Circling Thoughts

 I didn’t intend to write any more about this, but I can’t seem to write about anything else.

The information is still being gathered and sorted out, but the story behind yesterday’s massacre is beginning to take shape. Cho Seung-Hui – a citizen of South Korea, NOT China as was previously reported – and a senior in the English department at Virginia Tech, was the killer. It appears to have been premeditated, carefully planned out; they believe he made bomb threats in the past few weeks to test the university’s security measures, and the serial numbers on his guns had been filed off. He seems to have made considerable (but futile) effort to leave an unidentifiable body when he killed himself.

(UPDATE: New reports seem to indicate that he was born in South Korea but had lived in the U.S. for over a decade. They’re saying that his creative writing was so disturbing that his professors had recommended him for counseling, and that he had a history of messed up behavior – ranting and raving about things, setting fires, stalking, etc..)

In the past several months there’s been a lot of talk about the journalistic integrity of bloggers and das internetz in general. I don’t really have an opinion on that, but man did they ever blow it yesterday. The blogging community discovered the blog of an Asian student at Virginia Tech whose LJ and Xanga were filled with photographs of himself posing with his impressive collection of firearms. His posts stopped shortly before the killings occurred, and the internet drew a conclusion. Too bad it was a completely erroneous conclusion – and too bad they dealt with their “discovery” by leaving insults, hate speech, and death threats on his blog. Good job, internets.

The way things are looking, this all centers around a failed romantic relationship. Couldn’t just leave it at a murder-suicide, though – no, this fella had to take out a few dozen innocent people with him.

I read a comment on a newsblog that said “enough arm the teachers, put a stop to this” [lack of punctuation c/o the original writer]. Kind of a strange sentiment in a way. Are we talking requiring teachers to carry weapons? What about training? Just because I’m a teacher doesn’t mean I know how to operate a handgun. (That’s a ridiculous sentence.) And are people unaware of the statistics on home invasion deaths? I know it’s different, but still – you’re most likely to be killed by your own gun. Teachers as air marshals. What a thought.

It makes you wonder, though. If you were in a building and someone came through, guns blazing, what would you do? If you were in a position where you could jump the shooter and possibly restrain him, but would seriously risk being killed yourself, would you have the courage? Would courage even factor into it, or would it be a matter of adrenaline?

And of course there’s all the speculation about whether the university took the correct course of action after the first slayings. It kind of makes me sick, to be frank. Perhaps this would be a very different news story if the university had done something different, but at a time like this is it appropriate to pile on the accusations? I’m sure that VA Tech is more of a residential school than Boise State, but I can’t help but think of my own school and what would happen if they shut down the campus in the middle of the day because of something like this. Sure, there wouldn’t be students in the classrooms at that point – they’d all be milling around outside the buildings, grousing about the change in routine, in clear line of danger instead of (relatively) safe behind closed doors. I don’t know that VA Tech did things the right way, but it seems like we ought to have the common decency to hold off a few days before attacking their decisions.

I was reading blogs and whatnot yesterday, and came across the term “media vultures” several times. At first, I was kind of rolling my eyes – for better or worse, we’re a society that cares deeply about this sort of thing, and we crave more information – our morbid curiosity is boundless. From what I could see online (being at work, I wasn’t near a television) the media seemed to be dealing with the crisis fairly respectfully. Then I went to this blog and read the comments. The vultures were literally circling this guy, and it was disgusting…

(EDIT: Speaking of which… some of the political cartoons cropping up on this topic are beautiful and moving. This one may fall in that category, artistically, but it also – to me, anyway – seems to be pretty horrible and unnecessary. Am I overreacting?)

Another blog I read today said not to be scared of events like yesterday’s, that statistically we have to expect stuff like this to happen, particularly in a culture like ours that is desensitized to violence. I disagree. I don’t know how people can be surprised that things like this happen, but I can’t imagine not being scared of it – and I’ll tell you why. For whatever reason, there are people out there who are in some way wrong. Maybe they’ve been deeply hurt, maybe they were brought up wrong, maybe they’ve suffered abuse (from parents, from peers, from whomever), maybe they’re insane, maybe they’re evil. I don’t know that we can know what causes it, but it takes people like these: 

and turns them into the sort of people who walk into a school and kill children and innocents. And we know, from interviews and evidence, that there is an element of competition for many of these people. They know what the “record” is, and they want to break it. They want to be the most infamous, the milestone. Yesterday, Cho Seung-Hui beat the record. He raised the bar. And soon – perhaps right this very moment – some person who has gone wrong is going to look at the events of yesterday and think to himself that he can do worse.

That’s why this is scary. We can’t know where this is going to happen next. It might be a college, it might be a grade school, it might be a shopping mall. It could be an adult doing the killing, or it could be a six-year-old (it’s happened). It could be four years from now or, more likely (historically speaking) it could be in the next four months. All we know is that it is going to happen, and I don’t care if that is statistical, it’s still scary.