mamallama, posts by tag: tragedy - LiveJournal

I am so sick of all this talk about why teachers didn't spot warning signs in the VA Tech shooter, Cho, long before his rampage on Monday. Pretty much everyone who ever came into contact with Cho has come forward and shared anecdotes about shocking things he had said and done, and nothing was ever done about it. Hello, people!!! Remember Columbine? Remember Timothy McVey? Remember every serial killer ever caught? The common thread among all these mass-killers is that there were "warning signs" all along, and nobody could ever do anything about it.

And somehow, it always comes back to teachers. "Didn't their teachers see something wrong a long time ago? Couldn't they have done something about it before it got out of hand?"

The truth is, Cho's teacher DID try to get help for him. Numerous red flags were raised throughout the last few years, but what could have been done about it? You can't force a person to get help. He was already in counseling, voluntarily ... lots of good that did! A teacher pulled him out of a class and taught him one-on-one because he couldn't function in the general population. What more could have been done? Should they have kicked him out of school? Maybe, but he hadn't broken any laws, so how would that hold up if he decided to fight it? Should they have locked him up and thrown away the key when he started writing violent, gory plays? Sure, but he hadn't committed any real crime, so that wouldn't work out, either. When students complained about his disturbing behavior, how could that have been handled? Being disturbing isn't exactly grounds for expulsion. Even his more disturbing behavior -- mild stalking, taking unwanted photographs of people, thinly-veiled threats -- none of those actions are grounds for extreme action against Cho. Never mind that a clear escalation of hostility could be seen in his behavior. Escalation isn't illegal, either.

The scary fact of the matter is that everyone has a right to be as hateful and sick as they can be until they commit a crime, and even then, most likely they'll get out with a slap on the wrist and an order to attend anger management counseling. Then they'll go out and hurt someone, or possibly shoot up everyone on campus/at work/in some public place, and everyone will whine about why they weren't stopped years ago when they wrote something scary in school.

But what if you could get someone locked up just because they raised a red flag somewhere before they snapped? Stephen King would definitely have been locked up. Edgar Allen Poe? Yes. Shakespeare? Certainly. The list could go on for pages. I know I've had several students who could commit this level of atrocity and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. I passed their journals and sketchbooks on to the administration and they were referred to the Student Assistance Team (or school counselor, before I came to this school.) Several have been in the news recently for violent acts, including a shooting in which another person was killed. Did I stop a potential killer by raising red flags? Obviously not. Did I do everything in my power to raise that flag and wave it wildly so nobody could ignore it? I know I did. Did it make any difference? Absolutely not. Did all of my "red flag students" go on to become violent offenders? Not even a fourth of them did. In some cases, I think that writing/drawing violent things in journals actually kept them from committing violent acts in person because it gave them a place to vent.

How do you judge who's psychotic and who's just creative and needs to express themselves? And who gets to make that decision? And would we be happier in a society where someone actually did have that power?

I should probably say something intelligent and poignant about the shooting at Virginia Tech today, especially since it was the most deadly school shooting ever (and most deadly random mowing-down of human life with guns within the US borders that comes to my mind at all.) The thing is, I can't think of anything to say. I mean, what do you say? Some kid wakes up one day and decides to kill a bunch of people, and I'm supposed to say something that makes that make sense?

Actually, he didn't just wake up and decide to do that -- he had to have spent some time planning that and making it happen, which makes it even more difficult to discuss. Why? Why would someone do something like that? What happened to this kid to make him despise humankind so much as to take a gun on a college campus and blow people away like little metal ducks in a carnival game?

This is an act so heinous that I can't even begin to wrap my head around it to talk about it, much less understand what happened enough to point a finger or work myself into a good rant. All I can do is feel incredible sadness for those poor students -- some of them probably finishing up their first semester away from home -- and for the families of those who had to experience this firsthand. It terrifies me to think that this sort of thing is happening often enough that the news channels have snazzy graphics and theme music already made up with titles like "GUNS IN SCHOOLS" and "SCHOOL SHOOTING" with little crosshairs in the O's.

Everytime this happens, especially in a school, I want to run home and hug my kids and never let them out of the house again. This is the first time I have ever really had to explain something like this to them. They were too young to get 9/11, and too sheltered to hear about some of the other tragedies our nation has faced. The Iraq war is really far away. This happened just one state over. Isaac and Joe are kind of freaked out, and I wish I could say to them, "it's just TV. It wasn't real." But I can't. They know better, anyway.