept. of English chairman – Carolyn Rude

Virginia Police Chief – Wendell Flinchum
Superintendent of the Virginia State Police – Col. Steven Flaherty

Christopher Flynn, head of the university’s counseling center. “We have a duty to warn.”

Governor Timothy Kaine of Virginia

Independent review panel (appointed by the governor) Headed by Retired Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. Gerald Massengill

Includes former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge

Gordon Davies, Director for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for 20 years.
Helpful articles:

(Will add to this)

On the weapons purchase: “Where Cho Bought His Deadly Weapon,” Elaine Shannon, Time, Apr. 18, 2007.

On Cho’s behavior and plays: “Virginia shooter left ‘grotesque’ writings,” Tim Reid, The Australian, April 18, 2007.

On Cho’s counseling history: College gunman disturbed teachers, classmates. President comforts Virginia Tech after student kills 32 and himself
MSNBC and NBC, April 17, 2007.

Question Mark’ Killer Quietly Seethed With Rage, FOX, Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Virginia Tech Shooting – Radio Interview

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I will be addressing some of the questions involved in the case tomorrow on Radio CFRU 93.3 FM, www.cfru.ca, (a Canadian radio station) at 8.30 AM EST.The host is very interested in tackling the issues that ought to be at the center:

The treatment of psychiatric illness and the use of anti-depressants

The security failure and to what degree it was linked to legal problems surrounding psychiatric illness and its treatment.

Virginia Tech – How Come They Shut Down the Campus for Morva?

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I have been getting mail telling me that Virginia Tech’s decision not to close off the engineering buildings…or shut down the campus.. was quite understandable and defensible, and that hindsight from journalists is easy.

Here is my response:

If hindsight is easy, why didn’t Virginia Tech benefit from it? Why is it that authorities were able to shut down the campus…and the whole town… when William Morva, a survivalist and alleged murderer, was on the loose in the neighborhood last year, but could do precious little this year?

“The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to lock down the campus. In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The accused gunman, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges.”

(N. Y. Times – “Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead,” April 16, 2007).

Question:

If they could lock down the campus for that, why not for this?

Was that because in the Morva incident, the victims were police and security?

I hate to put it that way, but I feel compelled to. I do understand that the killing of policemen tends to be regarded as more heinous for a variety of reasons, some of which might be defensible, but it goes to show that Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guardians) is always a relevant question.

And to the Virginia Tech Administration groupies who wrote to me, let me point out that I did wait a couple of days and came down on the administration only when I saw the self-indulgent posturing going on.

In the old days, a university president would have stepped down immediately, regardless of who was to blame, simply for having had something like this happen on his watch. But university presidents today are like corporate CEOs – nary a word of self-reproach or self-recrimination. I think that was what angered me….and judging from the rest of my mail, a lot of people.
Still working on that summary…stay tuned.

A defense of guns from a different perspective

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I got this link from Brad Spangler’s anarchist site and thought it was interesting. I am posting it here as a kind of mea culpa directed toward whichever anarchist wrote to me and accused me of “smearing” anarchists.

Well, I am an anarchist, and I don’t think I did anything of the sort. I merely said I thought there was room for a nuanced position on guns. But, I don’t mind genuflecting to fellow anarchists……since we are such a widely misunderstood and embattled lot in this culture.

Mea maxima culpa, fellows.

Meanwhile, I have to say that I think FOX news, which is what I watched on TV for the V Tech story, was very careful not to dwell on Cho’s race in an inflammatory way. So, I am not sure that I think there has been a conflation of anti-immigration and gun-control arguments. After all, Cho had been in the US since the age of 8, even though he had not become a citizen.

As an immigrant myself, I am quite aware of the dangers of fanning the flames of xenophobia on an issue like this, but I also do think that people should be able to discuss crime and immigration in a fair-minded way, without automatically being termed a racist – a term, which by misuse or overuse we ultimately dilute just when we might most need to use it.

Racism is also not a very well defined term in common debate. But that’s something for another post.

Meanwhile, here is the post, which taught me something new – always a good thing.

http://phoenixinsurgent.blogspot.com/2007/04/disarming-robert-williams-re-arming-jim.html

I will be posting a summary of information about the V Tech shooting later today. I think I feel strongly about it, because the debate about it brings together a number of things I have been concerned with…..and wrote about in the Abu Ghraib book... violence and imagery, “the daddy-state,” and the proliferation of police state laws. Besides which, I have a number of thoughts about the dehumanizing effects of modern education….

So, more later.

Virginia Tech – More gun laws or fewer idiots?

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Dan Brown at the Huffington Post writes that there are only two ways to go on the Virginia Tech killings. (“Virginia Tech: Two Potential Paths, April 16) – either citizens will be encouraged to spy on each other and report suspicious behavior – the paranoid response, he calls it, or we tighten up gun laws that allow people to get as many guns as they want whenever they want it.

Talk about false alternatives. Would you really have to have been paranoid to have stopped some one like Cho Seung-Hui?

Some left anarchists (as well as adherents of the old right, like Pat Buchanan) argue that you would just need to have been armed. In 2002 the Appalachian Law School shooting, also in Virginia, resulted in only three deaths because it was stopped by armed students.

Hmm. That’s where ideology minus common sense gets you. Two camps of firearm fundamentalists, who refuse to look reality in the face, but are ready to fire from the hip.
However much we may support the second amendment, do we really want students packing heat in their book bags, as filled with alcohol, drugs and partying as most campuses are today? Why does the-right- to bear-arms-in-classrooms have to be part of a pro-gun position on this? I don’t think it does.

Nor do we have to end up on the other side, tying ourselves up with even more regulation on something that is already as heavily regulated as guns are. If the campus faculty and staff had been doing their jobs, Cho would have in psychiatric care of some kind. And if the campus police had been doing theirs, the campus would been closed after the first shooting, without any further delay. This has nothing to do with gun control. It has to do with ignorance about mental illness and about university officials and security not doing their job.

Look at this young man’s history. The 23 year old English major had written two plays that disturbed his classmates and teachers so much that he had been referred to counseling. What he wrote was described as “morbid and grotesque.”

His plays, Richard McBeef (replete with references to pedophilia, incest and chain saw murder) and Mr. Brownstone (scatological violence, and threats against teachers) – seem to reveal a disturbed sexual identity. Read them. I was a college English teacher once. I have read some pretty lurid stories from my students. But nothing that carried so much obvious personal freight. This is some one I would have definitely put on a watch list.

Poet Nikki Giovanni, one of his professors, had been worried enough to take him out of her class. Students had stopped coming to class because Cho was taking pictures of them on his cell phone camera; some students even speculated that he might commit a campus shooting.
By the way, the name Ismail Ax found marked on Cho’s arm, is probably not a reference to any jihadi association as people might assume – it is very likely a reference to Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his servant woman, Hagar (I used the term bastard erroneously). Ishmael is considered to be the progenitor of the Arabs (I originally wrote Muslims) and is a name often used as a symbol for the orphans, exiles and outcasts of a society (think, “Call me Ishmael” – the opening line of Moby Dick). In the Jewish and Christian tradition, the son whom Jahweh demands that Abraham sacrifice is Isaac; in the Muslim tradition, it is said to be Ishmael. I wonder – and here I am speculating – whether Cho’s references to Ismail and the plot line of Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone, indicate some very troubled feelings about his own father or some other authority figure in his life – whether grounded in reality or in his own disturbed imagination, remains to be seen. Not to color this with any homophobic sentiment – it is the case that Moby Dick also has distinctly homoerotic elements.

Although campus police do not confirm it (and, remember they have every incentive at this point to downplay any prior record of suspicious behavior to minimize their responsibility), student and police sources say that Cho had stalked female students and set fire to a dorm room. These incidents – if they occurred – should have led to a police record. If Cho had had a police record, he never would have been able to purchase a gun, even under current laws. He even had time to post a warning on an online forum: “I’m going to kill people at vtech today”.

But campus police at universities are notorious for covering up or minimizing these sorts of incidents. Why? Because campus crime statistics are bad for enrollment and they reflect poorly on campus police.

Notice, however, that campus security did manage to give Cho 2 tickets for speeding. Doesn’t that figure! Ticketing students for minor traffic offenses, as anyone who’s been on a campus knows, is the favorite pastime of campus police. It makes them money. And keeps them so busy, they don’t have time to bother with the trivial matter of preventing deranged young men from arming themselves to the teeth and taking out the student body.

Now we learn that Cho also left a “disturbing” note in his dorm room which vented his rage at “rich kids,” “deceitful charlatans” and “debauchery,” adding “You caused me to do this.” He is also said to have made a suicide threat and school counselors, reportedly, treated him. Then how did they not know what he was thinking? He was in a creative writing class, churning out pages and pages of this sort of thing – the faculty should have been keeping tabs on him and following up on his counseling. Now the university excuses itself by saying that they could not follow up, because they were afraid of litigation. Oh, that makes sense – the laws prevented them from doing what they ought to have done – and now they want more laws?

As everyone knows, university administrations are big, hamstrung departments that spend most of their energy on bureaucratic nonsense and covering their behinds. And that’s all these excuses are. I will bet you, that right now university lawyers know that Virginia Tech is in big, big trouble and they are getting ready for the mother of all law suits, as Tech parents finally realize that the high price-tag of schooling today doesn’t come with any minimal safety guarantees of their kids’ lives.

A bomb threat note was reportedly found next to Cho’s body and the bodies of some victims, “directed at engineering school department buildings.” That ties Cho directly to the bomb threats that the school received in the three weeks preceding the massacre. With Cho’s history of stalking, arson and violent talk, why had there been no earlier investigation of whether he was connected to the bomb threats? Who did the university think was behind them – the IRA?

We also know that Cho was being treated for depression. Was he taking medication? How come he was still able to buy a gun?

The chairman of the English department who referred him to counseling, did not follow up and find out the result of the session. Why not? What was the sense of referring him to counseling and then not finding out what the counselor had to say about his mental condition?
The university said it misjudged the 7.15 killings, believing that one of the victims was the killer; that’s why they didn’t bother to warn students to keep off the campus. What business had the university to indulge in dangerous and unwarranted speculation about where or who the killer was? Common sense should have told them to quit playing Sherlock Holmes and just warn everyone off campus. What was the downside? Losing one day of classes? Look at what was in balance on the other side – dozens of lives. Shame on anyone who even suggests this was a valid excuse.

Yet, this is how Virginia Tech president Stegerd excuses himself: he says that he believed the shooting at the dorm was a “domestic dispute” and “mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.”

Now, which is it? Did the university think the killer died …or that he fled? Why two contradictory explanations?

Did they first think one thing and then change their minds? Or haven’t they got their excuses straight in time for public consumption?

Steger told Fox’s Geraldo Rivera that “we closed that building immediately, surrounded it with security guards, cordoned off the street, notified all the students in the building.”
He added that police expressed the opinion that the incident was confined to that one building. “

Now, why in the world would the police leap to that conclusion, when they’d had two bomb threats a few weeks earlier, specifically targeting the engineering buildings – not the residence hall, where the 7.15 killings took place. Wouldn’t the normal reaction be to assume that more was to follow at the threatened sites? Shouldn’t they at least have warned students off the engineering buildings?

Though no weapons were found in the dormitory, the police seems to have taken some time to figure out what that meant — that the killer had fled.

Steger claims he spent part of Monday morning “trying to figure out what was going on.” and only learned from radio reports that “there were multiple fatalities, another shooting incident was underway.”

So there you have it – the university only got alarmed after dozens of people were massacred – a paltry two deaths weren’t enough to do it for them! Are these idiotic statements symptoms of complete confusion or are officials covering up here?

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” said Steger. Oh yeah? Why not?

Murderers at large (William Morva, earlier in the school year), arson, stalking, bomb threats, two killings…..that wouldn’t be a reason to suspect any other incident, oh nooooo……..

The first two killings took place at 7.15 in the morning at Ambler Johnston dormitory, but the school’s first email to students went out more than 2 hours later, after the massacre at Norris Hall had taken place. What was the need for this frightful delay that delivered a death sentence to dozens of people?

We don’t need any more gun-control laws. What we need are fewer idiots.

The Noticeable Absence of Hip-Hop at Virginia Tech

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Now that we know that the massacre at Virginia Tech (33 dead and 22 injured) was perpetrated – apparently – by a South Korean male Cho-Seung Hui, rather than a black one, people might at last let up on the hip-hop industry – as the chief and only architect of the pervasive violence of American culture.

Oh, sorry, someone already has. Maybe in deference to the upcoming April 20 anniversary of the Columbine high school shootings – which the popular press inaccurately pinned on the video game, “Doom,” Marilyn Manson and Goth culture – Florida attorney Jack Thompson has already concluded that the electronic game industry is to be blamed.

Now, a good argument can be made that video games – and indeed every piece of electronic entertainment – have an impact on the human psyche qualitatively different from that of the print media – but there is no evidence yet that, whatever role they played at Columbine, they had any part to play here. But God forbid, that the words, “we don’t know” – should ever come out of the mouths of popular pundits.

At Virginia, the killer or one of the killers, seems to have been a young undergraduate. And the rumored motivation seems to have been a thwarted romance. But since there is no political constituency – at least, not yet – for outlawing youthful hormones, we can confidently expect that censors and gun-control advocates will be crawling out of the woodwork soon.

Of course, one wouldn’t object to a nuanced position on either issue. One could, for example, be in favor of gun ownership at large, while deploring the ease with which a student was apparently able to get two handguns and massive quantities of ammunition into a dorm room on a campus, especially, when bomb threats (April 3, and 13) had already been directed against some of the engineering buildings there. In hindsight, the threats might have been the gunman testing the campus security system.

But don’t hold your breath for nuance. Expect, instead, the usual thunderous denunciations on all sides and much righteous posturing from the pols and pundits.

Meanwhile, only half tongue in cheek, may I suggest that there is – so far – as little evidence that video culture caused this tragedy as there is that, say, academic culture did. Less, actually.

After all, with depressing regularity, university campuses do seem to throw up deranged, alienated specimens with mayhem on their minds.

There was Theodore Strelesky, who expressed his disgust with his advisor at Yale’s math department by taking a hammer to the man’s skull and then became an urban legend for his bald refusal to plead insanity in his defense or mouth the usual therapeutic platitudes to get paroled. He argued ,instead, that his advisor had it coming to him, a sentiment not unknown among some PhD candidates. It’s been suggested – again, not entirely facetiously – that a jury of his peers would never have convicted him.

Then there was the physics graduate student passed up for research funding at the University of Iowa who shot and killed three professors, his academic rival, and an administrator, before killing himself. And, most famously, there was the Unabomber, Ted Kasczyinski, a Harvard math PhD by the age of 25, who over 18 years mutilated and killed numbers of innocent people in a doomed protest against society. No hip-hop…or video games.. there – Ted once played the trombone and modeled his wilderness lifestyle on Thoreau. Maybe, we should ban Walden.

Still, although the perpetrator at Blacksburg seems to have been an English major, not an introverted science student, there truly are problems with the American university campus — and I don’t mean the alleged strangle-hold of the left, as cultural conservatives are prone to thinking (rather too facilely)….. only now is not the time for that discussion.

Especially, since we really don’t have enough information about this tragedy.

A more useful line of inquiry is the one probably uppermost in the minds of the families of the victims. Could this have been prevented?

I’ve already mentioned the bomb threats. Additionally, earlier this year, the Blacksburg campus was shut down when an eccentric survivalist, William Morva, wanted for alleged assault and murder, was rumored to have been sighted on the grounds. The rumor was false, but ought to have made university officials sensitive to the potential hazards contained on the 2,600 acre rural campus with more than 25,000 students.

One doesn’t want to rush to judgment about the university’s culpability, but the manner in which campus security responded does provoke thought. For some reason, I think gun control hard-liners are not going to want to pay attention to the surprisingly lackadaisical approach the university took to security.

Here are the emails as they were sent out:

‘A gunman is loose’: E-mails from Virginia Tech

April 16, 2007

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The first 911 call on the Virginia Tech shooting came in at 7:15 a.m. The following are emails that Virginia Tech officials sent to students during the shooting rampage, which left 32 people plus the gunman dead. The misspellings are as they occurred in the messages:

Email sent at 9:26 a.m.:
Subject: Shooting on campus.
A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.

The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case. Contact Virginia Tech Police at 231-6411

Stay attuned to the www.vt.edu. We will post as soon as we have more information.

AD(‘ArticleFlex_1’);

9:15 a.m.: Approximate time of second shooting at Norris Hall, in which 30 people were killed. Second email sent at 9:50 a.m.:
Subject: Please stay put
A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows

Third email sent at 10:17 a.m.:
Subject: All Classes Canceled; Stay where you are
Virginia Tech has canceled all classes. Those on campus are asked to remain where there are, lock their doors and stay away from windows. Persons off campus are asked not to come to campus.

Fourth email sent at 10:53 a.m.:
Subject: Second Shooting Reported; Police have one gunman in custody
In addition to an earlier shooting today in West Ambler Johnston, there has been a multiple shooting with multiple victims in Norris Hall.

Police and EMS are on the scene.

Police have one shooter in custody and as part of routine police procedure, they continue to search for a second shooter.

All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until further notice.

All entrances to campus are closed.

************

More than two hours to send out an email after two people are killed in a dorm? And no immediate cancellation of classes? This, on a state university campus, where the campus police are closely tied to the state police?

Before we get new laws restricting the liberties of ordinary citizens in what is already an incipient police state, maybe we should first make sure that our security forces know how to do their jobs with the laws already on the books.

.