deconstructing Cho

Everybody’s doing it. I’m not really interested in playing, but what the hell.

I think Cho was a certifiable crazy who was allowed to roam loose in a society that is loath to stigmatize the mentally ill and that has no policy for helping them or for keeping the rest of us safe from their erratic, or much worse, behavior. A law that allows a crazy person to buy a gun without the gun-shop owner being aware of the mental-health problem of the potential buyer is definitely a problem. At the same time, I have seen many, many guns for sale in rural flea markets in which there is no need to show a license before the transaction is made, so I know that gun laws do nothing to prevent people from obtaining guns.

Also: I wonder about the value of the tradeoff. We may have stopped stigmatizing the mentally ill (I don’t think so, but that was the idea of emptying out psychiatric hospitals and ensuring mental patients’ rights to privacy), but by failing to guide and manage the mentally ill, we seem to facilitate their out-of-control behavior, at a big cost to society at large. That someone as troubled as Cho was allowed to live among the other students at Virginia Tech—that professors who complained about him were rebuffed by administrators, who were afraid to get involved for fear of being sued—is a massive, unaddressed problem.

That’s rather a lot to say for someone who claimed to have nothing to say on the subject. Oh well.

Here’s a round-up of more outraged thinking on the subject:

At Pajamas Media, Oleg Atbashian asks:

Good question! Then he goes and writes an extremely tendentious piece about the mindless blame-rich-white-privileged-America-first drivel that’s spewed out by idiots and partisans on the left. [Not helpful at all. --ed.]

Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, writes the representative pious liberal’s plea—how long must we wait?—for gun control. [Spare me. --ed.]

That great forensic psychiatrist and bazillion-selling crime fiction novelist Jonathan Kellerman says, Forget about gun control and start locking up the crazies! They shouldn’t be walking the streets! If they’re crazy, we should say so and keep them from hurting the rest of us. [He's got a point---a minor one. --ed.]

Last—in a category all her own—is Katty Kay a BBC “presenter” and a caricature of a journalist, who was a guest on the Chris Matthews show yesterday.

Unfortunately, the transcript isn’t available yet, so I’ll have to paraphrase. After she (and the rest of the panel) endorsed NBC’s airing and releasing to other outlets Cho’s “manifesto,”—a position I continue to disagree with,*** despite the compelling points that Jeff Jarvis made on his site and on Reliable Sources yesterday—Kay took it one step further.

Using the lunatic, scripted rantings and ravings of this sick guy at face value (let me underscore this point: she accepted the word of a paranoid schizophrenic as the basis for the “truth” about him and his actions) and proceeded to critique American society, so full of bullies, dontcha know, from a class struggle point of view. Did I mention that Ms. Kay is British? (A weak week ago, she was even more unbearable and overbearing on a different subject; Matthews’s site sucks, though, so I can’t even copy and paste from it—lucky you.)

—————

*** To clarify: Since NBC has numerous media platforms on which it can release its “content,” I think it would have shown good editorial judgment to talk liberally about the “manifesto” on air, perhaps show pictures in which Cho is not pointing a gun at viewers, and make it available for viewing on the Web. But then I’m just a viewer (though not anymore!)