The Virginia Tech ReckoningCan a blue-ribbon panel make sense of the Cho massacre?
Posted Wednesday, July 18, 2007, at 7:16 PM ET
Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—The Virginia Tech Incident Review Panel is tasked with explaining the inexplicable. As University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III says in welcoming the panel to his campus this morning, the challenge for everyone is "how to draw rational conclusions from an irrational event."
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StumbleUponIf it's true that the events of April 16, when Cho Seung-Hui shot and killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech really are, in the end, beyond explanation, the most this panel can hope to achieve is to distinguish between those problems that are fixable and those that are not.
Today's is the fourth and final public session of the panel, which has been meeting around the Commonwealth of Virginia to determine what went wrong last spring, and how to improve legal, mental-health, and emergency-response systems in the future. But even as the proceedings open, what's abundantly clear is that the panel's focus—on better police protocols, improved training and communications, more rigorous mental-health, privacy, and gun laws—is not the concern of the victims' families.
As the eight-member panel sits on the stage, one expert after another addresses policy concerns from a lectern to the left. Some offer concrete suggestions. Don Challis, president of the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, explains why nobody should expect a college campus to go into "lockdown" (it works for children and businesses but not college campuses) and why students arming themselves defensively is the worst possible solution to campus gunmen. Richard Bonnie, an expert on law and mental health from the University of Virginia, suggests that increased use of outpatient commitment systems would be more effective and ultimately less costly than the current arrangement.
But the first three rows in the auditorium are filled with the parents of dead children, and while every theory, proposed improvement, and question is at least nominally directed toward them, nobody can possibly explain why their children are dead. Since they do not get a chance to speak until the very end of the day, they become a sort of silent Greek chorus, arrayed between the panel and the audience; sitting between what this commission wants to do and what it can do.
There has been enormous tension between the families and the panel. Some families sought to be included on the commission and some have said they felt sidelined and ostracized. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine met with them after the last public panel session, promising better communication. This tension was addressed directly in today's meeting when Col. Gerald Massengill, the chairman, opens with a candid admission that they had been so "focused on information-gathering" they had not adequately "reached out to the families." He vows to "do better," a refrain we'll hear often over the course of the day.
The last thing most of these families wanted today was PowerPoint presentations on the composition of "violence prevention teams," or pallid corporate-speak about bringing together "stakeholders" at the table. As the panel recesses for lunch, Holly Sherman, whose daughter Leslie Sherman was killed that day, explains that all she wanted was some finding of responsibility and accountability. "On a nationwide scale, it would be very nice if we could fix these problems. But my problem is my daughter's dead. I want to know why." Much of what these families want to know—what was wrong with Cho, who knew, what his medical records contained or did not contain—has been turned over to the panel only recently and reluctantly. Much of what they also want to know—what went so horribly wrong that day and why their lives are ruined—may be unknowable.
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Remarks from the Fray:
The unhappy truth is that there is no safe place or, as a contemporary singer put it, "no far away." He was singing about the Iraq war but could easily have been singing about our urban, suburban, ex-urban, and rural communities. Nothing stops it; not gates, not cops, nothing. The only opportunity for surcease is community behaving like community and comforting the bereaved. Evil will not be defeated by committees or study groups; only by community helping the damaged and wounded.
--JackD
(To reply, click here.)
It is simply too easy to shutdown the detailed analysis of a situation, however tragic, by saying that one cannot possibly comprehend how it could have happened. The present article preempts systematic attempts at any solution by reducing the event to an affair about some individuals and their completely personal pain. There is no doubting that there is a pain that outsiders can only relate to by analogy; to speak of the loss of another's son or daughter is almost never adequate, at least in terms of comforting that person. That being said, the idea that Virginia Tech's response should be dictated by the parents' grief is unwarranted. It should address the grief, yes, but it should not be dictated by it. Grief, anger, fear, anxiety: these are not necessarily the ingredients for a sound assessment of a situation, nor the ingredients for any kind of corrective. If there is to be involvement by the parents of students, it should be all the parents, not just the victims' parents.
It would also seem pertinent to mention that despite the peculiarities of this event, it is not exactly foreign to the American landscape. Over the past twenty years, the American public has seen several similar incidents, and, after each one, discussion of any systematic causes of these events become stifled by calls to how irrational the event is, how it is beyond explanation. Perhaps, we cannot explain the pain, but does this mean we can't attempt to make detailed analyses of the conditions that lead to these incidents? Does this mean that we cannot recognize a historical tendency or trend wrapped up in specific social relations?
--cph02
(To reply, click here.)
This happened on someone's watch? Who is assigned to watch every person with an unstable personality and accurately predict when violence will result? While we're at it, let's demand someone be held accountable for the next big earthquake.
--Arlington2
(To reply, click here.)
(7/19)