Another portion of our continuing national nightmare of gun violence has unfolded once again. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the 32 massacred at Virginia Tech University and to their friends, and to all who live and work at Virginia Tech. What a terrible thing happened in Virginia yesterday morning. It brings back horrible memories of otehr school shootings, such as Columbine, and the Amish school massacre.
Why would the young Asian student Cho turn on the others and mow them down as if life meant nothing? Investigators are still struggling with many questions, including this one. Certainly, guns enable people to kill many others in one fell swoop. I am the owner of a shotgun and a pistol, and I am a former member of the National Rifle Association, so I see the need for guns for sport in our society. But,when one realizes that we lead all the countries in the world in gun violence, one must admit that something has gone awry in our culture.
According to Reuters News Agency, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch U.S. political ally, cited the tough gun laws in his country as a solution. Australia banned almost all types of semi-automatic weapons after a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996.
"We showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country," said Howard, extending sympathies to the families of the victims at Virginia Tech university.
More than 30,000 people die from firearms in the United States every year and there are more guns in private hands than in any other country. By comparison, there were 163 gun deaths in the United Kingdom in 2003, according to the latest figures from the campaign group Gun Control Network.
Why did he do it? Newsweek magazine, in an article posted online today, states that psychologists can say a few things with certainly about who is more likely to commit the most serious of crimes. Over 90 percent of killers are male, and the same holds for mass murderers—“I can’t think of a single case where a woman has done this,” says Louis Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.—partly because men tend to have more access to guns, which are usually the weapons of choice. The killers are usually somewhere between the ages of 25 and 35. They generally do not have previous histories of breaking the law in any serious way. And they are not, on the whole, psychopaths, although they are often identified in the media as such. “A psychopath is someone with little conscience, little interpersonal bonding, someone who’s smooth and manipulative," says Schlesinger. "That personality has nothing, zero, to do with mass murder."
Indeed, according to Newsweek, the personality type most often associated with mass murder is in some ways the opposite of a psychopath. He is far from cool-headed; instead, he is aggrieved, hurt, and above all paranoid. Some mass murderers may be trying to exercise power over a world that they feel has left them powerless. "These people often feel some great injustice has been done to them. They're angry and they want to take it out on the world," says Schlesinger. "Then they develop the idea that committing murder will be the solution to whatever their problem is, and they fixate on it. Eventually they come to feel that there's no other solution."
“Almost always [in school shootings], the perpetrator is a student who seeks revenge,” says Levin. In the most deadly college shooting in America before this week’s—a 1966 attack at the University of Texas that killed 16 and wounded 31—the perpetrator, Charles Whitman, had been a student and research assistant at UT. Some mass murderers, Jack Levin, a forensic psychologist at Northeastern University says, want to conduct "executions" of their classmates, as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did at Columbine High School. As for Cho and whatever had upset him, Levin says, "It was murder by proxy. I think he was trying to kill the college."
Hate is a horrible thing, authored by the father of lies. When hate is mixed with guns capable of firing at a rapid rate, it becomes a thing capable of causing a monstrous massacre. This is a very sad day for Virginia Tech, and all of America.
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