North Star Writers Group

Once again, America has been rocked by a madman on a murderous rampage in her halls of learning. What used to be news for its rarity has now become notorious for its seeming frequency. And in the days and weeks to come, we will furtively try to determine what made Cho Seung-Hui go so evilly berserk. Presuming for the moment that trying to posthumously argue with a crazy person isn't an inherently pointless exercise to begin with, what would the purpose of that analysis be if we don't have sufficient courage in our convictions to implement whatever preventative measures towards which it might point? After all, we already lack the moral backbone to have done that which was clearly justified and necessary to stop this lunatic before it was too late.

I can think of at least three things that a society capable of making moral evaluations could have done to, at minimum, make such an attack much more difficult:

Expulsion. Seung-Hui was creepy enough to scare 63 of 70 students out of showing up for Professor Nikki Giovanni's poetry class. Yet all the consequence she could muster was to arrange private tutoring away from the others, and give the tutor a code-word as an alarm in case she became uncomfortable. If he's that nuts, what on earth are you doing personally exposing the tutor to that danger? And why are you not getting this guy the heck out of Virginia Tech as fast as you possibly can? But when the only thing somewhat resembling moral evaluation you can manage to come up with is "And I just assumed that he was trying to assert himself," I guess you're not going see a threat even when it sits before you, staring you down.

Confinement. From what has been reported thus far, Seung-Hui had been displaying severely anti-social behavior laden with violent undertones going well back into high school. Yet it seemed no one thought to try to force some kind of evaluation or treatment upon him. Not that it would have mattered much if they had. Thanks to the ACLU and politicians of a similar stripe, there is no longer any way to compel mentally ill people to take their medications, much less confine them to a secure facility. At least not until after they've slaughtered innocent people, and presuming they don't kill themselves at the end of inflicting all that carnage. If we still had any moral gumption, we'd do our level best to provide treatment to the suffering in a way consistent with guaranteeing the public's safety. Sometimes, in extreme cases like this, and as distasteful as it otherwise may strike us, that means forcible confinement. But so long as our public policy is written by idiots who think mental illness is an alternative lifestyle worthy of a de facto civil rights crusade, the mentally ill will be cruelly left to suffer and the citizenry will not be protected from them.

Let Victims Not Be Sitting Ducks. Lastly, we could allow otherwise law-abiding adults to freely exercise their right to self-defense and carry a weapon themselves. If even one of those students or professors had a gun and the wherewithal to use it, many of the 32 victims could still be alive. The only thing passing "gun-free zone" laws accomplishes, on a practical level, is to tell homicidal wackos where they can find groups of unarmed and defenseless corpses-to-be waiting for them. We have to get over this ridiculous fear of an inanimate object, which does absolutely nothing by itself. Whether it is used to take or to save life is dependent entirely on the person holding it. That should make it crystal clear exactly who is and what is not truly responsible. And until such time as we can find the moral clarity to blame people rather than things, then I guess we'll just continue providing victims for the next psychopathic nutcase.

Finally, but perhaps most poignantly, there is the matter of nomenclature. It annoys me greatly to hear people describe this as a "tragedy." This was not a tragedy in any sense of the word. Earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes are tragedies. They are no one’s fault and occur simply as a matter of nature. This was a hideously evil sin, planned and perpetrated by a monster who knew damn well what he was choosing to do. And he alone bears total responsibility for his actions. To call this rampage a "tragedy" removes that vital element of moral culpability from the equation. Moreover, it's simply untrue. This creep is responsible whether we find it in ourselves to hold him such or not.

It says something not very good about us as a people when we can't even manage to find it within ourselves to apply a clear moral standard to even the most despicable acts. Or simply to the words we use to describe them. It is this moral cowardice that has created the conditions under which such savagery can flourish, and if we aren't sufficiently moved even in its aftermath to apply such a standard, then civilization itself is on the brink.

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This is Column # DKK057. Request permission to publish here.