Conservative Tendencies
by Michael K. Bassham
Lessons from the Virginia Tech Massacre
First reports that morning told us that two people had been shot and killed at dormitory on the campus of Virginia Tech. Only a couple of hours later red banners across the news websites screamed that 20 had been shot and several more wounded on the same campus. The final body count of America’s most deadly rampage by a single gunman was 33, including the deranged murderer himself.
In the hours and days after the final bullet ended the killer’s life, news outlets across the country carried nearly continuous coverage of the story, repeating over and over the same limited set of facts and building unsupported speculations.
Some pundits and parents complained that the Virginia Tech President should have put the campus on “lock down” and ensured the security of the faculty and staff after the first two bodies had been found at about 7:20 a.m. that morning. Such suggestions ignored the impossibility and futility of the situation. The Virginia Tech campus is 2600 acres with 10,000 students living on campus and another 16,000 coming in from off campus. Added to that are the thousands of staff and faculty who work on campus.
Imagine the vast army necessary to prevent anyone from coming on to or leaving from campus while at the same time keeping everyone on campus from changing locations. The logistics, communications and manpower for turning such a large campus into a concentration camp are well beyond what any campus or local municipal police department should be expected to accomplish. Even if through a combination of miraculous luck and prescient preparation heretofore unseen, a lock down had been achieved, it would not have prevented the madman from exacting this toll. Only the names and location of the victims would have been different.
Virginia Tech’s administration had attempted to prevent just this sort of occurrence by declaring the campus a “Gun Free Zone.” In an attempt to make themselves free from guns, they banned firearm possession on campus, even by persons with concealed carry permits. In doing so, they provided an unfortunate case study in the effectiveness of Gun Free Zones. Criminals intent on using firearms in the commission of a crime are not dissuaded by the existence of such zones. Seung-Hui Cho did not say to himself, “I’d like to shoot a bunch of people at school today, but having a gun on campus is against the rules so I won’t.”
Thus, only the law-abiding citizens left their guns behind when they stepped onto the Virginia Tech campus. Violent criminals were provided a safer area of engagement among an unarmed population. No one can guarantee that if students or faculty had been permitted to armed that this bloodshed would have been stopped sooner. But, by forbidding firearm possession on campus, the administration guaranteed that it would not be stopped sooner.
We can learn several lessons from this tragedy. First, we just have to live with the fact that there is no way to be certain that this sort of thing never happens again. We cannot identify and eliminate all deranged individuals in our midst. Despite the media obsession with the warning signs that may or may not have been seen in Cho’s behavior, we can not depend on psychoanalysis to identify and predict future killers.
Psychiatrists are asked on a daily basis whether a particular individual is a danger to themselves or others. The best they can do is rely on their training to evaluate the available information. Ultimately, every one of them will admit that predicting an individual’s future behavior with certainty is impossible. That leaves them with evaluating what is possible or probable. But what can be done with that information? We cannot prophylactically lock up every potential criminal. Even involuntary psychiatric commitments are subject to frequent re-evaluation. We cannot ignore warning signs; we just cannot depend on seeing them correctly.
Second, we cannot depend on the police to show up and shoot the bad guy before he shoots us. According to a recent audit of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, there are no national standards for police response time to emergency calls but five minutes is the bench mark. Whether you are on a sidewalk, your home or a classroom facing a mentally unstable individual with a gun, five minutes is an eternity. More importantly, it is long enough for you to end up robbed, beaten or dead.
Finally, one of the things killers such as Cho or Harris and Klebold of Columbine sought was posthumous fame. They knew that all of the news programs would feature their crimes, along with special graphics and their own theme music, in around-the-clock coverage for days and weeks after their shooting sprees. They knew their names would be known the world over. Before their rampages they prepared videos messages they hoped would receive international attention. They had a goal and knew the media would be their willing servants in achieving it.
Oddly, NBC has a policy of not showing footage of fans that run onto the field at most sporting events. They have that policy so as not to encourage that behavior. Yet, they gladly showed Cho’s tapes, knowing that somewhere out there is a future killer being reminded that he too can achieve this stature by following in Cho’s footsteps. The desire to provide sensational coverage that attracted more viewers that led to more ad revenue fosters an environment that will lead more to act as Cho, Harris and Klebold did.
In this context, we each must take ultimate responsibility for our own safety and we must reject measures that make us less safe.
