I didn't read all the topic and I'm not replying to any one in particular, it is just that I read some things and I would like to give my opinion on certain things:
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But guns make it much more easier, so people shouldn't be allowed to have easy acess to guns.
I'm asian and I'm a really quiet guy, does this make me a potencial serial killer? First of all some people are just shy (not my case). Second of all some of the quiet guys, like myself, just doesn't have good conversation skills (social-skills), call me anti-social for not developing those skills if you want. But I do talk to my friends, it's just that I'm not the kind of person that talks about everything with anyone.
I'm not saying that that guy wasn't suspect, I'm saying that people have their reasons to be quiet and even to "act weird" and that is not enough to make us potential killers.
That said, I also believe a person can have his reasons to become a killer. I'm not trying to justify his actions and be the devil's advocate. I'm only saying that he might have some explanations to why he did it.
I COULD be a killer IF I was dumber, IF I didn't have anything to live for, IF I had easy acess to weapons and IF I didn't have any good-sense (I think americans call it common sense). I have already been through some stressfull situations in school and high-school (bullying) and I must say that when one is pushed to his limits, one is capable of doing extraordinary or horrible things. I've been there before but I didn't do anything extreme and stupid, maybe because I lacked the courage or the stupidity. But I did have the wishes to do justice with my own hands (this is a true reason to believe that I could be a potential killer, if only I was more stupid).
Back to the killer, I read that he had some mental issues, so I don't know how far you can blame a person that doesn't have total control over his own self. I don't want to get into a religious subject, but if there is a God and if he is fair, he problably doesn't punish "crazy" people. Again, I'm not trying to prove he's not guilty, of course that he is a criminal anyway and if he was alive, he should be locked in jail.
I also believe that most of these sociopaths killers are actually products of society. As I said before, a normal person can do really stupid things when pushed to his limits. Just imagine what a crazy person can do when irritated. Bad things happen when people bully the wrong guy (I don't know if this is the case, I'm just considering the hypothesy). I'm assuming he was at least a little bit crazy, either that or he was really really stupid and evil. If he is only a bad guy and not crazy at all, then he did deserved worst things than a simple and coward death.
This is only my personal point of view. And yes I'm a geek who doesn't give a damn about beer and doesn't care about college parties.
/rant
I definitely think he is crazy, insane, a psychopath, all that good stuff. I'm not saying he's not. i mean he freaking killed 32 people. I just meant his video speech seemed contrived. but i'm not going to argue about it with you, it's just my opinion.
Our college got ANOTHER bomb threat today as well. Woke us up at 4:30, but apparently the threat was made the previous day. Of course, a false alarm.
I HATE copycats.
Anyone else having this kind of thing happen to them too?
I do not think he was "crazy" in the normal connotation(schizophrenia). Disturbed? Yes. A sociopath? Yes. I just think he was selfish and a prick, and since he was turned down by women over and over, he just wanted to kill himself and at the same time, wanted to hurt as many people as he could in the process.
I saw a student on one of the news shows this morning, and she had mentioned that there should be some kind of link between people who sell guns and people who have been evaluated mentally. Meaning, if you've been diagnosed with a psychosis of some sort or any kind of mental health issue...anger management issues, etc. that you shouldn't be able to purchase a weapon. I was wondering if anyone knew if there was any kind of legislation like that being enforced in any state?
High school classmates say gunman was bullied
Police say package sent to NBC News between shootings is of little use
Updated: 51 minutes ago
BLACKSBURG, Va. - Long before he killed 32 people in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Cho Seung-Hui was bullied by fellow high school students who mocked his shyness and the strange way he talked, former classmates said.
Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Ins ute and State University in Blacksburg, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life Monday. He sent a large multi-media package outlining his grievances against religion and the wealthy to NBC News, but police said Thursday that the material added little to their investigation.
The text, photographs and video in the package bristle with hatred toward unspecified people whom Cho, a South Korean immigrant, accused of having wronged him, adding to a portrait of a solitary man who rarely, if ever, managed normal social interactions.
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech student who graduated with Cho from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., in 2003, recalled that Cho almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.
Once, in an English class, the teacher had the students read aloud and, when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. Finally, after the teacher threatened to give him a failing grade for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,’” Davids said.
Among Cho’s victims were Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson, who both graduated from Westfield High School last year. Police said it was not clear whether Cho singled them out.
‘The question mark kid’
Virginia Tech student Alison Heck said a suitemate of hers on campus found a mysterious question mark scrawled on the dry erase board on her door. The young woman went to the same high school as Cho, according to her Facebook page. Cho once scrawled a question mark on the sign-in sheet on the first day of a literature class, and other students came to know him as “the question mark kid.”
“I don’t know if she knew that it was him for sure,” Heck said. “I do remember that that fall that she was being stalked and she had mentioned the question mark. And there was a question mark on her door.”
Heck added: “She just let us know about it just in case there was a strange person walking around our suite.”
The young woman could not immediately be located for comment, via e-mail or telephone.
Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, said she was in several classes with Cho in high school, including advanced-placement calculus and Spanish. She said he walked around with his head down and almost never spoke. And when he did, it was “a real low mutter, like a whisper.”
Wilder said Cho was no friendlier in college, where “he always had that same damn blank stare, like glare, on his face. And I’d always try to make eye contact with him because I recognized the kid because I’d seen him for six years, but he’d always just look right past you like you weren’t there.”
Go back to China?
I'm not automatically thinking it's true that they said that, but if it is?
These are college kids?
It says high school, but I see what you're saying.Go back to China?
I'm not automatically thinking it's true that they said that, but if it is?
These are college kids?
Oh no, he got bullied so it's understandable.
Ah, ok. I don't even remember like that happening in high school. Kids these days.
I fail to see where anybody is saying that.
Is that not what is implied?
If that's what you're reading in the presentation of a news story, well, then that's what you're reading in the presentation of a news story.
It's information from multiple, outside sources that claim to have known Cho and is presenting the information about what they say happened to Cho.
If you think that the simple presentation of that information (which is news) is implying an "understanding" of his actions, then you're going to believe that no matter what anybody says.
I'm not personally aware of any such legislation that might have existed before this incident, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a proliferation of bills seeking to achieve that end across the country.
I wonder a bit about the Cons utional aspect of such legislation. Felons are generally prohibited from purchasing weapons (as I understand the law -- I don't do much criminal stuff; I've never attempted to purchase a weapon) and such prohibitions are permissible because those individuals have forfeited their 2nd Amendment rights. It would be somewhat different with someone who had been diagnosed with a psychosis or been treated for a mental health issue, because I think you'd get into some fairly arbitrary line drawing that would divest a large number of people of a specific right protected by the Second Amendment and you'd be doing so not based on what those people had done, but instead based upon who they are. To use an analogous right, I don't think that it would be a cons utionally sound argument to deny the right to vote to someone who has been diagnosed with a psychosis or treated for some type of behavioral disorder. Obviously, there is a significant difference (in terms of relationships with others) between the right to vote and the right to bear arms; but at a more fundamental level, the issue of when you can limit or eliminate someone's right to exercise a right is similar enough to suggest (at the very least) that there might be some legal question concerning the cons utional validity of such legislation.
Understanding. How nice. It's all perfectly logical how he ended up smoking 32 people because he had his feelings hurt.
Again, that's what you're taking away from the story.
Just because you think that doesn't necessarily make it true.
Now it's nice, clean and antiseptic "information". That's all. Hey, the killer provided us with some "infortmation", wanna see?
Johnny, the reason why he was saying that about the story is because that line about being ridiculed was highlighted when it was posted here.
I just bolded it because I mistakenly thought it was college kids picking on the guy's race and lack of social skills.
That quote seems REALLY over the top. I know I haven't been in high school in ten years, but I can't imagine high school students being THAT harsh in class.
But there is a common denominator with all these kids that go over the edge and kill other classmates or themselves, and that is, they are bullied and outcast. When will parents teach their kids to treat all fellow human beings with respect and dignity, like my wife and I have done with my son? Until we do that, there will be more of this happening again and again.
It couldn't have been because that quote was what Danyo was specifically addressing in his post calling those who may have said those words as ill-educated?
Sounds nice, but it'll never happen. Someone will always feel left out, disrespected, etc.
I think JM sums it it up nicely:
People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down
When you're strange...
A good read:
------------------------------------
Why they kill
By James Alan Fox, JAMES ALAN FOX is a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University and the author of many books, including "The Will to Kill" (2006) and "Extreme Killing" (2005).
April 17, 2007
MASS MURDER certainly wasn't invented with the 1966 Texas Tower shootings. For as long as there has been history, there has been murder — including horrific mass murder. Certainly in the first half of the 20th century there were examples, such as the case of Howard Unruh, a mentally ill war veteran who killed 13 people in 13 minutes with a Luger pistol on the streets of Camden, N.J., in 1949.
But 1966 was a dramatic turning point. On Aug. 1, Charles Whitman, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, climbed up a 27-story tower and killed 14 people, wounding 31 others, before being shot dead by the police.
After the Whitman killings, the incidents started to climb. Mass murders (and, especially, mass shootings) became increasingly common — George Hennard in Killeen, Texas; Patrick Edward Purdy in Stockton; James Huberty in San Ysidro; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., to name just a few — and the body counts began to grow as well. Seven of the eight largest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have occurred in the last 25 years.
The murder of at least 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday may have been the worst, but it was only one of about 20 mass shootings that occur each year in the United States (a subset of the two dozen or so mass murders). A mass murder is defined as an event in which four or more people are killed in the same episode. Serial killings, by contrast, occur over an extended time.
What accounts for the increase? Is it possible that man (and yes, 95% of all mass murderers are men, who tend to be far more comfortable and better trained in using firearms) has simply grown more evil and bloodthirsty since 1966 than during the previous millenniums of human existence?
Of course not. But several changes have taken place that have made such incidents more common.
One, of course, is the change in the potency of weaponry. Before 1966, the best weapons available to most would-be killers were pistols, rifles, maybe a shotgun. That is no longer the case; today, semiautomatics are all too easily accessible.
But there also have been societal changes that have increased the incidence of mass killing. In studying mass murderers over 25 years, my colleague, Jack Levin, and I have identified five factors that exist in virtually all cases.
First, perpetrators have a long history of frustration and failure and a diminished ability to cope with life's disappointments.
Second, they externalize blame, frequently complaining that others didn't give them a chance. Sometimes they argue that their ethnic or racial group or gender isn't getting the breaks that others are. (An example of this is Marc Lepine, who killed 14 female engineering students at the Ecole Polytechnique of the University of Montreal, apparently because he felt that women were taking too many seats at the university.)
Third, these killers generally lack emotional support from friends or family. You've read the "he always seemed to be something of a loner" quote? It has a grounding in reality.
Fourth, they generally suffer a precipitating event they view as catastrophic. This is most often some sort of major disappointment: the loss of a job or the breakup of a relationship. In massacres at colleges and universities, it's often about getting a grade the shooter feels he didn't deserve. In 1991, a graduate student at the University of Iowa killed five people because he thought his physics dissertation should have won a prestigious $1,000 award.
Fifth, they need access to a weapon powerful enough to satisfy their need for revenge.
So what has changed? For one thing, the United States has become much more dog-eat-dog, more compe ive in recent years. We admire those who achieve at any cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail. (Just look at how eager we are to vote people off the island or to reject them in singing compe ions.) This certainly increases frustration on the part of losers.
Then there's the eclipse of traditional community: higher rates of divorce, the decline of church-going and the fact that more people live in urban areas, where they may not even know their neighbors. If mass murderers are isolated people who lack support, these trends only exacerbate the situation.
Many mass murderers, for example, are people who have picked up roots and moved. James Huberty, who used a 9-mm semiautomatic Uzi to kill 21 people during a 77-minute massacre at a McDonald's in San Ysidro in 1984, had moved to California from Ohio after losing his job. When he lost another job in California, he had no friends or extended family to fall back on. They were all in Ohio.
These days, we know an awful lot about why these events occur. We're beginning to understand the motivations behind events that, to many people, seem senseless. But that doesn't mean we can prevent them. We're not going to build fortresses out of our college campuses, nor should we.
It should give us some degree of consolation to know that these events are exceedingly rare. But they still occur, and they are among the sad and tragic prices we pay for the kind of open, modern, democratic society we live in.
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