Category: Current Events

Reading through some of the comments on a post at Dr. Helen’s, it got me thinking about whether the university dropped the ball here. I certainly think they did. But there’s always going to be difficulty in dealing with mentally disturbed people who are exhibiting warning signs.

We live in a free society that values a presumption of innocence; the idea that we cannot deprive people of their liberties without due process. To have someone committed against their will should require the state to meet a difficult burden. If you look at totalitarian systems, many of them used mental health as an instrument of oppression; institutionalizing dissidents and the like as mentally incompetent. There are good reasons to restrain the state in this area.

It seems, though, that this guy crossed into behavior that should have been taken seriously be school officials and reported to law enforcement. At the very least, he should have been expelled. Lighting fires, stalking, harassing, and vandalism are all crimes, and all serious matters. Arson is a felony, especially to occupied dwellings. Why did university officials sweep this under the rug?

But I’m reluctant to go so far as to say it should be easier to commit someone, or suggest that universities need to adopt “zero tolerance” policies akin to what primary and secondary schools have done. That would just be compounding on the tragedy. I think there were general law enforcement options that could have been taken here, and weren’t. The system failed, and tragedy struck.

And people wonder why I don’t want to relay on the same system for my own personal safety.

The Smoking Gun has the VA Tech killer’s one act play.   Check it out.  It’s a look inside a warped mind.   He thought this stuff was OK to share with people?   It’s horribly written and highly disturbing stuff.

Apparently there was a mob hit on the Mayor of Nagasaki, in Japan:

The shooting was rare in a country where handguns are strictly banned and only four politicians are known to have been killed since the Second World War.
Mayor Iccho Ito, 61, was shot twice in the back at point-blank range outside a train station Tuesday evening, Nagasaki police official Rumi Tsujimoto said.

One of the bullets struck the mayor’s heart and he went into cardiac arrest, according to Nagasaki University Hospital spokesman Kenzo Kusano. Kyodo News agency and national broadcaster NHK said Ito died of his wounds early Wednesday.

Firearms are effectively are illegal in Japan, with few exceptions. Yet we can see that criminals are still able to obtain them. Japan’s violent crime rate is very low, but that is more a reflection of Japanese culture than of Japanese law.  One can find cultures with more ubiquitous ownership of small arms that have similar rates of violent crime.  This example would seem to indicate, that criminals in Japan who desire guns can still get them.

Be sure to check out Dave Kopel’s article on gun control in Japan.

Professor Liviu Librescu:

Librescu was among the thirty-three people killed in the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007. He was killed during a class in the Norris Hall Engineering Building. He was 76 years old.^[6] Librescu held the door of his classroom shut while the gunman Cho Seung-hui was attempting to enter it. He was shot through the door but was able to prevent the gunman from entering the classroom until his students had escaped through the windows^[7][8]. A number of Librescu’s students have called him a hero because of his actions, with one student, Asael Arad, saying that all the professor’s students “lived because of him.”^[9]

In all tragedies come our heros.

I agree with Uncle that, given the data we have now, the police acted appropriately in not locking down the school after the first shooting.   They had sufficient reason to believe that this was an ordinary murder, and that the killer was at that point on the lamb.  I don’t think the police could have reasonable anticipated the killer would then start a mass killing spree.

The police are not supermen.   They are ordinary people who make ordinary mistakes, and have to act, quite often, on spotty information.  Once those folks were chained into the room, there wasn’t much the police could have done.  Even a SWAT team would have taken time to blow down the door.  As I said before, the only person to blame in this tragedy is the deranged lunatic.  It’s foolish to expect others to provide perfect safety.