Grasping for Answers

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 11:26 AM

When I saw the English teacher describe how Cho's bizarre and violent writing caused her to alert the authorities at Virginia Tech, my knee-jerk reaction was to wonder why the hell nobody did anything.

If you look at the stories, they are clearly the work of a deeply disturbed young man. The warning signs were there! Why wasn't this killer stopped in his tracks?

But that, of course, is probably unrealistic. Writing violent stories is not against the law--indeed, some authors and moviemakers have made a fortune doing just that. If Cho wasn't making specific threats, there was no basis to arrest him, or even expel him. And you can't force someone to go to counseling.

What's happening here is that we're all grasping for some answer that might have prevented this horrible massacre, if only to comfort ourselves that we might be able to stop it from happening again. If only he hadn't been able to buy the guns, if only the police had locked down the campus, and on and on. The sad truth is, while we can and should take precautions, there is no magic solution. When terrorists hijack airplanes, we can beef up security to the point that you can't bring on a large tube of toothpaste. But college campuses are sprawling, open places, and as such, very difficult to defend against a lone maniac.

This Chicago Tribune editorial makes the point nicely:

"No sooner had the wail of sirens replaced the crackle of gunshots Monday than many of us took refuge in a familiar and reflexive question: Who's to blame for not preventing this?

"Maybe we could pin this on Virginia Tech administrators who didn't lock down their sprawling campus after the first two killings in a dormitory. Or maybe we could pin what unfolded on campus police officers who didn't intercept a vicious killer as he prowled toward a classroom building.

"Such are our attempts to apply hindsight, to tame and control a frightful horror. Charles Steger, the university president, offered an instructive point Tuesday during an interview on ABC's 'Good Morning America.' Why hadn't school officials locked down their campus early on? 'If you're talking about locking it down, what is it you're going to lock down?' Steger said. 'It's like closing a city. It doesn't happen simultaneously.'

"Should Steger and his officers have done something different to stop a killer so clever, so calculating that he used chains to ensnare his prey? That is a question they'll ask themselves years after the rest of us have moved on. The likely if unsatisfying answer: Not really."

Here is a chilling posting by AOL employee Ian MacFarlane about being in the creative writing class:

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap."

Now that we know the gunman's name is Cho, the Asian American Journalists Association has weighed in with this admonition: "AAJA urges all media to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason."

What? Everything about this crazed killer is germane. Is this group afraid that the news coverage will imply that all South Koreans are potential serial killers? I just don't get it.

In the first serious blunder of the coverage, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed reported yesterday:

"Sneed hears authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people in a rampage on the Virginia Tech campus was a Chinese national who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa.

"The 25-year-old man being investigated for the deadliest college carnage in U.S. history reportedly arrived in San Francisco on a United Airlines flight on Aug. 7, 2006, on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said."

I suppose it might be true that authorities were chasing that tip, but did that warrant publishing it?

On the other hand, the Chicago Tribune scored a real scoop at 12:39 p.m. yesterday by reporting that Cho had left a note railing against "rich kids" and "debauchery."

What has really been growing in volume on the airwaves is the parade of profilers and ex-cops and FBI types questioning the school's decision not to attempt to lock down the campus between the initial shooting and the massacre that followed two hours later.

Television also latched onto the inevitable gun-control debate, as predicted in this space yesterday. It's all over the Web as well.

Jane Smiley on the Huffington Post:

"What I would like is for the gun-toting right wing to admit that there is a price we pay, that senseless accidental deaths and traumas are a national cost and that it's not so clear that it's worth it, but hey, we pay it anyway because so many guns are in the hands of so many people that there would never be any getting rid of them. I would like the right wing to admit that guns are not 'good' and that the right to bear arms is not an absolute virtue and that the deaths in the US caused by guns are at least as problematic, philosophically, as abortion. But I'm not holding my breath."

Red State chastises a Virginia Democrat for raising the issue:

"Less than 24 hours after the deadliest shooting spree in U.S. history, liberal Rep. Jim Moran took to the airwaves to launch a political attack against President Bush, congressional Republicans and the National Rifle Association.

"Appearing on the 'Jack Diamond Morning Show' on 107.3 FM in Northern Virginia, Moran suggested Republicans were to blame for Monday's tragedy at Virginia Tech, which left 33 dead and injured another 30. The anti-gun congressman said Republican policies made it easy for the shooter to obtain a gun.

"When the show's host tried to suggest that the gunman may have been hellbent on killing regardless of the law, Moran turned the conversation back to the GOP, complaining that the United States needs a national registry to track all firearms purchases and more stringent gun-control laws. Moran then blamed Bush and Republicans in Congress for opposing such measures at the behest of the NRA."

At the Right Wing Nuthouse, Rick Moran predicts the media will jump on the bandwagon:

"Despite the fact we don't live in a perfect world and there's no sign of one emerging any time soon, we can count on the idiots in Congress and the media to start the political posturing, dying to make speeches and write columns telling us about how wrong the opposition is and how this shooting proves this or that about America, or Americans with guns, or violence in America, or how our schools are screwed up, or even blame the victims for not dodging the bullet that killed them.

"What this shooting proves is that there are many who will use horrible tragedy to make political hay." Bull Dog Pundit targets the NYT:

"Not even 24 hours have passed since a crazed lunatic slaughtered at least 30 people, and left more than that wounded and The New York Times . . . has penned a lead editorial telling us what is necessary to help solve the problem - the need for stricter gun control laws . . .

"In one sentence they say is that it is 'premature to draw too many lessons', yet they then go on to say that stronger laws are needed over 'lethal weapons', even though nothing is known about how he got them."

Right or wrong, aren't editorial pages supposed to offer opinions?

The Nation's John Nichols unloads on the NRA:

"Do not doubt that the National Rifle Association is preparing its 'this-had-nothing-to-do-with-guns' press release. The group has no compunctions about living up to its reputation for being beyond shame -- or education -- when it comes to peddling its spin on days when it would be better to simply remain silent. But the NRA will not be alone in responding in a self-serving manner. Many groups on all sides of issues related to guns and violence in America will be busy making their points, just as many in the media will look for one dimensional 'explanations' . . .

"The notion that banning those weapons will end the violence has become a tougher sell. Shocking and horrible rampages occur in countries with stricter gun laws than the U.S. No, they do not happen as frequently. But they do happen."

At National Review, Jack Dunphy questions the wisdom of all those law-enforcement talking heads:

"Despite [the] scarcity of information, the cable news channels were positively teeming all Monday afternoon and evening with all manner of self-proclaimed experts who must have been elbowing each other all the way to the green rooms at the various television studios in New York and Atlanta. Most of them seemed to have been excavated from the lower recesses of newsroom Rolodexes as desperate producers tried to fill their air time.

"On Fox News, for example, a woman named Pat Brown, who presents herself as some kind of profiler-for-hire, lambasted the police and school authorities for not closing down the campus after the first shooting was reported. Former NYPD detective Bo Dietl followed her and offered the same criticism. This theme seemed to gain currency as the day progressed, even reaching the point that the parents of one Virginia Tech student demanded that the school's president and police chief be fired. 'My God, if someone shoots somebody there should be an immediate lockdown of the campus,' said John Shourds, whose daughter Alexandra is a freshman (she was unhurt in the attack). 'They totally blew it,' he said. 'The president blew it, campus police blew it.'

"Rubbish. Let us suppose that the police had indeed shut down the school at 7:30 A.M., just after the first shooting. The Virginia Tech campus has scores of buildings spread across 2,600 acres, and there are 26,000 students enrolled there. There aren't enough police officers in the entire state of Virginia to seal the campus off completely. But even if it had been shut down, then what? How long does it stay shut down, and how do you know when it's safe to open it up? Do you strip search every last person on campus before letting them leave? And if the suspect is contained within one of the buildings, what's to prevent him from killing the people he's contained with?"

Andrew Sullivan ties the shootings to another big story:

"Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.

"This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country?"

American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta illuminates an angle that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere:

"Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society . . .

"The idea that you don't warn people that a killer is on the loose just because you think he killed his girlfriend seems like 1950s thinking."

Mary Katharine Ham chided the Republicans late Monday over their lack of online response:

"To be clear, I'm not saying that Obama, Hillary, and Edwards care any more about the suffering on the ground in Blacksburg, Va. today than Mitt, McCain, and Rudy.

"But to look at their websites, you wouldn't know a thing about what Mitt, McCain, and Rudy think about this national tragedy. It's doesn't mean they're terrible, selfish men, as I'm sure the Left will infer. On the contrary, I'm sure all of their thoughts and prayers are with the kids of Blacksburg, just as all of ours are. But the fact is that the Big Six in the presidential race are huge, public figures who are required, for better or worse, to have a public position on every issue, ever."

Let's close with a lighter item, courtesy of the Politico:

"John Edwards' campaign for president spent $400 on February 20, and another $400 on March 7, at a top Beverly Hills men's stylist, Torrenueva Hair Designs."

I bet that place just raised its prices.