Reflections on a Mass Homicide (Commentary)
description: (PDF, 30KB; Full text below.) Commentary Reflections on a Mass Homicide Jimmy Lee,1 MBBS, MMed (Psych), Tih-Shih Lee,1,2 MD, PhD, FRCP (C), Beng-Yeong Ng,1 MBBS, MMed (Psych), FAMS 1 Department of Psychiatry, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore2 Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore Address for Correspondence: Dr Tih-Shih Lee, Department of Psychiatry, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore, Outram Road, Singapore 169608. Email: tihshih.lee@gms.edu.sg Introduction The names "Virginia Tech" and "Cho" will be associated forever with the tragic mass homicide of 32 persons cum suicide by Seung-Hui Cho on 16 April 2007. In the aftermath, many questions have been posed: "What happened and why?", "Was he crazy?", "Could it have been prevented?", "Could it happen here?" This was the third mass killing in a US campus, with the largest number of fatalities. The first was in 1966 in the University of Texas with 16 dead and 31 wounded, then the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, in which 13 students were killed. We do not profess to know more about what happened in Blacksburg, Virginia, or Cho's neuropsychiatric condition than whatever is published in the popular press.1 But through a series of questions, we reflect on this tragedy, attempt to place it into a human and psychiatric perspective, and offer insights into if, and how, it can be averted in the future. Question 1: Was Cho insane? Cho was described as a shy and quiet child, who was good in mathematics, but struggled with English. There were allegations of him being taunted and bullied in school since young. Both his pastor and relatives had suspected he might be autistic and suggested professional assistance. There was no record of him being involved in overt violence except that he had harassed 2 female classmates, one of whom called in the campus police. He expressed suicidal ideation and was involuntarily committed by a judge in a mental health facility briefly for assessment. A psychiatrist wrote in his…
creator: Jimmy Lee, Tih-Shih Lee, and Beng-Yeong Ng
date: 2007-08-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Kirat Kaur (Ms) Editorial Executive Annals, Academy of Medicine, Singapore annals@academyofmedicine.edu.sg
language: eng

The news gets worse and worse
description: By KEVIN FRISCH Messenger Post Columnist Posted: Apr 23, 01:00 PM EDT What a difference a weekend makes. Last Friday, the big story was brand new man of leisure Don Imus, who was ousted from his nationally syndicated radio program after making a disparaging remark about a women's basketball team. Since the comment was racist in nature, there were calls for a new discussion on the topic of race; a new dialogue on the parallel universes that are black and white America. By Sunday, this conversation was put on hold — along the East Coast, anyway — as attention turned to more immediate concerns. Namely, the weather. A full-fledged 'noreaster made an unwelcome April visit and, for some 36 hours, it snowed slush. Or slushed snow. Or rained snow and slush. Whatever, the result was inches and inches of precipitation leading to flooding, treacherous travel and widespread power outages. By late Monday morning, even those with cold homes and flooded basements were suddenly counting their blessings as they heard the first news reports from Blacksburg, Va. An unspeakably violent week in recent American history had another blood-soaked chapter. In the past 15 years, the week between April 15 and April 22 has seen the siege of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas; the Oklahoma City bombing; the Columbine High School shootings and, now, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history: the massacre at Virginia Tech. Including the gunman, 33 souls were lost on the college's campus on April 16. Another 26 people were wounded. As the initial shock and confusion gave way to anguish and a search for likely-nonexistent answers, a few reflexive voices were raised. There was right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who climbed onto his high horse to condemn the "drive-by media," whoever they are. (Apparently, Rush has a problem with news people showing up to cover what may well be the biggest story of the year.) There was the almost immediate debate over firearm rights, a customary ec…
creator: Kevin Frisch
date: 2007-07-17
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

Finger-pointing won’t answer problem of evil
description: GateHouse Media Tue Apr 24, 2007, 10:41 AM CDT BLACKSBURG, Va. - A tragedy the magnitude of last week's mass murder in Blacksburg, Va., prompt most of us to ask serious questions. What compelled a student to kill 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus? How could someone so obviously disturbed gain access to the weapons he used? Why didn't anyone recognize his potential for violence and do something to prevent it? These responses are to be expected, given the scope of the collective sorrow experienced by people across the nation. And in time, there is no doubt some individuals may be forced to address some of these questions. The answers may help school officials, counselors and legislators in crafting policies and procedures designed to more effectively deal with such problems. But the finger-pointing masks an inescapable fact: Regardless of who missed what signs and who failed to raise security measures, Seung Hui Cho is solely responsible for all those deaths. And when someone decides to engage in such violence, there often is little that other people can do. Some have described Cho as a loner who didn't interact with his roommates. Others have said his writings were very disturbing. These statements are most likely true, but they don't explain why he killed so many people. How many young people across the country could be described as loners? How many of them have a bizarre attraction to violence and write rather alarming things? Thousands, tens of thousands? Perhaps more? So there are many others who face circumstances very similar to those Cho experienced. Yet virtually none of them make the leap from disturbed loner to mass murderer. While he was plagued by fear, resentment and isolation, Cho had choices to deal with his problems. The difference between him and the countless others confronting the same problems is that he chose not to find alternative ways of handling his fear, resentment and isolation. Cho opted to walk down the path of violence, and this is a…
creator: GateHouse Media / Brookfield Suburban Life
date: 2007-07-17
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
language: eng

No Shortage of Manliness
description: April 23, 2007 Filed under: Feminism, Minnesota Monitor, Virginia Tech — Jeff Fecke @ 12:21 pm It is human nature to try to figure out why bad things happen. Long ago, we blamed natural disasters on the capriciousness of the gods. The flood was caused by Poseidon's wrath, the storm by Thor's fury. Gifts were given to the gods, sacrifices of fruit, of animals, even of people, in order to placate them and turn their anger into love for their human charges. Today most of us (Pat Robertson excepted) reject the notion that bad things happen because of an angry and vengeful God. And yet, when tragedy strikes, we still seek to find the pattern underlying the madness, our ultimate failing that led to our punishment by...well, we're never quite sure, but we're sure we're being punished. After Cho Seung-hui opened fire on his classmates in Blacksburg, Va., it was only natural for us to ask why. The primary answer — that he was a deeply troubled, possibly schizophrenic and certainly psychotic man who was operating outside the bounds of normal society — is unsatisfying and seems to beg more questions than it answers. And so some writers have seized on an explanation that has a mythic history as rich and powerful as any blameworthy figure in human lore: It's the women's fault. Not all women, of course, but specifically feminists. These horrid people have, we are told, upset the natural order. They have made women more like men, causing them to demand for themselves the same privileges and prerogatives that men alone have traditionally enjoyed. At the same time, they have demanded that men stop behaving like louts, thus feminizing them, making them more female, robbing them of their manly virtue. National Review columnist John Derbyshire started the drumbeat by arguing that all of the students should have been armed, the better to kill the shooter. But that wasn't his main point. "Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals," he wrote, "why didn't anyone rus…
creator: Jeff Fecke
date: 2007-06-19
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
language: eng

Desensitization, Detachment and Virginia Tech
description: Apr 23 2007 Written by Lynn Kindler To all family, friends, and people affected by the horrific and sad shootings at Virginia Tech, please accept my heartfelt sympathy. I know that I am joined by many others who are keeping you in their thoughts and prayers. With that said, I've been putting off writing about how the shootings affected me because I did not want to add to all the hype and gander that is already going on about it and because my initial reaction was NOT what I had expected to feel. Being an extremely intuitive person, I'm used to "getting" insights and a heightened sense of awareness before incidents like the one at VT occurs—often weeks before. This time not only did I not intuit anything but as the events unfolded I had no feelings about it. I'm a very caring person and since my initial non-feeling bubble, have had many insights but the initial non-feeling sensation really caught me off guard. I checked with many of my friends to find out how they reacted and found out that there were many very caring, spiritual people who had the same initial reaction as I did which was the absence of intense emotion. After listening and reading some of the news about VT, what was revealed to me was the seemingly collective response of not wanting to fan the fire of the media. The way that many of the people from Blacksburg handled this event, showed a majority of caring and thinking people who wanted to respect the event and all its complexities without the media circus. I am inspired by the people who have been writing and communicating under the mass media radar through www.facebook.com At first glance, I wondered if what "we" were experiencing en-mass was desensitization towards violence. How many of us wake up to NPR in the morning with the latest recount of a suicide bomber event? But someone very close to me noted that as listened to me she could hear anger under my numbness and upon closer inspection I realized that I was angry about our ignorance of menta…
creator: Lynn Kindler
date: 2007-06-17
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

Virginia Tech
description: Thursday, April 19, 2007 I first saw Blacksburg, and what was then V.P.I., almost fifty years ago, the summer of 1960. A member of my high school's chapter of the Future Farmers of America, I was attending the FFA's Virginia state convention - a wide-eyed rising 9th grader. About 5 foot six, I weighed little more than a large sack of chicken feed. I was a member of our school's second-string crop judging team; we did surprisingly well. Blacksburg was the "sleepy little college town" in the mountains then, home to a small agricultural and mechanical/military school and little else. You could count the traffic lights and have fingers left over. V.P.I. was essentially all-male and all-white; being a member of the corps of cadets was the norm. Foreign students and women on campus were not. The student body generally came from rural and small-town Virginia, where it was highly regarded. A turkey was the school mascot. It was so not UVA, William and Mary, or Hollins. It was not even V.M.I. Things change and stuff happens. By the time I graduated from high school V.P.I. was beginning its remarkable transformation into a major university. My lackluster high school record and vague aspirations did not make me highly sought after college material. But V.P.I. took a chance and accepted me. They had probably seen worse. After purgatory at their Danville Branch I finally arrived in Blacksburg in the fall of 1966. Evidence of the major commitment to transform Tech was everywhere: new buildings, overflowing dorms, expanding academic programs, a much larger and more diverse student body (though still not enough girls), and a major emphasis on athletics, mainly football. We even managed a traffic jam on some Saturday afternoons in the fall. Off-campus housing grew, a fine off-campus book store opened, along with a decent restaurant or two. Long hair and an underground newspaper appeared. The 60's arrived at Tech and Blacksburg sometime in the 70's, but it arrived. I should have been…
creator: Bibb Edwards
date: 2007-06-17
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
language: eng

Virginia Tech: Laying The Blame
description: Karen Harper 22 Apr 2007 There will be a lot of blame dished out in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre. But one element will be missing and that is the system itself. Capitalism and the society it nurtures will remain unscathed in the big business press. In the aftermath of another school shooting in the US, many will be asking why and some will be trying to lay blame. The shooter's parents will be blamed for how they raised him; the school will be blamed for how it dealt with his mental illness; and his schoolmates past and present will be blamed for how they teased and ostracized him. However, the blame will mostly not be laid where it appropriately belongs; on the head of capitalism and the social values that it has nourished. No individual can be looked at out of context of the larger society, and this young man and what he became cannot be understood without first looking at the society he came from. Unfortunately, the "angry loner" type that has done these sorts of shootings in the past is not the product of an isolated genetic mutation that happens unpredictably and that cannot be prevented. Such people are a real product of their environment and the direct result of capitalism's impact on personal development and mental health. This society promotes individuality, self-absorption, and competition over solidarity and collective struggle. Is it any surprise that some young people are so incapable of not only identifying with the group and its larger good, but also of even, in severe cases, forming any kind of meaningful relationship with another individual? These people after years of painful experiences can come to the conclusion that they are completely unloved and unlovable. Because we are social beings, this conclusion makes life difficult to continue. Capitalism is daily bombarding our self-esteem; we are never good enough under capitalism. There is always some drug to make us happier, some surgery to make us thinner, some car or house or job tha…
creator: Karen Harper
date: 2007-06-10
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
language: eng

On Being A College Professor after the VT Massacre
description: Thursday, April 19, 2007 I had nightmares about the VT massacre last night. It was on a two day delay. I knew that eventually the horror of what had happened would start to eat away at me. In part, I think my dreams haunted me precisely because I didn't talk, or rather listen, to what students thought about this. I didn't check in to see if they were suffering, in shock, afraid . . . I had to think a lot about why I didn't, especially after the Provost sent us a thoughtful email encouraging us to do so. What it comes down to is that I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to actually confront the horror of this event. I wasn't prepared for hearing any vitriol, anger or racist statements either (not that students would've made such statements, but I worried). I am scared and frightened by what happened, and in my selfishness, I didn't want to hear anything about it, or how it affected my students. I started to realize how frightened I was by the events yesterday while talking to my colleagues in the Philosophy lounge. I had been studying the faces of the dead at the NYTimes website. But, more importantly, I had been studying the faces of the dead professors. One of them, Jamie Bishop, looked like the sort of colleague I have here. He was young, married, and well-loved by his students. Don't get me wrong, I paused on pictures of young women and men, who could've been my own students, and found myself speechless over the loss. But, seeing the pictures of dead professors haunted me the most. And, it is precisely that which I dreamt: being hunted by a former student, being called to protect my class from an armed assailant. These are not tasks that one signs on for when he/she becomes a college professor. Kerry reminded me of a student we both had a few years ago, who I am convinced was schizophrenic. He was the right age and gender for the onset of schizophrenia. His papers were long, stream of consciousness writings full of references to disturbing sexuality. Th…
creator: Aspazia / Mad Melancholic Feminista Blog
date: 2007-06-09
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
language: eng

Librescu Day
description: By Salah Obeid Online Journal Contributing Writer Jun 8, 2007, 00:27 There isn't room enough on the calendar to honor every American hero, but Aug. 16, the birthday of one such hero, is a day teachers and others who cherish education should make a point of celebrating. No one knows what drove Liviu Librescu, four months short of his 77th birthday, to martyr himself to the cause of education. But that is what Librescu, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and mechanical engineering professor, did when he blocked a gunman from entering his Virginia Tech University classroom on April 16 -- earning him five bullets, one of them to the head -- so that most of his students could escape through the windows. Because he was slain in a public learning institution, public schools are where he should be celebrated. And because Librescu (the root of whose name, "libre," is Latin for "free") came to America searching for freedom, those who teach subjects like U.S. history and government should make honoring him a lesson on where his adopted country truly stands on freedom. By the time they enter college, many students in this country can't think critically about history and politics, having rarely been encouraged in school to think creatively outside of art and music class. Yet wolfing down hot dogs and soaking up sun on a field trip to celebrate Librescu Day could amount to more than just indigestion and sunburn, if the day were also an occasion for students to reflect on how their country, a magnet for immigrants seeking freedom, too often deprives people in other countries of the very freedoms Americans enjoy. Throughout its history, the United States has -- in places like Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines and elsewhere -- picked fights at the drop of a dime whenever dollars were to be made, a fact that is largely ignored in classrooms around the country. The result is that, as the country gets bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, many students don't know any better than to …
creator: Salah Obeid
date: 2007-06-10
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Bev Conover, Editor and Publisher, Online Journal (editor_oj@yahoo.com or editor@onlinejournal.com)
language: eng

Virginia Tech, Imus and Curve Balls
description: [Philosophical Musing on Media Culture] By Carl Davidson 20 Apr 2007 The universe throws curve balls at us, now and then. It seems to want to wake us up, and teach us lessons in impermanence and interconnectedness. Take the killings at Virginia Tech. A strange, quiet young Korean man, Cho Seung-Hui, writer of tortured and violent plays and screeds, makes his own solipsistic martial arts-gangsta video of himself, and sends it to the media, in the course of slaughtering 32 people, then killing himself. The media sensationalizes it. MSNBC ratings go through the roof as its images are repeated, to millions and millions, then all the networks join in the frenzy. As expected, other troubled youth respond, in copy-cat fashion, often only with words, and scares shut down numerous classes across the country. At the same time, discussions of 'healing' get underway. Talk show commentators are having a time of it. I hear both liberal and conservatives alike carry on about 'looking in the face of evil' and trashing the notions of illness and therapy. Rush Limbaugh and one caller on his show go on about how the Korean youth is an 'America hater,' 'suicide bomber,' and simply evil. Retired FBI guys talk about 'training' students to be able to respond better, and hiring tougher 'security.' People debate police tactics, censorship and guns. Then a British paper goes to a tiny hut in Korea, and a reporter talks to the boy's grandparents, who say he was a bad kid and 'deserved to die' for his sins. But the grandparents also reveal the poverty of his parents as they immigrated to the U.S. Most important, they reveal their grandson was diagnosed early with autism, but the poverty all around prevented them from doing much about it, either in Korea or here. Autism is recently growing with unusual speed in the US. Parents, rich and poor, are desperate for help, since dealing with an autistic child is often beyond any couple, however well off. One radio personality, Don Imus, takes up their…
creator: Carl Davidson
date: 2007-06-10
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
language: eng

Bowing Down to Our Own Violence
description: Media Beat (4/19/07) By Norman Solomon Many days after the mass killings at Virginia Tech, grisly stories about the tragedy still dominated front pages and cable television. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale -- the war in Iraq -- ebbs and flows. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the chronic evasions of the American media establishment. In the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of official American violence overseas is a routine assumption. "The first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence," George Will wrote on April 7, 2004, in the Washington Post. But three years later, his Newsweek column laments: "Vietnam produced an antiwar movement in America; Iraq has produced an antiwar America." Current polls and public discourse -- in spite of media inclinations to tamp down authentic anger at the war -- do reflect an "antiwar America" of sorts. So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that's reserved for American warriors in American society. When a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent. However -- even after four years of a U.S. war in Iraq that has been increasingly deplored by the American public -- the standard violence directed from the Pentagon does not undergo much critical scrutiny from American journalists. The president's war policies may come under withering media fire, but the daily activities of the U.S. armed forces are subjected to scant moral condemnation. Yet, under orders from the top, they routinely continue to inflict -- or serve as a catalyst for -- violence far more extensive than the shooting sprees that turned a placid Virginia campus into a slaughterhouse. News outlets in the United States combine the totally pr…
creator: Norman Solomon
date: 2007-06-09
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
language: eng

Tragedy at Virginia Tech
description: Monday, April 16, 2007 As I wrapped up my afternoon course today, my students informed me of the 31 deaths at Virginia Tech today. It was the first I heard of it and so I immediately looked to the news and am now glued to the press conference airing on NBC. It is uncanny that this shooting tragedy has occurred in the same week as Colombine, 8 years ago (the very day I was interviewing for my job here). I am not sure what to make of this event yet, other than to be utterly horrified by this event and sorrowful for the community at Virginia Tech. We don't yet know how many of the deceased are students and how many are faculty. These details are sure to emerge over time. I am dismayed by the tone of the press, who launched into an attack of VT's President for not locking down the campus after the first shooting incident in the morning. The idea of lockdown and the idea that in the future we might have to post guards on our college campuses is frightening. This is a tragedy. This was an event that no one could've forseen (unless I am persuaded by evidence to the contray), and to respond to this event with greater militarism on college campuses horrifies me (perhaps more than the event itself). I will no doubt have something more to say about this event after I learn more facts and digest the coverage. In the meantime, I would appreciate any links to blogs from VT students or other bloggers covering this story. UPDATE: From the Huffington Post A White House spokesman said President Bush was horrified by the rampage and offered his prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia. "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," spokeswoman Dana Perino said BARF! Posted by Aspazia at Monday, April 16, 2007 -- Original source: http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/tragedy-at-virginia-tech.html Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
creator: Aspazia / Mad Melancholic Feminista Blog
date: 2007-05-21
contributor: Brent Jesiek
language: eng

The Tangled Thicket of Cho seung-hui, Don Imus, YouTube and American Idol
description: April 21st, 2007 Cho seung-hui, the Rutgers University women's basketball team, the students and Virginia Tech all form a tangled thicket nourished by the American media, overgrown with too many words, too many pictures and too many answers to too many bad questions. We, the American people struggle to navigate this thicket, for during the last few weeks we have only become more confused as if we have lost our sense of direction. You can enter any of these words in a search engine and lose all hope of finding any rationality, any thread that will lead you out. Technorati lists 152,000 blog selections for Virginia Tech, 23,000 for Cho and 4,788 for the Rutgers' team. With new posts on all of these each day, there are enough words that it would take a person probably a year to read them all. And yet we all seek a way out of this thicket of information, a clear path, a why that puts the last few weeks all in perspective. That the media have become such a tangled thicket rather than a clear voice represents perhaps the only generalization we can draw from these events and an indication of what has happened to America's sources and ideas about information. During past tragedies-the Kennedy assassination, Jonestown, the space shuttle explosion-somehow the media brought us together and enabled us to not only have a common source of information but also a shared sense of perspective. Just the opposite has occurred over the last few weeks. Instead of coming together we have thousands of information sources; instead of a shared sense of perspective we have something resembling a cubist painting crafted by a random group each with their own paints, brushes and sense of reality. Trying to come together has become an exercise in frustration, disappointment and even anger. The equilibrium many have found may even be misleading, for it comes from linking with a group of like-minded people who share their own prejudices and views of the world. So instead of finding a way out of the…
creator: Ralph Brauer
date: 2007-06-08
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
language: eng

In Memoriam: Virginia Tech, April 16, 2007
description: April 16th, 2007 As one who worked with school districts across the country, I know the issue of school shootings is every school official's nightmare. The apparent random nature of all the shootings only makes the nightmare more fearful, for after dozens of workshops at countless conventions, the only thing anyone can say for sure is that they do not know where the awful sounds of gunfire will next echo down the hallways and in the classrooms. But no one I knew or any of the workshops ever talked about the possibility of the equivalent of a Columbine occurring at a college. Every school district in the country has detailed policies in place if it ever happened to them. Their teachers, administrators and staff are trained in what to do and local law enforcement officials participate in the planning and the drills. Now that it has happened at a college they, too, will have to undergo similar training and create similar plans. Campuses will seem less safe, new rules and drills will need to be implemented and college officials and teachers will now understand the nightmares of their secondary colleagues. At the center of that nightmare lies a dark, bottomless pool. As with the Columbines of this country, people will stare into the pool seeking answers. Some will see reflections and try to generalize from them about the nature of the shooter and the victims, but the reflections they see will only be their own. Interest groups will look into the pool and see their causes, filling the talk shows with spokespersons who will say that if we had only done "x" the event would have never happened. Others will take a longer view trying to peer into the depths of the pool seeking confirmation of trends historical, social and psychological. They too will see only their own reflections. For those at the center of it all, the parents, relatives and friends of the victims and the shooter, those who witnessed it and lived, and those who somehow made a decision to not go to those place…
creator: Ralph Brauer
date: 2007-06-08
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
language: eng

Virginia Tech Redux: Did the Old Media Lose it in Blacksburg?
description: April 18th, 2007 As the words continue to flow along with the tears after the deaths at Virginia Tech, one important observation rises above the ruins: the incident represented a triumph for what the pundits term the New Media over the Old. The keys to this triumph lie in the strengths of the New Media: its immediacy, diversity, and ability to speak personally. The immediacy of the New Media put them far ahead of the Old Media even as the crisis unfolded. The on-campus emails that first informed many students that something terrible had happened became like pebbles dropped in a pond, rippling out into the ether. New Media such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and search engines became the preferred sources for people desperate to find out what happened. Probably the most dramatic illustration of this was the group of students who fled to the library and then frantically searched the Internet to find out what was happening. A decade ago they might have turned on the radio or television. Even the Old Media had to acknowledge the role the New Media played for the students at Virginia Tech. CBS ran a story "Students Turn To Web In Time Of Tragedy" whose sub head read, "How the Internet Helped Va. Tech Students Cope with Shooting Massacre." The Los Angeles Times reported about University of Southern California sophomore Charlotte Korchak who instead of using a cellphone to check on friends at Virginia Tech, immediately went to Facebook. "I was able to immediately find out who was OK," she said. "Without Facebook, I have no idea how I would have found that out." As for the news on campus, the Old Media struggled to catch up. National Public Radio even published a desperate-sounding plea on their web site for witnesses of the tragedy to please contact them so they could line up interviews. In short, in the first few hours after the shootings the Old Media became just like the rest of us, searching the web for information and answers. Later National Public Radio would gloat, it…
creator: Ralph Brauer
date: 2007-06-08
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
language: eng

Blacksburg, violence, and America
description: Published by Dave April 25th, 2007 I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven't really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling. In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun. On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us. Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing. In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren't sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session. After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that a man had opened fire with a handgun on the Empire State Building's observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws for…
creator: Dave Shepherd
date: 2007-06-08
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng

You vs. MSM in Va Tech Shooting Coverage
description: by brock | April 23, 2007 at 08:21 pm As the terrible story of the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus began to unfold last week, the tens of thousands of moving pieces that make up the main stream media were kicked into high gear. The effort to get reporters "on the ground" and "in the face" of those on campus is startling in its breadth and depth. As you see below, the Washington Post threw no less than 75 reporters at the story!! That is stunning. And when further reading the piece, there was concern among the editors on the Post because it was too windy to charter a private plane to fly their reporters to the Va Tech campus. And then there was you, citizen journalist, crowd sourcing the story from any angle. NowPublic was fielding eye-witness accounts and sifting through rumors in real-time mode; ethical discussions about what information was appropriate to release and when (NowPublic had the name of the shooter's first victim very early on, perhaps before the main stream media knew) it was appropriate to do so. The crew at NowPublic handled the chaos with grace and style and sensitivity and with more coolness and level heads than I've seen in major newsrooms during breaking stories. And they did with a fraction of the resources at the command of media outlets like the Washington Post or NBC News. And they did a more than commendable job. What's the point? Simply this: that effort couldn't have happened without YOU, the citizen journalist. I've talked to many about citizen driven journalism or "crowd sourcing," whatever you want to call it, and many people I talk to ask "what's the use?" especially when there are places like the Washington Post throwing 75 people at the story. But that's exactly the point: with all the resources available to all of you, all of your friends and their friends... citizen journalism can be (should be) a force to be reckoned with. But it starts with you; you gotta believe in this... and then just jump in. Point, click...National Ne…
creator: Brock N. Meeks
publisher: null
date: 2007-06-07
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: null
language: eng

too much coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy
description: April 19, 2007 The amount of coverage has been staggering--dozens of stories per day in the top national newspapers, nightly broadcast news programs that are lengthened by half an hour, 24-hour repetitions of the same information on cable news, even a blow-by-blow account in the "Kid's Post" section of the Washington Post, which my 7-year-old reads. I first found out about the Blacksburg tragedy because a student TV news crew stopped me on the street to ask my opinion. This is a global phenomenon: Le Monde and the BBC also led with Cho Seung-hui's picture when I looked. It's a choice to devote so much space and time to those 33 deaths. Bombers killed 158 in US-occupied Baghdad on Wednesday. Nigeria, the biggest country in Africa, saw violence connected to its presidential vote. Comparisons are odious; they imply that one doesn't care about particular victims and that human lives can be counted and weighed. I do sympathize with the Blacksburg victims and their families. I sympathize because I have been told their stories in detail; but there are many other stories that I could have been told--other tragedies, or (for that matter) other narratives that are important but not tragic. Perhaps the Virginia Tech victims deserve sympathy from all of us, but I suspect they would prefer less attention. I find it hard to see how the deserve something they don't want. One reason to tell the Virginia Tech story in detail is to provide us with the information we might need to act as voters and members of various communities. For instance, I work at a university much like Virginia Tech and could agitate for new policies in my institution. But it is generally a bad idea to act on the basis of extremely rare events. There have been about 40 mass shootings in the USA. During the period when those crimes have occurred, something like half a billion total people have been alive in America. That means that 0.000008 percent of the population commits mass shootings. There cannot be a gene…
creator: Peter Levine
date: 2007-06-07
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng

The vanity of reason: making sense of the Virginia Tech tragedy
description: Gene Koo - Thursday, April 19th, 2007 @ 5:52 pm Soon after an initial outpouring of shock and grief at the senseless murder of 32 members of the Virginia Tech community, we began seeking explanations for the tragedy. By all accounts Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator and 33rd victim of this rampage, was a severely disturbed young man; the snippets of video released so far by NBC reveal profound paranoia. Inevitably our questions turn to what would lead him to commit such a heinous crime. We yearn for insight into his motives. Why did he do it? What was he thinking? These questions are familiar to me. I have asked them myself about my own mother, who probably developed paranoid schizophrenia some 15 years ago. I write "probably" because, like water filling a tub, the disease crept over her, imperceptibly, until suddenly it spilled forth in a flood. And somewhere in that tub, the loving woman who had been my mother drowned. I cannot know, but looking at the face in the video aired by NBC, I would guess that the real Seung-Hui Cho, someone capable of the kind of laughter and anger you and I would understand, perished long before he pulled the trigger on himself. People of sound mind often assume that individuals with mental illness think like we do: therefore, they must be misinformed, wrong-headed, or just pretending. We are, essentially, in denial. We delude ourselves into believing that we can figure these people out, and in so doing, learn how to "fix" them. In the first few years of my mother's illness, I challenged her claims that the "Chinese mafia" were spying on and stealing from her. Using lawyer's logic, I repeatedly demonstrated why it made no sense for criminals to go to such great lengths to inflict such petty wounds upon her. She would always win these fights, because madness is not susceptible to reason. What I lacked in communicating with her was not logic, but rather imagination. -- "Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can," asks Mr. Cho…
creator: Gene Koo
date: 2007-06-07
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike 2.5
language: eng

Cho Seung-Hui: A Lone Deranged Gunman?
description: Thursday, April 19. 2007 As all of America mourns the deaths which occurred on the Virginia Tech campus, bloggers are drawing comparisons to the body count that issues daily from Iraq. See a particularly poignant post from Floyd Rudmin of commondreams.org titled "32 Senseless Deaths: A Chance for Empathy, Change of Heart, and Change of Course" which concludes: The tragedy at Virginia Tech was caused by lone gunman, probably deranged. It was a one-time event. It is finished. The tragedy in Iraq was caused by the US government, with the over-whelming support of the US Congress, most of the US media, and much of the US population. This war was planned and executed by rational men and women, none of them deranged. The US decided to start the war against Iraq. The US decided to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. The US decided to destroy the Iraqi government and to disband its police and army. The US decided to send too few soldiers to secure the nation after doing these destructive deeds. And the tragedy of Iraq is not a one-time event. It is not finished. It continues, apparently without end. By many reports, the US is now preparing to start another war, this time against Iran. Americans feeling the shock and grief of the tragedy at Virginia Tech should look into their hearts and realize that they through their government are bringing this same tragedy again, and again, and again, and again, and again, endlessly and needlessly, to other people in the world who also have hearts that can be torn out, who also feel grief and loss when family and friends are suddenly killed when doing ordinary things of life, like going to school. Tragic deaths force us to feel our humanity and to see we are similar to others in the world. The tragic deaths in Virginia might serve to motivate Americans to curb their militarism and to minimize the tragedies of sudden death that they have been bringing to other families in the world. Read the full article. It is heartening to witness a vigo…
creator: David Barker
date: 2007-06-06
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng