He dejado pasar un tiempo, antes de desbrozar estas reflexiones sobre la matanza en el Virginia Tech, situada en la ciudad de Blacksburg, en la que eran asesinados treinta y dos estudiantes, y se hería a otros veintinueve. La escena debió de ser dantesca. Alumnos que saltaban por las ventanas, se arrastraban por el suelo, improvisaban barricadas o se hacían los muertos, mientras un profesor -superviviente de los horrores del Holocausto-, perdía la vida, al tratar de bloquear las puertas. Y lo he hecho de forma premeditada, pues deseaba asegurarme de si mi primigenio análisis seguía pareciéndome correcto. Pues bien, mi criterio no ha variado; lo más, la presencia de las oportunas posteriores matizaciones.… Seguir leyendo »
A judge ruled this month that depositions by the parents of the gunmen in the 1999 Columbine school shootings would remain sealed until 2027. It would be tragic to also have to wait 28 years to hear from the family of Seung-Hui Cho, the killer at Virginia Tech. But the tense legal standoff that led to the Columbine ruling is likely to repeat itself in Virginia if we don’t quickly devise an alternative.
In the Columbine case, as in Virginia Tech, the killers’ families went into seclusion and released statements of regret and bewilderment. Parents of mass murderers have their own grieving to do.… Seguir leyendo »
Era previsible. Cho Seung Hui era un taciturno solitario, de humor cambiante, inestable. Cuatro de sus profesores habían mostrado su preocupación a la vista del contenido de sus trabajos académicos o de su conducta en clase. Tras las quejas de dos alumnas, los servicios de seguridad del campus y un consejero de los servicios psicológicos del instituto politécnico de Virginia (Virginia Tech) hicieron gestiones para internarle en una institución psiquiátrica. Sin embargo, un médico se mostró en desacuerdo con el juez en el sentido de que representara un peligro para los demás. En Estados Unidos es fácil adquirir armas (aunque están prohibidas en el campus de Virginia).… Seguir leyendo »
On the campus of the University of Memphis, where I was visiting for part of last week, the news of the Virginia Tech mass killings struck with special force. Not only were these students, like those in Blacksburg, Va., attending a large public university with a big commuter population, but they still recall the scars of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was gunned down in this city 39 years ago this month.
Meeting with students at the journalism school, I was reminded that no campus these days is free from violence. Just two weeks ago, the student newspaper reporters said, a female graduate student was stabbed in the leg by a man who was trying to steal her purse.… Seguir leyendo »
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, the spectacle of principled folk feeling the need to reassert their principles has not been uniformly edifying. Had all the students been armed, stated one rifle lobbyist on Monday, the massacre would never have happened. From NBC, who opted to air the material mailed to them by Cho Seung-hui, there were the thoughts of network president Steve Capus. "This is, I think, as close as we will ever come to being inside the mind of a killer," he posited.
Writing in the conservative National Review, self-styled "resident chickenhawk" John Derbyshire was frothingly bemused.… Seguir leyendo »
If people noticed anything at all about Cho Seung Hui, it seems, they were struck by his silence. He wouldn't respond in class. He wouldn't talk to his roommates. Making his way across the Virginia Tech campus, he was quiet as a ghost.
But when he was alone, at a keyboard or in front of a camera, he had volumes to say. "You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he proclaimed in the video he mailed to NBC News between Act One and Act Two of his rampage. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing.… Seguir leyendo »
When it comes to school gunmen (and, yes, they're usually male) what may seem like random acts of madness are usually premeditated.
"The most frequent motive was revenge," the Secret Service concluded in a 2002 study of 37 school shootings. As part of the Safe Schools Initiative it undertook with the Education Department after the 1999 Columbine killings, agents reviewed cases and interviewed 10 school shooters. They found that school assassins send clear warnings and that "[i]nformation about these attackers' intent and planning was potentially knowable before the incident."
None of this suggests that assassins deserve public sympathy or that all mentally ill people are dangerous.… Seguir leyendo »
I was at my desk at the F.B.I.’s Critical Incident Response Group on April 20, 1999, when a colleague ducked his head into my office and asked if I’d heard the news. A school shooting in Colorado. Some place called Columbine. At least 10 dead. Columbine, I remember thinking as I clicked on the bank of TVs on the far wall. Where in God’s name is that?
After 13 years as an F.B.I. agent, I’d become somewhat inured to violence: bank robberies, murders, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City. Death had become my business. Yet these images were appalling. Teenagers were dying in a public high school.… Seguir leyendo »
Why do we have the same futile argument every time there is a mass killing?
Advocates of gun control try to open a discussion about whether more reasonable weapons statutes might reduce the number of violent deaths. Opponents of gun control shout "No!" Guns don't kill people, people kill people, they say, and anyway, if everybody were carrying weapons, someone would have taken out the murderer and all would have been fine.
And we do nothing.
This is a stupid argument, driven by the stupid politics of gun control in the United States.
In other spheres, we act reasonably when faced with new problems.… Seguir leyendo »
The horrifying killings at Virginia Tech on Monday leave us grieving and troubled. They also leave us -- especially those like me who lead colleges and universities -- with difficult questions to ask and, then, to try to answer.
The most complex and emotional question is: Could this massacre have been prevented by getting Cho Seung Hui into counseling -- or, as some have suggested, by removing this young man from Virginia Tech's campus? This is a university administrator's nightmare.
GW was in the news last year for its attempts to serve the best interests of a student who had sought mental health treatment, while also considering the well-being of all of our students.… Seguir leyendo »
La espantosa matanza que, a manos de un estudiante, ha tenido lugar en una Universidad del Estado de Virginia (Virginia Tech) hará que se intensifique el debate sobre la libre venta de armas en Estados Unidos, instalado nuevamente en los medios. A preguntas de los periodistas, el portavoz de la Casa Blanca ha respondido que éste no es el momento de entrar en tal asunto, sino de pensar en las víctimas y acompañar en el dolor a sus familiares.
No se conocen los motivos que han llevado a Cho Seung-Hui -un estudiante surcoreano de origen humilde, criado en Estados Unidos- a cometer este asesinato masivo.… Seguir leyendo »
I wasn't born in Blacksburg, Va., but I lived there most of my life. If my husband hadn't dragged me to a bigger city -- "where something actually happens and restaurants serve more than
hamburgers" -- I'd be there still.
Your home town defines you. It helps make you what you are. Now that this thing, this massacre, has defined my home town, I wonder if my definition is going to change, too.
Last August, when a gunman committed a double murder in Blacksburg, people said the town had lost its innocence. Ridiculous, hyperbolic swill, I thought. Transplants. Commentators. What did they know?… Seguir leyendo »
My daughter, Colette, never had a babysitter. My wife and I wouldn't leave her in the care of a stranger -- or with her grandparents, all of whom live within 10 miles of us. For years we sacrificed vacations, trips to the movies and even church. We were the couple with the screaming kid on the airplane and in restaurants. Our daughter was as protected from the world as any two parents could possibly manage.
Before we knew it, 18 years had flown by. Our little girl grew up and applied to the one college she had her heart set upon -- Virginia Tech.… Seguir leyendo »
Don't try to make sense of the horrific killings at Virginia Tech, at least not yet. Don't try to make those involved into archetypes -- the gun-wielding loner, the valiant young heroes, the dithering college officials -- and fit them into a familiar, comfortable narrative. Don't rush to draw lessons about guns or alienation or funding for mental health services. Not yet.
This shattered community hasn't even had time to learn what happened, let alone why. It's understandable that authorities would be cautious in releasing the names of the 32 students and faculty members slaughtered by Cho Seung Hui, but the result is that every student I've talked to has spent hours calling around and taking an inventory of friends.… Seguir leyendo »
In my day, Fort Dix, N.J., billed itself as the home of the Ultimate Weapon. That weapon, depicted by a heroic statue at the front gate, was the lowly infantryman armed only with his rifle and appearing to shout something like "Follow me!" This was the Army's way of countering the glamour of the other services, particularly the Air Force. It took boots on the ground -- not planes overhead -- to really win a war. It took, in short, the ultimate weapon. No one could kill better.
Now from Blacksburg, Va., comes additional evidence that there is nothing as dangerous as a single man and nothing as unpredictable as the mind of man.… Seguir leyendo »
On April 12, an 18-year-old blogger with the handle ntcoolfool posted a brief, unexceptional tribute to the deceased American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for which he received three equally unexceptional responses. On Monday, ntcoolfool’s blog became a scrolling newsreel, providing harrowing details, replete with photos and video footage, of a massacre unfolding below his window. The Virginia Tech university student, identified on his website as Bryce Carter, began reporting in real-time, portraying a quiet campus thrust into a mini war zone.
In a post entitled "Safe and rather scared?,” Mr Carter wrote:
“I walked with my friend to his dorm to get his stuff as an omniscient announcement echoed across campus: ‘This is an emergency.… Seguir leyendo »
Not everyone concludes that tighter gun controls might prevent more gun deaths, although this has been the common conclusion on this side of the Atlantic. As the fatal shooting of 32 people at Virginia Tech sent the US into new analysis of one of its most controversial personal freedoms, some American commentators argued that if only students had been allowed to take their own arms into classrooms, they could have fought back.
Michelle Malkin, a well-known conservative blogger, attacking The New York Times’s call for tighter gun laws, declaimed that “apparently it’s creepy to call attention to legislative efforts that prevent students from arming themselves in self-defence on campus, but there’s nothing creepy about the Times jumping the gun on gun control”.… Seguir leyendo »
The global image of the American school was once of wholesome youths laden with books and cheerleader pompoms. More recently it has become one of over-armed and overweight policemen racing to take up firing positions while students run screaming with terror.My first response to Monday's horror at Blacksburg, Virginia, was please, let it not be an Arab. The particular would instantly have become general and a madman a terrorist. Such is the degradation of public response to violence these days that nothing is allowed to be what it probably is, the random act of a mind deranged. It must be a sign of war and subject to the language of war.… Seguir leyendo »
Cada vez que sucede una matanza indiscriminada como la que ha tenido lugar en la Universidad Politécnica de Virginia se alude a la enorme permisividad que existe en EEUU con respecto a la posesión de armas por parte de personas particulares, así como a los intereses de la industria armamentística para que las cosas sigan igual. Eso, sin lugar a dudas, es así, pero no sé si eso sólo explica el hecho de que a algún venado le dé de vez en cuando por coger un rifle y emprenderla a tiros contra los estudiantes.
A los extranjeros siempre nos llama la atención esa especie de veneración por el arma que tienen muchos americanos.… Seguir leyendo »
A few months ago, when I returned from a trip to Sierra Leone, a country I lived in for years and one still reeling from the effects of a brutal civil war, I was filled with relief to be returning to a crime-free place like Blacksburg. As usual, I was welcomed by the Blue Ridge Mountains, and by the friends I’ve grown to love during my 22 years on the faculty at Virginia Tech.
It’s a quiet place. The town is full of turkeys — statues of our mascot, the Hokie Bird, painted in garish colors — as if being a Hokie were not a sports metaphor but a way of life.… Seguir leyendo »
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