The past couple of days has been inundated with media reports and coverage of the latest school shooting at Virginia Tech, a small town with a virtually unknown college. It was until two days ago when South Korean born Hui Seung Cho pillaged the student campus and left 32 dead and killed himself in the process. Today the FBI released the video clip that Cho mailed prior to the second shooting, wherein he blasted the middle class debauchery of the student body and their “hedonistic needs.”
Most people are left baffled by Cho’s bizarre behavior and flabbergasted by the deaths resulting from his destructive violence.
It would be effortless to blame the lax gun control laws in the United States, to blame the college for not responding to students concerns about Cho’s odd writings, to attribute it to ethnic minorities, or to point the finger at the police for not being proactive after the first shooting. No one knows why this happened, everyone is in shock and searching for a plausible explanation.
One aspect of this mayhem that has been mysterious is Cho’s family upbringing. Perhaps Cho was abused as a child, neglected as an adolescent, and ostracized as an adult, all culminating to the estranged man that wielded the deadly weapon. Perhaps he identified with the media’s daily depiction of violence in the entertainment industry and the coverage in the daily news. Perhaps he was socially tormented by his peers and identified with infamous loners such as Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma bombing or Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of the Columbine shooting. Perhaps acquiring the gun was simply too easy and gun laws should be more rigorous. These are questions that will debated and scrutinized by the public until some of the pain, grief and anger subside.
What could have prevented this senseless tragedy? Could it have been prevented? One can ponder for years and experts will analyze it in crime reports and scholarly journals, but in most cases of vicious killings, the truth may never be known.