This post is modified from one I posted elsewhere on another forum, so all of it may not seem to fit here exactly. But it needs to be said a few more times. When you've seen people who have lined their houses with tin foil literally, or swallowed a bed sheet (I am not kidding) or castrated themselves you do at least realize they are ill and not living in the real world. Some people just shouldn't be held responsible for psychotic delusions. It makes no sense.
I didn't have any sympathy or empathy for Harris and Klebold. And it makes you ponder where you should draw the line and why. But when you get to the end of the spectrum where Cho clearly was, you are looking at a person whose brain was seriously malfunctioning. I really don't think a lot of people comprehend that, especially considering the news coverage has focused on evil and revenge motives. The reporters want to make this about something other than what it is about. They want a motive. The fact that motive is irrelevant, a fantasy, a delusion, gets lost between the psychiatrists who recognize Cho's symptoms immediately upon seeing the recordings and writings, and what the reporter wants or expects to hear. So the psychiatrists' diagnoses get honorable mention, but the reporter moves on and the prize focus of the story goes instead to the reasons the reporter is looking for, because that's what the pattern is supposed to be. It's supposed to be revenge for relentless teasing of an outcast. Or it is supposed to be an evil person. Mental illness is merely one more opinion, no better or worse than the opinion Cho is the result of the loss of prayer in school or whatever claim is being made. The tragedy moves on to blame liberals who fought for patient's privacy rights to conservatives who refuse any gun regulations claiming each and every one is a slippery slope. All the while every story dilutes the facts. It was a serious mental illness, not merely a creep with a personality disorder.
They can't even get the blame right. All the attention is paid to whether or not the university notified the students of some nebulous threat sooner than they did. And some attention is paid to why being evaluated for suicidal risk didn't trigger a system alert a year later when a gun was being purchased. Can you imagine what the gun rights people would say if everyone who had a court ordered psych eval lost the right to buy a gun?
Have you seen a single news report that said the university had not implemented any of the FBI task force recommendations on preventing school shootings? See any reports that asked which other schools or school districts have also not implemented the recommendations? Has there been any news coverage of the need to monitor adult paranoid schizophrenics for ongoing risk of deteriorating and becoming a risk to themselves or others the same way we might monitor someone on parole or keep tabs on a sex offender? There's been reports on why nothing happened when Cho was seen by various agencies/people but nothing on the fact people's conditions change over time.
So we hear again the claims that something needs to be done, but what? Or we supposedly will do "everything possible" or some other generality so that "this never happens again". It's always, "never to happen again." Yet here we are with recommendations from an FBI task force no one had heard of, no one implemented and not enough schools will implement tomorrow either so it will almost certainly "happen again".
Share this information with your child's schools/universities and make them listen to you. In a few weeks the momentum will be lost...until the next time.
Here are three important resources you can share:
The School Shooter, a Threat Assessment Perspective
Understanding Subjects with Paranoid Schizophrenia; From: The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin | Date: 12/1/1999 | Author: DUFFY, JAMES E.
Center for the Prevention of School Violence, North Carolina's Critical Incident Response Kit Project
The Internet almost always has the answers to major issues like school shooting incidents because people have developed extensive plans following the last horrible tragedy and the one before that and the one before that. But memory of tragedies fades quickly and risk perception fades with it. No one remains motivated for very long. You can get results if you push this stuff right now. In a month, good luck getting anyone's attention.
