The tragedy at Virginia Tech

Like most of the world, I was shocked by the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in my home state. I hadn't blogged about it because the carnage left me speechless. What was going through Seung-Hui Cho's mind? How could somebody be so consumed by hate? What other factors, if any, contributed to the deaths of 32 innocent victims?

I don't have answers to those questions -- even though, as a reporter and editor, I've helped covered a lot of mass violence. At the Austin American-Statesman, I helped coordinate coverage of "the Luby's massacre" in Killeen, Texas in 1991: In that incident, George Hennard drove his pickup truck into a Luby's Cafeteria, shot and killed 23 people, wounded 20 others and then committed suicide. The Luby's massacre was the deadliest criminal mass shooting in U.S. history until the April 16 slaughter at Virginia Tech.

Writing can be therapeutic and often enlightening. So I invited some of the journalism students whom I've met in Ukraine to write commentary on the Virginia Tech shootings. Maria Kirsanova, a journalism student at Mariupol State University of Humanities, took me up on the offer.

Today, the Commonwealth Times -- the student newspaper at VCU -- printed Maria's guest column. Here's the link. The URL is unwieldy, so I've "snipped" it to "http://snipurl.com/kirsanova" if you want to share it.

The top of Maria's column:

The shootings at Virginia Tech are appalling and make one wonder: Why is that kind of tragedy not uncommon in the U.S.?

The media tend to focus on the availability of military-style weapons. However, as far as I am concerned, a mentally disturbed teenager bent on committing murder will find a way to do it, whether a legal gun is easily available or not. ...

Maria then goes on to discuss other factors that contribute to a violent society, and she ends with this controversial statement:

Трудно сказать точно, что так сильно влияет на поведение учащихся в Соединенных Штатах: телевидение, компьютеры, доступное оружие или что-то ещё. Да и вряд ли от этого на сто процентов застрахованы люди в других странах. Ещё труднее сказать, что может сделать правительство Америки, чтобы предотвратить такие трагедии в будущем. Да и стоит ли удивляться, что подростки решают свои проблемы при помощи оружия, когда своих внешнеполитических целей правительство страны достигает путем войн?

Oh, you don't read Russian? Well, check out the English translation in the CT!

For the record, I think Maria's assertion that intolerance contributed to Cho's rampage is incomplete. I'd argue that school officials were too tolerant with his anti-social behavior. This was a "student" who signed the class rolls with a question mark, repeatedly harassed other students, stopped coming to class ... but it seems that no one intervened in a forceful way. Perhaps privacy laws and other rules prevented such intervention.

At VCU, I also have seen instances of university officials' tolerating conduct that goes beyond rude and verges on criminal. Last semester, a student sent me an e-mail that began with the F-word, ended with "P.S. I hate you" and in between pleaded for a higher grade (probably not the most effective appeal in history). The student also contacted the VCU president's office, triggering a flurry of messages from administrators who asked me to try to "help" the young man. (The administrators dropped that request when I alerted them to the student's profanity-laced e-mail and explained that there was no justification for raising the student's grade. But, so far as I could tell, VCU never took action against the student; the student certainly never apologized.)

I'm not suggesting that the VCU student described above will go beserk as Cho did. But as some point, maybe we need to recognize these behaviors as "cries for help" -- or at least cries to protect society.

I don't mean for any of this discussion to excuse Cho or to detract from his culpability. He alone bears responsibility for the mass murders at Virginia Tech. But maybe we can find ways to prevent future Chos.