1. Do you think we are too far out on the limb nowadays in becoming so obsessed with the rights of the perpetrators'? If only someone would have sounded the "alarm bell", this entire masaccre could have been avoided.

2. This play is not the only possible alert. Teachers and others who came in contact with Seung Cho have expressed on national television their personal, scary experiences with this student. Do you think we should rethink this "hands off" policy?



Cited below is the Virginia perpetrator's play he submitted at Virginia Tech.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0417071vtech1.html

Based on the play alone... I wouldn't say that the play alone meant that something should be done. I mean, I can think of another play involving a stepfather who kills the father in order to get the wife and is, therefore, killed by the son. I think it's called... ummm... Hamlet.

Certainly. This boy was actually confined in an institution. His English teacher was very concerned about his violent essays. He was a stalker. How mush warning is required before someone in authority wakes up??? This is the same as Columbine – when teachers were asked later why no one noticed these kids they all said they HAD but the school administration would not let them act.




No doubt about it. Anyone with the list of scary behavior this boy had should have been either kept in custody or expelled and barred from the campus

Well, hindsight is 20/20, of course. So, a couple of things to consider here.

1. Yes he was committed to an institution for a few days. Actually, self committed. No one placed him there involuntarily. Had he been committed by the legal or medical institutions in some form or another, that would have triggered information going to the Federal data-base used to determine eligibility for handgun ownership, when he applied to purchase a gun. Since he admitted himself, no such notation was required. This is something that needs to be changed.

2. His teacher was concerned about violent essays and a play. Ok, now what? Lots of folks write violent stuff, without going on a shooting binge. Hell, by the standard you appear to be looking for here, nearly every screen writer and director in Hollywood should be denied a gun, and maybe even locked up for life.

3. He was a stalker. Again - Ok, now what? The police were called in two separate instances, but the so called "victims" never pressed charges. They both said that they just wanted the "creepy" emails or text messages to stop. So police contacted him, told him to knock it off, and at least with regard to the two women, he did stop. But so far as I've read, police or the two women did not contact school administrators with regard to the incidents.

Here's where the "hindsight"part comes in. We know all of this now, and can put the complete package together. Prior to this all we had were disparate parts. Some people had problems with this guy's attitude and actions, but no one had the entire picture, particularly school administrators, who may have been able to have him expelled prior to this incident.

Which brings us to the next point:



Sorry, Ted, but you can't keep some one in custody if they have not already committed a crime, or if the victims decline to press charges, as in the case of the "stalking" emails.

Second, lets assume that all of the above information had been made available to the school administrators, and they had done what you suggest - expell and bar him from the campus. Do you really think that would have prevented this? I don't. In fact, that may well have exacerbated and accelerated the condition.

There are not nearly enough police officers on any campus, or indeed in any city, to prevent this kind of thing from happening. With 25 to 30 thousand students in attendance, it's likely that they'd never notice his arrival on school grounds, even had he been barred from the campus. After all, most colleges have no "main gate" to go through, no systematic way of preventing folks from gaining access to just about any building they want.

It's easy to say what should have been done after all the pieces of the puzzle are known. Not so easy to put them all together before the tragedy unfolds.

1. Do you think we are too far out on the limb nowadays in becoming so obsessed with the rights of the perpetrators'? If only someone would have sounded the "alarm bell", this entire masaccre could have been avoided.

I hate to break it to you, but the "perpetrator" had no previous really serious record (no actual violent or gun violations), so technically wasn't a "perpetrator" of anything except bad writing.

While I think of it, this would-be street-kid hommage to Hamlet (which this guy had clearly never read - maybe he skimmed through some cheaters' notes, but the layout alone of his "play" clearly indicate the only dramatic texts he's ever even seen are screenplays) is just dross, and if he wasn't failing English then at least one person on campus should have been sacked, and it wasn't the people in some sort of authority that let this guy slip through their fingers, it was his English tutor.

Aside from some creative swearing, which might conceivably have got him a job as a contributor for the Viz Comic Profanisaurus (WARNING - rude language throughout), it's not only badly written and impractically laid out, it wouldn't be any fun to watch at any level - the only point of theatre.

2. This play is not the only possible alert. Teachers and others who came in contact with Seung Cho have expressed on national television their personal, scary experiences with this student. Do you think we should rethink this "hands off" policy?

If people's experiences alone of being scared by someone are indicative of the necessity for police or government intervention to restrict their activity, Wes Craven and Marlyn Manson are going to be on death row.

He also had brushes with the mental health sector, campus counsellor, etc, which might have given indication that there was trouble ahead.

More importantly, there doesn't seem to be any way that all the little pieces of the puzzle, which on their own don't mean very much (English students write bad plays with themes of violence and sexuality; students get depressed and possibly suicidal; students buy guns; etc.) - can be brought together without an obvious necessity to watch everyone's activity in the minutest detail all the time, in case someone might go off the rails.

And I'm not sure anyone thinks such a Big Brother-ish (I'm thinking of Orwell's 1984, not the tawdry TV reality show) intrusion would be pragmatically worth the chance of avoiding a future massacre or two, let alone the infringements on freedom that would come with it.

The truth is, it's really easy after an event like this to trawl through the villain's life history and pick out the things that supposedly marked him or her out as a mass killer/murderer/child abuser/what-have-you. Not least because you know what you are looked for - you have confirmation bias.

It's a lot harder to synthesise a valid prediction of how someone may or may not behave in the future based on lots of tiny bits of evidence from all aspects of their life, when NOBODY knows EVERYTHING about ANYBODY until after they're dead. Not even then.

That said, some kind of competence/sanity testing before the issuing of gun licences might not be a bad idea, but we're already discussing that elsewhere.

All I an saying is that the “weight” of the events including his writings, stalking, etc should have been recorded by the administration and used to evaluate the “risk” of this student doing some harm. I would bet that had they done this and then followed up with some interviews with classmates and all his professors that could have either gotten him more help or expelled him. And when a person is expelled you would expect that whatever security the school had would be on the lookout for his return. To say we must “keep” potentially dangerous people because expelling them “could” push them over the edge is ludicrous.

If the complete history of events was known by the school administration and police he might not have been able to buy the guns.

IMO the issue here is security not guns. If we cannot identify potential risks like this boy then we are certain to suffer the consequences of his actions.

As pointed out in the WSJ today – the IM traffic about this was heavy once the shooting started. If we cannot even warn people of the possibility a man with a gun is on campus we have no security there at all. Total incompetence all the way around. There are numerous systems available that allow for a recorded message or warning to be broadcast to hundreds of phones/computers at once. Five minuets after shooting one every teacher on campus should have known what happened.

Except, Ted, that the "weight" of events were not all reported to the administration, even if they had the means to record such for each and every student on campus.

The police apparently never reported the so-called "stalking" emails to the administration. The hospital where he had himslef admitted for a period of time was, as I understand it, off-campus. It would have in fact, been illegal to release that information to school authorities.


First, expecting 40 police officers to be able to spot one student-aged person on an open campus of 30,000 is ridiculous. And even if you're talking about this one isolated case, it's akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. Now, let's compound it - if this is the standard you want for everyone with "problems", the department's going to have to triple it's size, 2/3's of which will do nothing but attempt to keep an eye out for somebody returning to campus that shouldn't be there. And there's still no guarantee they'll spot someone.

Second, I never said that the school should have kept him in, because expelling him could push them over the edge. It's your framing of this argument that's ludicrous. All I said was, with what we know about this kid now, that his return perhaps even sooner to do what he did would be a likely expected result.


Now, this I don't disagree with at all. I don't know how you get around the hospital notifying the campus PD or administrators without violating the HIPPA laws, but there is still some room for improvement. For example, making even self-admittance to a mental facility a reportable action to the Federal gun check data base, and not just involuntary admittances.

Second, if the police make even the kind of stalking that he did (by email and text message) a crime that does not require the "victim" to press charges, and if these kinds of offenses are listed in the database, it may help to prevent these folks from buying guns "legally" at least. Although my brother, a retired officer, said that being a student, if he knows so much as one person who buys marijuana or drugs on a semi-regular basis, that person would likely be able to provide them with access to illegal weapons.


And again, hindsight is 20/20.

From what I've read and seen on TV, not sending something out immediately after the first incident, by the school was reasonable under the circumstances. Here's why.

The first incident was very limited in scope. One student, and an RA who attempted to stop Cho. Apparently, nobody else saw Cho at this location. When police arrived, they were told by dorm mates of the victim, that her boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend) lived off-campus, and was known to own handguns. Police went to that location, found the boyfriend, and a number of weapons, and were in the process of interrogating this "person of interest". It was while this person was being interrogated, that the second shootings began.

Look at it from the school's perspective for a minute.

First, they have no witnesses to the first set of shootings. Police report to them that they have someone off campus who knew one of the victims, and who has the means to have carried out the crime, and that they are currently questioning him.

Second, to my knowledge anyway, I haven't heard of a "rampage" type shooter like this taking a 2 hour break between shootings. Once they start, they usually don't stop until they either kill themselves, or are caught or killed by police.

I think it reasonable to assume, and for the school to assume, that this was an isolated incident, with no further repercussions to the student body, outside the obvious notifications once the school had positively identified the student, and notified next of kin, etc.

Now, they may have been able to send out a notification of the incident, but really, you'd shut down the entire school over something that appears to have been over the instant it happened?

Now, of course, in light of Cho's new twist to doing things, circumstances for making notification will have to change. But prior to this coming to light? I don't see any other University in the country doing anything different than V-Tech did on Monday.

The administration should have had a good deal of info on this boy including the concerns of his English teacher. This should have been put into a “threat matrix” for the campus that would allow for better decisions after the first event (see below)




I disagree. The first incident was the violet death by gun of two students and regardless of the fact that a “dorm mate” thought it might be an off campus boyfriend – they had no idea where this boy (even if it was him) was currently located. The fact that he lived off campus does not mean he was definitely gone. As a bare minimum the campus should have gone to lockdown (if they even had this) until the man was located, arrested or cleared. IMO, the administration, hearing of 2 violent deaths on campus and no one in custody should have shut the school for the day – esp. since it was early enough to do this.


The courts will decide culpability I guess but I see it as a total failure of the police and campus administration.

What if they couldn't locate him, or after locating him, he turned out to not be the person (as was the case). Sometimes it takes weeks or months to find the person responsible...so they should just cancel the entire semester for the entire school? How would we know he might not go to another school? So we should shut down the entire University system everywhere? Wait...we don't know that he wouldn't go to any other place, either. So, I guess the only practical thing to do is to place the entire United States in house arrest every time a murder is committed? The point is that the solutions to these scenarios aren't that simple, and while it's very easy to use hindsight now, the people making the decisions don't have that luxury.

Well lets be realistic. This would be done for the day – by which time they would have verified the off campus “boyfriend” was not the man and probably have concluded who the right man was. This would also have prevented the availability of “targets” for the day while the facts and evidence were worked out.

So you feel that if someone walks into a dorm and shoots a couple of people and then disappears in the area, the rest of the campus should not know? The perpetrator with a gun was missing in the area and was in fact on campus getting his ammo together. No one could be sure that even if he was not a student that he had left the campus. As a minimum, if I was a student or teacher I would want to know this and I might decide to (as a student) leave or as a teacher, cancel a class.

Nonsense, Ted, nonsense.

What did the school have? a couple of complaints by a couple of teachers of a student who wouldn't take off his sunglasses and hat in class, making him somewhat intimidating, and some writings of a violent nature. Quick, while we're at it, lets expell every kid that fits this description. And of course, Quentin Tarantino is never speaking at a university film class ever again.


Again, nonsense. The police had somebody they considered a possible suspect - the dorm student's ex-boyfriend. They had located him, he was being interrogated by police at the police station, they had confiscated all of his weapons to test them.

As for locking down the campus until the police actually facilitated an arrest or cleared their "person of interest, I'll simply note that the ex-boyfriend wasn't officially cleared until Wednesday morning. You're going to lock down the school for two whole days, should nothing else have happened? I don't think so. And how long does this lock-down last for, if the initial suspect is cleared, and they don't have anyone else in custody yet? 3 days? 4? A couple of weeks?

Again, Ted, you are going strictly off of hindsight, here. You can't do that. You have to look at the situation with what the administrators had to go on at the time they made the decision, and in the same kind of time-frame.

A shooting occured. Regrettable, but it happens. A half hour later, police report that they may have a possible suspect. He has a prior relationship to one of the students that was killed. He's been located at his apartment. He has the means to have committed the crime.

And yet you'd still attempt to lock down the entire school? Ridiculous.


You can see it anyway you want. Doesn't make it any more valid. I think that the school and police did everything they could reasonably have been expected to do, given the information they had. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this. Big surprise, huh?

As to actually locking down a campus of this size, however, I can also tell you that it's damned-near impossible. 30,000 students, teachers and adminisrators, most of whom are in the process of commuting to the school when the first shootings took place? And a school that in and of itself is an integral part of the city it's in? Good luck with that. No fences, no controlled entrances or streets. No practical way to prevent traffic of any kind from coming and going as it pleases, from any number of roadways. There's just no realistic way to do this.

1. Do you think we are too far out on the limb nowadays in becoming so obsessed with the rights of the perpetrators'? If only someone would have sounded the "alarm bell", this entire masaccre could have been avoided.

I think with the behavioral and disruptive problems during class, the stalking of female classmates, the surreptitious taking pictures of female students lower bodies, the commitment to a mental institution 2 YEARS AGO, the fact that many people who thought he was suicidal and reached out to him only to be rebuffed, in addition to the violent poems and plays (and cringe-worthy bad writing at that), he should have been expelled from the university. His pattern of behavior was disturbing enough to at least remove him from the midst of the faculty and other students.

2. This play is not the only possible alert. Teachers and others who came in contact with Seung Cho have expressed on national television their personal, scary experiences with this student. Do you think we should rethink this "hands off" policy?

What “hands off” policy? I don’t understand what you’re getting at here.

Come on please – a shooting happened and the only response is to look for a boy who “may” be involved” While the rest of the campus is totally ignorant of what happened. They knew in 2 hours this guys guns were not involved. At that point I am sure the dopes were saying to themselves – maybe we were dead wrong and now we have no idea where the man with the gun is. Of course this is exactly when the shooting started. And no one on campus had any warning. Real dumb – and this is not about hindsight but procedure.

It my 12 year olds grammar school if someone come in and even yells or fights with staff all doors get locked immediately – same in local high schools.

No kid of mine will ever go to a school where someone can murder 2 people with a gun and no one knows but a few police – who have no clue where the perpetrator is.

Yes the school had these few things- but they had more than that..


He was declared mentally ill and a danger to himself and others, which turned out to be very true. But the next day he walked out of the hospital, although declared dangerous and something was wrong with him. That's enough evidence for the school to think over if having him on campus was the best thing.

Actually, the school didn't have that at all. Take a look at the story again:


He was ordered to undergo an evaluation by a judge. While he was deemed a danger to himslef, he was not deemed a danger to others. And after a more detailed evaluation the next day, he apparently wasn't deemed to be enough of a threat to himself even, that required enforced inpatient care, as he was released to an outpatient program.

Further, since he was evaluated by a private medical facility, they cannot, by law, disclose a medical diagnosis or treatment recommendations to anyone else, without the express written authorization of the patient involved. In other words, even if they had wanted to notify the school, they couldn't.

As I've said earlier, there may be changes needed in the HIPPA laws that would allow this kind of reporting to certain authorities. But prior to this shooting, nobody at the hospital was going to risk a fine and/or huge civil lawsuit for releasing a patient's medical records to a third party, unbidden.

And again, it's easy to see what went wrong after the fact. What we don't know is how difficult it is to try and keep track of one person with no real criminal record, in what's essentially a small city, with everything else a college administrative staff has to deal with on a daily basis.

You are aware, of course, that you live in a society where such a thing happens almost everyday? I don't see them locking down cities when someone gets murdered...don't even let everyone know at all. Happens everyday in any major city, and less frequently but with the same non-response in every other city in the United States. So, I'm assuming neither you nor your kids will ever venture out into the streets anywhere, anytime, then? Should we all sue our city governments for exposing us to so much unnecessary violence? Or, if they did shut the city down everyday, should we sue them for unnecessarily impeding our freedom and ability to do our business, see our friends, etc? What's the difference?

Alas the world of easy answers.

Stalking is the only tangible reason to expel him.

Being committed to a mental institution and bizarre writings should not qualify, even if they had a violent tendency.

As for the "stalkings":

Special report

Hopefully we don't expel students who are suicidal, as if their problems weren't enough already.

Besides, expulsion is an inadequate deterrent for ravenous killers. Would expelling Cho a week before his now legendary rampage saved faculty and student lives? Doubtful. The expulsion might even motivate a rampage to some degree.

We must be careful when we preempt potential killers. Factors that are perfectly law abiding cannot be used as validation for chastising. We should not enforce by law normality.