http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6969842.stm

Milan seems to be on the same page as you, apparently the Baker Act is too weak to really be effective. Perhaps rightly so, we wouldn’t want people just randomly being institutionalized.

You roundhoused someone… to the head no less? Hmmm. Suddenly, I’m intimidated. Still, I disagree about the nature/nurture thing. I think its a nurture question as opposed to nature. Course, they guy is dead and I don’t believe in any conlusions on a person’s mental state that are reached once said person is deceased.

So I’m not entirely convinced with yours and Milan’s comments but it has made me think. On besmirching a killer though, you must agree, the media was wanton disabandon initially.

Chapati Kid (my little roti!), I think you took a piece of everyone in your last post Very true that doctors are giving Prozac and Xanax to anybody they can these days. Kids get all kinds of ADD drugs for no real reason.

If anything, I think some folow up articles are in order, namely one of gun-control (fitting since it will be an election issue in the US) and the other on whether society can or should have the ability to incarcerate/institutionalize before any damage has occurred… the concept of pre-crime essentially (to use Minority Report lingo).

Should be interesting, Milan has experience with the Baker Act and gun control (being quite an accomplished gun owner), Jennugus has experience with the loonies and gun-point robberies and Chapati Kid experiences the effects of gun control daily in “safe” Canada. As for me, I’ve none of the aforementioned experiences. I like guns but support gun control. I don’t want any infringement on freedom or rights but the pre-crime thing is alluring. I like big breasts and small breasts. It’s quite a conundrum.

We all have free will and being bullied as a child doesn’t make us ALL psychotic or violent as adults. This guy’s issues seem more than likely to be more nature than nurture. I was bullied, and managed to extinguish it in Jr. High with a few roundhouse kicks to the head and a viscous tongue….and I’m completely normal now

As far as gun control goes, I believe that this situation, like columbine, is one of the few where it would be valuable, useful, and possible to effectively use a concealed weapon. I changed a lot of my belief system on control after being robbed at gunpoint in 1998. There’s no way that in my situation, I could have quick-draw-McGrawed a gun like Jack Bauer on 24, and had anything good happen. However, amidst the chaos of the mob shooting at VATech and Columbine, where there’s more time, I believe it could be valuable to have an easily accessible gun to take the shooter out.

And yes, speaking about the parental responsibility thing… Milan, I don’t know what culture you come from, but in most Eastern cultures, the concept of psychiatry/psychotherapy is not only not dicsussed, but is frowned upon. If you tell people you’re going for therapy, they automatically assume that you’re a nutter. There’s also the possibility that his parents simply couldn’t afford the hefty medical expenses it involved, since, after all, there’s no nationalized health care in the Unites States. Add to that the fact that mental illness was not in their vocabulary (figuratively speaking), and you have a disaster on your hands.

On the other hand, maybe his parents never knew. According to published research, paranoid schizophrenia, when it does appear in males, appears in early adulthood, around the age of 17 or 18. This might mean that Cho had left home and went to college by then. So prior to that, his early symptoms of mental illness might have been interpreted as sullenness and introversion, which is what his college friends thought. Extreme introversion, blanketed emotions, etc. are classic symptoms of withdrawal from reality.

Society’s fault? The college’s fault? Well, I think the administration did as much as it could to help the student, but if you’re mentally ill and you refuse medication, then I think there’s a problem of a Catch-22 there. If you’re schizophrenic, then you don’t have the rational judgement to accept medication which will make you better. And if you don’t accept the medication, it will make you worse. In his case, he probably didn’t think there was anything wrong with him, because his irrational world made as much sense to him as his rational world, if not more. Should he have been forced to take it? Absolutely, especially considering that the doctors evaluating him believed him to be a threat. Is it an infraction of civil rights? Absolutely, at the cost of saving the patient’s life, as well as others’ lives, as we saw. As for a 1984/totalitarian scenario, I think that’s being a bit cycnical. The medical profession takes a Hippocratic oath to save lives. I doubt that if doctors are given the right to administer medicine to a patient they believe to be harmful to society, in order to “normalize” the patient as a functioning member of society, this means that doctors are suddenly going to abuse those rights and use them to create some Prozac-numbed nation. Oh wait. That’s happened even without doctors being given rights. It’s happened VOLUNTARILY. So what’s the big difference if the medical profession actually helps the people who DO need help? I hope that made sense.

Finally, the NRA is my pet peeve. They all bandy about the whole “right to bear arms”. For crying out loud, that was written in the constitution some two hundred years ago, and frankly, it doesn’t apply today. You no longer live in a country in which you have to take the law into your own hands because there’s a civil war at your doorstep, and because you have to leave your helpless wives and home while you run through cannon fire. There are cellphones and landlines and the internet and pagers if you want to get help. I think the only people who should be allowed to bear arms are hunters and farmers. And if you’re arguing that a Canadian conducted a shootout in Montreal despite the law against firearms, I think you might want to compare the ratio of gun-related deaths in both conutries. Or more specifically, compare the ratio of gun-related school deaths in both countries.

RE: Canada and mental health. Well, I must admit that there have been some changes in healthcare ever since the privatization option came in, but Canadian health care runs along the same principles as Scandinavian health care. Sweden and the Netherlands are primarily the model. I had to study a comparison when I was at uni in the States, and I think that was when I decided that I loved Canada. Here we do have government-run facilities for mental health patients, but I can’t vouch for their quality. What I do know is that Canada pays for 100% of hospital and physician care, but not as high for prescription drugs. Under the universal health care law, though, a Canadian citizen MUST be enrolled under a provincial prescription drug plan if they do not have employee health care coverage.

His roommates had tried to talk to him; they had tried to get him out of his shell. People in his classes say they tried to talk to him. He never responded. He wanted to be left alone. Even when his teacher gave roll call, he wouldn’t respond. All he did was put a sheet up with a question mark on it as his name.

There is not much society can do when the person offers so little. As he hadn’t acted out on anything worse than stalking a few girls, which at that age isn’t completely abnormal, everything could be explained by a really sad, depressed, loner kid. His teachers and his classmates did not have a history with him to know him any different.

As for his parents, remember parents are humans too. They don’t know what they’re doing when they’re raising kids. They’re just doing the best they can. Now, take immigrant parents from an Eastern (ie: conservative) culture trying to raise children in a Western (ie: liberal) culture. There is a major culture clash, and they might not have known what they could do. Add to that, with what I’ve read, is that his family was working class. There is no way in hell a working class family can afford to pay for psychiatric treatment, and even less so if he needs to be inpatient, where the costs can rise up to $500 a day.

The parents hands were tied. It’s one thing if the kid was depressed. All depression needs is counseling. I don’t think the kid was depressed. His writings don’t show sadness, they show anger and malice, but they I don’t even think it was conscientious anger.

I don’t think the kid fully realized what it was he was feeling, just that that’s how he felt.

Diseases of the brain do some weird things to you, and logic plays no role whatsoever, which is really difficult to treat, especially by people who aren’t trained in it.

Have you ever known someone who is suicidal and tried to tell them to smile or turn that frown upside-down everything’s really not that bad? It doesn’t work. The suicidal person can logically understand that he shouldn’t be suicidal, but he still is. It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain and there’s nothing he can do about it except slowly get through it. Telling the suicidal person to stop being sad only makes him worse because now he begins thinking what’s wrong with him. It’s a circular thought process that makes no logical sense, but its there. (This I know from experience.)

I can only imagine what schizophrenia would do the brain. Actually, I know that as well from bad acid trips.

The kid was in trouble, but more than likely, he couldn’t speak to his parents, because of the culture difference, for some reason never made any friends that he could rely on, and in the end, he just got worse and worse and worse.

As for locking the school down, they didn’t need to. Cho already did. Locking the school down would only work if the killer had already killed his intended target and was now trying to escape. In the VT shootings, this was not the case. Locking down the school would have actually helped Cho because he wanted to kill everybody.

In the end, this was an extremely tragic event that I don’t think could have been stopped. The system worked as it should have. The problem was, the system always has cracks, and somehow, he managed to slip through every one of them, unintentionally, of course.

While it would be nice if society could detect these kind of people and treat them before they go too far, I can’t imagine how this could be done, without having a large number of false positives.

And this country stands by: It is better to let a thousand criminals go free than to imprison one innocent man.

I agree with that.

At the end, the only thing that could have saved even a few lives is if the law-abiding student population was allowed to arm themselves, since the criminal population obviously doesn’t care whether or not they’re allowed.

Take a quote from Robert A. Heinlein:
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

I’m torn now. I feel society is partially at fault. At the same time, it certainly is easy to blame everybody else except for the dead killer. In the immediate aftermath of the killings, the media definitely was all over Cho, the “disturbed South Korean murderer.” The tide seems to be switching to blaming everyone else now. I was initially concerned at jumping to conclusions suggesting that it was wiser to do the investigation, look at the facts, history and then make an informed decision. As these proceedings get underway (and conclude) the story will become clearer and clearer and perhaps Cho is the only one at fault. Perhaps not.

Is there a middle ground we can meet at? Cho is certainly at fault. I think his parents are at fault too, he was their child after all (even though he was an adult). Security may have botched up but in a different way. I think shootings on a campus should result in the closure of the entire facility. I don’t think security could have avoided the incident either way, though, Cho had a well thought out plan. I don’t think university policy or the president are at fault, how can you really plan for this type of eventuality?

As for society in general? Well in the grander scheme of things, should we strive to be more informed and perhaps more compassionate in dealing with the mentally ill (befriending them, healing them, avoiding disasters, etc)?

For example: This wouldn’t have been so bad if campus security acted quicker. This wouldn’t have happened if the doctor who saw him last had placed a mark on his background test. (I’m just waiting to see the families of the victims file a lawsuit against the doctor.)

it’s why parents are calling for the resignation of the president, even though he did nothing wrong, and campus security acted as best as they could, with they knowledge they did. People in grieving need something physical to blame, rather than “it is genetics, it was a trainwreck waiting to happen, sorry your kid got in the way”. it’s the same reason why when a experience skydiver dies, everyone looks at something to blame (the rigger, the pilot, the weather, the gear, anything) rather than the jumper made a mistake or it was bad luck and shit happens.

As for what I do here. Engaging in this profound discussion is the most productive thing I’ve done all day.