VT Shooting

I don’t remember there being security cameras on campus, but then, they’re not exactly meant to be noticed if they’re setup right.  :wink:

I understand that 10,000 students can not be monitered. However, when one student sticks out to be disturbing out of the 10,000 shouldn’t something be allowed to be done? Report them for counseling or something, but the teachers aren’t allowed to do that, which I think is something that needs to be changed.

He was reported for counseling, they just don’t have the authority to force him to counseling.

Even if they did, he’d already been seen by psychiatrists (institutionalized, even?  I don’t remember).  He was clever enough to claim not to be suicidal/homicidal, and I think those are the only 2 reasons you’re allowed to keep someone institutionalized.  (Regardless, he was obviously deemed “fairly OK” and sent back to school.)  Sociopaths are often smart enough to seem relatively “normal”.

I think one of the problems with these situations is simple. How many times have any of us said ‘Oh, I could kill him/her/them.’ It’s normal to feel frustrated, it’s normal to consider lashing out at the source. It’s not normal to actually do it. That line between word and deed, is not always visible. It’s easy to look at this situation with hindsight and say ‘Wow, they should have predicted this’. It’s not so easy for somebody on the ground who has to distinguish between the kid who writes Goth poetry to express himself and the one who is actually going to snap.

By the way, I read something indicating that Cho may have had a speech defect…maybe what he needed was a better way to communicate, a better language than violence…

Yeah, well apparently his writtings were really creepy to say the least and descript. The english teacher (?) was so afraid that he might hurt somebody that she came up with a code word for the class to get out of the class room in case there was trouble. To me, that is just a red flag. But like Shanti said if he was institutionalized said he wasn’t suicidal then they can’t keep him there, which makes no sense, i guess it shows that they’re in their right mind? I don’t know, i guess the shootings are so rare and seem to be random that its hard to predict that anybody would be capable of such manslaughter. Its just awful.

Well, think about someone like Edgar Allan Poe.  His writings are “disturbing” (they give me nightmares, anyway), and he wrote about people dying and such (in the first person sometimes, too), and yet he never killed anyone (except possibly as a soldier).  He falls under the category of “mad genius”, probably, but hardly deserved to be institutionalized for it.  (We’ll ignore the fact that he was suicidal and thus could/should’ve been institutionalized on that account. :wink:  And the fact that, in the 19th century, you were likely to be institutionalized just by friends/family claiming you were insane.)

So, as Teri Lawrence said, it’s a very fine line to walk between containing the (few) legitimate psychos who are a danger to themselves/others, and not imprisoning the people who are “just” angry/depressed/what-have-you.

I don’t live in America, but when I heard about it, I felt horrible! Shanthi, that must have been pretty hard on you :frowning: I’m so sad now!