Tweet
Today in the Dallas paper I read possibly the most fair-minded and constructive reflection on the lessons of the Va. Tech shooting, written by a columnist named Jacquielynn Floyd. The official posting of the article is here for credit, but for convenience I've pasted it here. I'm just really impressed by this. I don't think I could've put it better.
Predictably and inevitably, we didn't even know the dead gunman's name before we started assigning blame for his catastrophic act on the Virginia Tech campus.
The usual-suspects list is a long one, and it's still growing: too many guns, too few guns, lousy security, inept administrators, inadequate mental-health laws, school bullies, unprepared bystanders, gory movies, violent video games, signals missed and warnings ignored.
We want to identify mistakes or lapses that can be fixed with new laws or better procedures. To suppose that we can't is too bleak and frightening to contemplate. It leaves us too vulnerable to the blind mayhem of random madness.
Cho Seung-Hui, in the glaring light of retrospect, was positively radioactive with warning signals.
He frightened his own instructors. He was a friendless, frustrated loner; he was preoccupied with guns and violence; he badgered women with unwanted attention.
Time and again, it is suggested, "opportunities were missed" to intervene and, if not repair what was wrong with him, at least to protect the people around him.
But, of all the solutions that have already been proffered (and the countless more certain to come), nothing strikes me as, ultimately, more useful than this: Be a little nicer.
"What can you do? If you see someone who seems unhappy and could use a friend, try and be one."
The person who makes this suggestion is not some noodle-necked, sandal-shod, New Age sensitivity wiener.
It's James Alan Fox, a Massachusetts professor who probably knows as much about high body-count homicides as anybody alive. He has studied the occurrence, the psychology and the methodology of mass and serial killers for decades. He has written several books on the topic. He has served as a consultant to law enforcement.
And it's his extremely informed opinion that, as tempting as it is to find a fix that will identify and prevent mass killers, no such fix exists, short of making politically intolerable sacrifices of our accustomed freedoms.
I caught up with Dr. Fox, who has for obvious reasons been in great demand this week, on his cellphone while he was at a Boston Starbucks drive-through.
"You cannot identify the would-be shooters," he said flatly. "These things always become clearer in the aftermath than they actually were."
Yet the Virginia Tech gunman shared striking similarities with the mass killers that preceded him. If we always seem to hear the same clichés, it's because they're accurate – these people are socially isolated, paranoid loners. They blame other people for their perceived problems. They're desperately, chronically depressed.
But, contrary to one very common cliché, they don't "just snap." Like Mr. Cho, they nurse these grievances for a very long time. They plan their assaults with obsessive care.
Often there's a precipitating incident that sets the plan in motion – a lost job, a romantic breakup – but the idea is already there.
To cite just one proposed solution, a "cooling off" period for a firearms purchase wouldn't apply – the guns are already bought. A semi-automatic weapons ban might reduce the death toll (that's a political fight for another day), but it wouldn't prevent the attacks.
(An aside: Dr. Fox makes the dry observation that we-in-the-media are less than helpful in our obsession with crowning a numerical "worst-ever" killer, since it conceivably can be an incitement to copycats.)
These shooters, with remarkable consistency, are angry, odd, prickly people. They're the easy-to-spot losers in the social pecking order.
So why can't we identify them?
"Because a large number of people fit that profile," Dr. Fox said. "It's a needle in a very big haystack." Most of them – nearly all of them – never hurt anybody.
There's considerable comfort in keeping that fact front and center. Mass murder is profoundly rare – you may not want to hear it, but when you pack your kid off to college, he or she is in a great deal more danger from drunken driving than from the statistically insignificant Mr. Chos of the world.
We'd be less than human, though, if we didn't grasp at solutions.
I'm not naive enough to suppose that being Ned Flanders-nice to the class creep is a blanket vaccination against future bloodshed.
But trying to be a little more civil, a little less cruel and exclusive and hypercompetitive, might make a difference to somebody. At the very least, it might make our society a slightly easier place to be the odd man out.
It's not a magic fix. But then, nothing is.
The usual-suspects list is a long one, and it's still growing: too many guns, too few guns, lousy security, inept administrators, inadequate mental-health laws, school bullies, unprepared bystanders, gory movies, violent video games, signals missed and warnings ignored.
We want to identify mistakes or lapses that can be fixed with new laws or better procedures. To suppose that we can't is too bleak and frightening to contemplate. It leaves us too vulnerable to the blind mayhem of random madness.
Cho Seung-Hui, in the glaring light of retrospect, was positively radioactive with warning signals.
He frightened his own instructors. He was a friendless, frustrated loner; he was preoccupied with guns and violence; he badgered women with unwanted attention.
Time and again, it is suggested, "opportunities were missed" to intervene and, if not repair what was wrong with him, at least to protect the people around him.
But, of all the solutions that have already been proffered (and the countless more certain to come), nothing strikes me as, ultimately, more useful than this: Be a little nicer.
"What can you do? If you see someone who seems unhappy and could use a friend, try and be one."
The person who makes this suggestion is not some noodle-necked, sandal-shod, New Age sensitivity wiener.
It's James Alan Fox, a Massachusetts professor who probably knows as much about high body-count homicides as anybody alive. He has studied the occurrence, the psychology and the methodology of mass and serial killers for decades. He has written several books on the topic. He has served as a consultant to law enforcement.
And it's his extremely informed opinion that, as tempting as it is to find a fix that will identify and prevent mass killers, no such fix exists, short of making politically intolerable sacrifices of our accustomed freedoms.
I caught up with Dr. Fox, who has for obvious reasons been in great demand this week, on his cellphone while he was at a Boston Starbucks drive-through.
"You cannot identify the would-be shooters," he said flatly. "These things always become clearer in the aftermath than they actually were."
Yet the Virginia Tech gunman shared striking similarities with the mass killers that preceded him. If we always seem to hear the same clichés, it's because they're accurate – these people are socially isolated, paranoid loners. They blame other people for their perceived problems. They're desperately, chronically depressed.
But, contrary to one very common cliché, they don't "just snap." Like Mr. Cho, they nurse these grievances for a very long time. They plan their assaults with obsessive care.
Often there's a precipitating incident that sets the plan in motion – a lost job, a romantic breakup – but the idea is already there.
To cite just one proposed solution, a "cooling off" period for a firearms purchase wouldn't apply – the guns are already bought. A semi-automatic weapons ban might reduce the death toll (that's a political fight for another day), but it wouldn't prevent the attacks.
(An aside: Dr. Fox makes the dry observation that we-in-the-media are less than helpful in our obsession with crowning a numerical "worst-ever" killer, since it conceivably can be an incitement to copycats.)
These shooters, with remarkable consistency, are angry, odd, prickly people. They're the easy-to-spot losers in the social pecking order.
So why can't we identify them?
"Because a large number of people fit that profile," Dr. Fox said. "It's a needle in a very big haystack." Most of them – nearly all of them – never hurt anybody.
There's considerable comfort in keeping that fact front and center. Mass murder is profoundly rare – you may not want to hear it, but when you pack your kid off to college, he or she is in a great deal more danger from drunken driving than from the statistically insignificant Mr. Chos of the world.
We'd be less than human, though, if we didn't grasp at solutions.
I'm not naive enough to suppose that being Ned Flanders-nice to the class creep is a blanket vaccination against future bloodshed.
But trying to be a little more civil, a little less cruel and exclusive and hypercompetitive, might make a difference to somebody. At the very least, it might make our society a slightly easier place to be the odd man out.
It's not a magic fix. But then, nothing is.
At least, that's my take on it.
Comment