My heart is breaking for all the families affected by this - especially the parents of the gunman. How do you deal with the news that not only is your child dead, but he took over 30 people with him?
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry has said that they hope the shooting would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.” I would really hope that people are intelligent enough that when they look at all this, they see someone with real problems, not just someone who was from South Korea. I guess it’s just sad that it has to be said at all.
There are, of course, knee-jerk reactions coming from all sides. I’ve heard more gun control, allow students to carry, make all college campuses closed and install metal detectors everywhere. I completely understand where this is all coming from - who doesn’t want to immediately be able to shout from the rooftops, “This won’t happen again, and here’s how we’re going to do it!”?
What this situation truly deserves is a thoughtful, intelligent, measured response based on not just what happened yesterday, but what led up to it and caused it to happen at all.
You’ve got someone who had some very serious problems, to put it mildly, and he finally hit his breaking point. In this case, he lashed out and did so violently. It happens. We don’t like to admit that it happens, but it does. Attempts were apparently made to reach out to him in the form of a referral to counseling - whether or not he ever followed through on that is still unknown. On the one hand, you can’t force someone to help themselves, but at the same time, don’t we have some sort of obligation as decent human beings to at least try as hard as we can to help someone out who needs it? Should someone have taken the initiative to see if he was getting the counseling that was recommended? Maybe they did, we just don’t know yet.
If he’d gotten some sort of help, would it have prevented all of this in the first place?
My second question/concern is the two hour gap. Even if the police did believe the first shooting was an isolated incident, you’ve got a gunman who has already shot two people, still armed and at large in a very densely populated area. There are conflicting reports as to whether or not there was a lockdown after the first shooting. I’m not in law enforcement, maybe there is a very good explanation as to what happened after the first shooting. However, I would think that until you had found the shooter and had him in custody, a lockdown would have been perfectly appropriate. But again, not in law enforcement, and I am very interested in hearing more on what exactly happened.
I am sure there will be groups that will use this for political gain. Attempts will be made to legislate everyone into a state of perfect safety, even though no such thing exists. Hopefully something good can come out of this terrible thing, but sadly, the way politics works, somehow I don’t see it.
April 18th, 2007 - 11:13 am
This is the thing I do where I become all analyitical when faced with great tragedy. My heart goes out to those touched by this tragedy.
I don’t actually understand the call for a lockdown after the first shootings. The campus is 2600 acres, 700 buildings and 30,000 to 40,000+ people, it’s a town, with no more ability to be locked down than any other town. In that region (Southern Atlantic) there is an expectation of 6.7 homicides per 100,000 peoples (based on 2002 data, urban locations would have a higher number). Sadly 2-3 homicides per year is expected. Every indication was that it was a horrible case of domestic violence, there wasn’t any evidence that this was a precursor to a spree killing.
The police did secure the building (or in town metaphor, several hundred residences surronding the incident) of the first shootings, but they rationally didn’t attempt to shut down the entire town. I don’t usually assume to police are above criticism, but everything I’ve heard about the police response seems appropriate given the situation and what was known.
It’s extremely sad, but once the shooting has begun there isn’t a lot that can be done. Hopefully it will be a long time before history repeats itself.