What I find to be so striking about Virginia Tech even more so than Columbine even though what a I am about to say could also apply to Columbine is that with Cho we have 3 parties. School shootings are a real problem and they are not going to go away anytime soon. Their is so much we could have done. The killers never "snap" as reported by the media. There is a long sordid path that leads up to the shootings and we allow it to happen. The way I see it their are three main parties in the Virginia Tech massacre.
Party 1 is Cho a man who got a pretty messed up lot in life and as a result was unable to cope with reality and developed a victim complex. I would say that in the end the majority of the slights against him were all inside his head. He could have fought this and became something although maybe not the writer he dreamed of being but he could have been happy someday. In the final years if his life he became kind of a prick who alienated himself purposley because others had done so to him prior. I don't think you can say that someone like this was evil. Everyone wants to but when i see Cho I see a fearfull young man afraid of not only others but himself and who he was.
Party 2 is the people arround him. His family, roomates, aquantinces and teachers. People like his roomates obviousilly did not know how to react to his odd behaivior but others chose to just ignore him. They can say that "how can you reach out to someone who won't let you" and that is true for an extent but they recognized he needed help but they didn't realize how to do it and in the end most people that did care lost interest after getting frustrated with his conduct. However some of the actions and this attempt by several campus attendees such as some of his door mates teachers and the girls he tried to reach out to border on insensitive and unethical.
His roomates searched his room yet found no weapons. They seemed to want to blacklist him because of his behavior.
Party 3 Is the random people he killed victims of his insecurity and desire to become something he knew he could never really be. A strong dark anti hero. To anyone who reads this and is thinking about commiting a massacre go look at each picture of the victims and read their names outloud to yourself. Read the comments from their loved ones. Do you really think they deserved to die? These people that never even knew Cho?
Cho was a victim of his enviorment and of himself. If someone could have reached out to him in the right way this could have been avoided. In the end their is no one to blame but Cho for the murder. In the months prior to the massacre I don't blame the students for feeling creeped out by Cho but their conduct was not in the right place. In the end the biggest threat to Cho was himself but its our fault for not giving him the tools to deal with his insecurities and in the end outside of drastic intervention I think he was too far gone down the spiral to make the first step for help himself. I don't think he has Autism nor the Aspergers varient. The Selective Mutism diagnoses works far better in explaining his actions. Cho reatreated into a world where he could be the alter ego he created. He was immature and was not able to cope with reality.
The massacre revealed alot more about ourselves rather than him. We turned him into a pop villian and assigned coverage of the even its own theme song. Premature speculation and political grandstanding was done before the investigation was even started. Then as the months went by we found new sources of entertainment and the massacre was a distant memory to those of use glued to our TV sets that day. We have made no real progress in stopping these events we took several steps back. We further renforced the idea of the "Dangerous Misfit" and newspapers with no clinical expertise published warning signs and a step by step method to identfy threats that has no real merit or value in predicting who will commit such an act. We pretended to care about the 33 people that died but when the high wore off from America's latest "tragedy" we promply pushed it to the back of our minds and continue to make the same exact mistakes. Their will be more Cho's in the future as their will be More Eric Harris's & Dylan Klebolds.
The Virginia Tech Shooting was a cluster of multiple failures by many different people including but not limited to the Seung Hui Cho and the people around him. This tragedy could have been easily prevented and 33 people including the shooter could have been happy. In some alternate universe hell they could have even been freinds. You cannot call Cho evil. Until the shootings he did not anything really evil and he really saw himself against a uncaring world. There is NO excuse for him and his cowardly cop out that took the lives of 33 innocent people but we must realize 33 victims were the result of the shooting but Cho was a victim of the shooting as well.
Many people think that we should forget that such people exist and just write them off as there is no way to know why they do these things. This is cowards advice. This is a complex problem that cannot be solved with after schoo special lessons but a painfull problem we must all work together to solve.
Cho was a angry hatefull lonely immature insecure socially inept man who ruined not only the lives of the 33 people he killed but many more in the after effects of the tragedy. He should not be gloryfied or excused but he should not be forgotten. Eventuall he should be forgiven. This was not a person who was evil but just lost. He truley was a question mark.
The question mark now is what will we do to prevent such events in the future?
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