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Other Voices
It's easy to see, now that 33 people are dead, that someone should have stepped in and done something. But in the moment, what do you do? What can you possibly do that wasn't done? It's human nature, I suppose, to want to fault someone for the horror that happened at Virginia Tech. So the inevitable questions arise. Why didn't the university act sooner? Why didn't his roommates report his strange behavior to authorities? Why didn't his professors get him into therapy? Why was he allowed to buy a gun? Why didn't his parents step in? Why was he released from the mental hospital in which he was briefly admitted? But you can't blame university officials for this. Certainly Virginia Tech's leaders and those at colleges across the nation will learn from this incident. The suggestion, for example, that officials should have notified the campus earlier about the first incident is a valid one. But locking down the campus likely would not have stopped this horror. Consider that the gunman arrived at the scene of the first shooting by entering a building where he shouldn't have been, a residence hall locked and accessible only by electronic key card. Yet he got in. And, by all reports, he left the first scene and returned to his own dorm room - in another building - to prepare the package he later mailed to NBC. Had university officials locked down the campus, it's true that the killer would not have been able to get to the engineering building, the site of the second shooting. Instead he would have been locked in a dormitory with 400 fellow students, where the same or worse violence could have taken place. You can't blame his roommates for this. They thought he was weird, strange, mean and withdrawn. But don't you think they would have acted differently if they felt for one minute he was capable of this evil? You can't blame the gun lobby for this. I don't have a gun. I don't like guns. But I don't care if you have guns as long as you handle them responsibly. I don't have a problem, however, with a realistic gun-control law that keeps these weapons out of the hands of people who would use them for violence. Show me such a law and I'll support it. The problem with that is that no amount of gun control would guarantee this shooting wouldn't have happened. The killer bought his guns legally. But had some tougher law prevented him from purchasing them legally, he'd have found a black-market source. A sick, twisted man hellbent on taking out innocent people will find a way to do it. You can't blame his professors for this. The great poet Nikki Giovanni, who had the gunman in one of her creative writing classes, kicked him out because, she said, he was "mean" and "a bully." The department head tutored him the rest of the semester, and out of concern for him, tried to push him toward counseling. He apparently did get some counseling, even spending some time in a mental hospital. And although the doctors said he suffered from depression and some form of mental illness, he was let go. This isn't meant to send a message of hopelessness and despair. We should strive to be as safe as we can possibly be. We should be more aware of our surroundings. We should ask the tough questions. But we must be careful about whom we blame when those things don't work, because they won't always work. It's not the fault of the school, or of the professors, or of the roommates, or of the gun lobby or even of society. Blame belongs solely to Cho Seung-Hui, the lunatic who pulled the trigger.
If you must point fingers after such a tragedy, that's the first place you should start.
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