4-21-07 Virginia Tech
There's an idea floating around that something has to be changed in order to prevent such a thing as the Virginia Tech massacre from ever happening again.
We could pass new laws, but the fact is that the perpetrator broke existing laws. What he did is already against the law. It's against the law to murder people, it's against the law to have weapons on campus, it's even against the law to merely use threatening language against people. The list of laws broken by a psychotic student that day is very long. It's even against the law to commit suicide. It's clear that passing new laws to prevent people from breaking existing laws is a bit pointless.
We could make guns more difficult to obtain, but statistics demonstrate that where guns are more difficult to obtain, gun related crime rises. The incidence of gun related crime has risen sharply in Britain, since the passage of laws making guns illegal. In Washington, DC, where guns are illegal, crime has also risen sharply. Meanwhile, in "Gun Town, USA" where a law was passed in 1982 requiring all residents to own a gun, the incidence of gun related crime has dropped dramatically... for a quarter of a century, now.
We could institute more screening to attempt to isolate and handle potential psychotics who would be capable of performing such insane acts against others, but it's apparent that such a thing is actually not within any scientific discipline's ability to predict. This article describes what we would be up against in such attempts. And this article describes ten years of research into how to specifically profile school shooters that, essentially, has come up with many more questions to be addressed than resolved.
We could theorize that the VT shootings were symptomatic of something wrong somewhere, that something is really out of whack, and this needs to be fixed.
But I say that this incident is symptomatic of nothing. Out of 300 million people, one kid went completely insane. This isn't a symptom of anything. It isn't even a statistical anomaly.
Mass murderers commit insane acts on a par with the VT shooting nearly every week in Iraq, however. Looking for reasons why that's happening could bear more scrutiny.
We could pass new laws, but the fact is that the perpetrator broke existing laws. What he did is already against the law. It's against the law to murder people, it's against the law to have weapons on campus, it's even against the law to merely use threatening language against people. The list of laws broken by a psychotic student that day is very long. It's even against the law to commit suicide. It's clear that passing new laws to prevent people from breaking existing laws is a bit pointless.
We could make guns more difficult to obtain, but statistics demonstrate that where guns are more difficult to obtain, gun related crime rises. The incidence of gun related crime has risen sharply in Britain, since the passage of laws making guns illegal. In Washington, DC, where guns are illegal, crime has also risen sharply. Meanwhile, in "Gun Town, USA" where a law was passed in 1982 requiring all residents to own a gun, the incidence of gun related crime has dropped dramatically... for a quarter of a century, now.
We could institute more screening to attempt to isolate and handle potential psychotics who would be capable of performing such insane acts against others, but it's apparent that such a thing is actually not within any scientific discipline's ability to predict. This article describes what we would be up against in such attempts. And this article describes ten years of research into how to specifically profile school shooters that, essentially, has come up with many more questions to be addressed than resolved.
We could theorize that the VT shootings were symptomatic of something wrong somewhere, that something is really out of whack, and this needs to be fixed.
But I say that this incident is symptomatic of nothing. Out of 300 million people, one kid went completely insane. This isn't a symptom of anything. It isn't even a statistical anomaly.
Mass murderers commit insane acts on a par with the VT shooting nearly every week in Iraq, however. Looking for reasons why that's happening could bear more scrutiny.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 6:16 PM
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