The Virginia Tech massacre, guns and pop sociology.

[thedrifter]

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Cho's Madness
The Virginia Tech massacre, guns and pop sociology.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

The mass murder at Virginia Tech is the kind of traumatic event that unleashes a torrent of pop sociology and national psychoanalysis, so allow us to weigh in with a more fundamental explanation: There are evil and psychotic people in this world willing to do great harm to others if they aren't stopped. The dilemma in a free society is how to stop them.

Cho Seung-Hui seems to fit the profile of a social misfit who snapped. Like many other mass killers, the 23-year-old is being described by acquaintances as a "loner," given to bursts of hostility and other antisocial behavior. We will learn more in the coming days, but our guess is that those who knew him will conclude that they saw the warning signs.

The calculation of his murder spree also suggests some deeper evil at work--if we can use that word in liberal company. Cho used chain locks to bar students from escaping, lined some up against a wall, and emptied his clips with brutal resolve. "There wasn't a shooting victim that didn't have less than three bullet wounds in them," one of the doctors on the scene told CNN. This was a malevolent soul.

How can a society that wants to maintain its own individual freedoms stop such a man? The reflexive answer in some quarters, especially overseas, is to blame any killing on America's "lax" guns laws. Reading a summary of European editorials yesterday, we couldn't help but wonder if they all got the same New York Times memo, so uniform was their cultural disdain and their demand for new gun restrictions.

Yet Virginia Tech had banned guns on campus, using a provision in Virginia law allowing universities to become exceptions to the state's concealed carry pistol permits. Virginia is also known for its strict enforcement of gun violations, having implemented a program known as Project Exile that has imposed stiffer penalties and expedited gun cases.

In any case, there is no connection between recent mass murder events and gun restrictions. As Quebec economist Pierre Lemieux noted yesterday, "Mass killings were rare when guns were easily available, while they have been increasing as guns have become more controlled." The 1996 murders in the Scottish town of Dunblane--17 killed--occurred despite far more restrictive gun laws than America's.

You could more persuasively argue, as David Kopel does in The Wall Street Journal today, that the presence of more guns on campus might have stopped Cho sooner. But as a general rule we are not among those who think college students, of all people, should be advised to add guns to the books in their backpacks.

Any gun control crusade is doomed to fail anyway in a country like the U.S. with some 200 million weapons already in private hands. While New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg seems ready to stump for gun restrictions, we doubt many Democrats will join him. They did so after Columbine in 1999, only to lose the 2000 election in part because of the cultural backlash in America's rural and hunting counties. We'll concede that this political reality has changed only when New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton decide once again to pick up the gun control cause.

A better response than gun control would be to restore some of the cultural taboos that once served as restraints on antisocial behavior. These columns long ago noted the collapse of such social and moral restraints in a widely debated editorial called "No Guardrails." Instead, after Columbine, there was a rush to blame violent videogames. But videogames or other larger media influences don't inspire mass murder when there are countervailing restraints and values instilled by families, teachers, coaches and pastors. Two generations ago, colleges felt an obligation to act in loco parentis. Today, the concept is considered as archaic as the Latin--and would probably inspire a lawsuit.

However, even those benevolent influences--were it possible to restore them--might not have made a difference in the case of Cho Seung-Hui, whose madness can't be explained by reason.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

No policy can outwit the Grim Reaper
By David Frum
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/04/2007

A quiet spring day on a rural campus - then suddenly shots, shouting, chaos, death. Our minds cannot absorb such fathomless violence. We need to impose order on it, find explanations.

And so, within minutes of the mass murder at Virginia Tech University, a great conversation erupted as Americans - and the rest of the world - tried to make sense of the senseless.

It was a classic American crime: an angry loner, enraged by the failure of a love affair, turns his anger on the world around him. Think of John Muhammad, the Washington sniper of 2001; John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan; Charles Whitman, the clocktower killer at the University of Texas, whose 1966 rampage was until this week the deadliest campus crime in US history.
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Such stories are too random and terrifying for the mind to absorb. So, instead, we attempt to squeeze these crimes into our pre-existing categories and use them to advance our ideological agendas and thereby apportion blame. In the hours since Monday's attacks, three such categories have been presented to the American public.

The one probably most familiar to British audiences attributes killings such as those at Virginia Tech to the easy availability of firearms in the US. There is some truth in this. The murderer, Cho Seung-Hui, appears to have legally purchased a Glock 9mm automatic pistol shortly before the attack. Had it been more difficult to buy such a weapon, perhaps his crime could have been prevented - or at least rendered less lethal.

There is also an element of plausibility to the second explanation - the feminist one. Even in countries where guns are difficult to obtain, male sexual jealousy does daily, deadly damage. The British Home Office contends that domestic violence kills more young women worldwide than war, cancer and motor vehicle accidents.

Then there's the third and final explanation - immigration. Seung-Hui was a Korean-born resident alien. Aliens increasingly drive the US crime problem: about one third of California's prison population is first- or second-generation immigrant, as is 29 per cent of the federal prison population. Salvadoran and other Central American gangs commit the worst violence in many American cities. The finger of blame is easily pointed.

So which shall we blame? Guns? The male psyche? Immigration? None of the above? Or some of all of the above?

Typically, it's the first - America's gun culture - that most readily captures the rest of the world's imagination. After the Concordia University massacre in 1992, Canada adopted a strong new gun-control law. Yet Americans have been far more reluctant to respond to gun violence with legislation. Bill Clinton proposed only a few small refinements to US gun laws after the 1999 Columbine massacre.

America last tightened its gun laws in 1993 - and many Democrats blame that decision for their defeat in the 1994 congressional elections. Some blamed Clinton's 1999 initiatives for helping to tip Arkansas and Tennessee to George W Bush in 2000, and the party has eschewed the gun issue ever since.

This was perhaps because lower-income males were identified as a must-win demographic - and guns therefore an issue that cost more votes than it gained. In 2004, John Kerry posed for the cameras in duck-hunting gear. In 2006, Democrats recruited as a star senatorial candidate former Secretary of the Navy James Webb, a lifelong gun enthusiast.

So will the Democrats revert to gun control as an issue for 2008?

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama can afford to do anything that might alienate the downmarket males who returned to the Democrats in 2006. And hopes of holding the Senate will turn on the party's success in retaking southern and western seats lost in 2002. The Democrats hope to gain Senate seats in Colorado, New Hampshire and Oregon in 2008 - and gun owners form an important share of the swing vote in all three. On the other hand, Democratic support for new gun controls could risk seats in Arkansas and South Dakota. Not much debate to be found there, then.

Nor will we find much appetite to launch national discussions about male sexual possessiveness or immigrant crime. Why blame all immigrants for the crimes of one, people on the Left will sensibly ask. Good point, the Right will respond - so why blame all men for the crimes of one?

But this welcome scepticism leads inevitably to the most sceptical of all questions: why are we blaming anything or anyone for this crime other than the criminal himself?

Crime can be reduced. Since 1990, the number of homicides in the US has been cut from almost 25,000 a year to about 15,000. Schools have launched programmes to predict potentially violent students. Some require transparent backpacks, and others have instituted sophisticated psychological profiling. All will pounce on any student joke about copy-catting Columbine. Meanwhile, many local police departments have attempted to modernise their tactics.

America will try to learn lessons from this latest tragedy too. But there is no escaping the hardest lesson: that death lies waiting around the corner for us all. No public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact - or the equally fearful obligation to walk with courage under the burden of the reality of evil.
David Frum was a speechwriter for George W Bush, 2001-2002.

Ellie