It is now
ten years since the Virginia Tech rampage and the images and the pain are just
as vivid as they were that Spring day in 2007.
If you have
the misfortune to not only hear about such a tragedy, but find out that your
own family has been directly touched by it through the loss of a loved one,
then that moment stretches out over days, months and even years, as one by one
the agonizing details come out. If you are lucky, there is justice and a moment
when you are able to move on. If you are unlucky, there are justifications,
excuses, and lies that tie you tighter to the tragedy every day. But no matter
what happens, there is that overwhelming and inescapable loss.
For those
of us whose family members were victims of school shootings, there are no words
that can capture the impact of that loss.
For me it was the mother of our oldest grandchild killed at the
Appalachian School of Law shooting on January 16, 2002.
What is my
goal in continuing to write about the Tech rampage? There are three main goals:
first, to expose the abdication of leadership and authority by politicians,
school officials, and law enforcement personnel in connection with all aspects
of the Virginia Tech tragedy; second, to raise public awareness about what
happened at Virginia Tech before, during, and after the shooting, and in so
doing give support to the Virginia Tech families’ efforts to bring about
changes in state and federal laws to tighten school security; and third, to
help all families understand what they can do in insisting that universities
and colleges have in place effective security measures and that those measures
are understood by faculty, staff, and students.
My purpose is not to be vindictive, but to hold people accountable
for their actions or inactions in an effort to lessen the chances of future
school shootings. My purpose is to expose the shortcomings and inadequacies of
our society that have made too many of our schools shooting galleries for the
mentally ill and emotionally disturbed. My purpose is also to expose the
lengths that those in leadership will go to in order to hide the truth,
including their failure to abide by their own written policies, so as to
maintain a steady stream of financial gifts. The simple fact is that until
there is accountability, our schools will not be safe.
I do not pretend to have all the answers, and I recognize that
violence in America today is part of a broader problem in society, including a
crisis in masculinity—men and boys have carried out all the school shootings in
the U.S. to date. Males do around 97 percent of the mass killings and serial
shootings in this country. I also recognize that many of our core values and
beliefs need to be re-examined. For example, we need to re-examine individual
rights. A potentially dangerous student does have rights, but not at the cost
of other lives. We seem to have lost sight of that fact.
It is not enough to tell the families of the shooting victims that
no one could have prevented the Virginia Tech tragedy. For one thing, that
simply is not true. The only way you can say it could not have been stopped is
to gloss over the fact that people ignored the warning signs. If people ignore
multiple warning signs then of course these shootings cannot be prevented. In
my opinion, to ignore warning signs is tantamount to being an accessory to
murder before the fact.
As long as people maintain that no one could have stopped Seung
Hui Cho, the families of his victims will be prisoners to the agony of their
loss. The road to recovery starts with the recognition that Cho’s rampage could
have been prevented. Indeed, the first step in moving on from the loss of life
on April 16, 2007 is to understand that we will never fully recover because the
Virginia Tech massacre was preventable.
In Virginia, politicians fell prey to political agendas and opted
to cover up and obfuscate. Fear of the impact of those agendas blocked a
thorough examination of events of April 16, 2007, turning the Governor’s Review
Panel Report of the tragedy into a glossy canard. Indeed, the failure to
include a representative from the families on the Governor’s Review Panel
Report proves French writer Paul Valery’s assertion that “politics is the art
of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.”
Second Amendment advocates and the National Rifle Association have
so manipulated and defined the problem of school shootings that no one is
willing to rise to discuss campus shootings without first saying, “I support
the Second Amendment.” This statement is usually followed by a tirade about the
individual’s rights to own guns. The politicians’ anticipation of right-wing
opposition to any dialog on gun violence has meant that issues such as mental
health and keeping weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill never get fully
explored. No one seems willing to hear about problems in society or pathologies
that might be feeding into the minds of the unstable and contributing to their
violent reactions to real or imagined threats. The Second Amendment advocates
have paralyzed discussions about the prevention of school shootings. The
radical gun-rights advocates have done our society a terrible disservice.
It is because of the inadequacies of the response by Virginia Tech
and the fact that not nearly enough has been done to alert the public to the
continuing danger of school shootings, that I feel obliged to write this book.
Just because some things were done in
response to the Tech shooting, does not mean that the correct things or enough
things were done. Indeed, the voices of those who wanted to look at all the
factors surrounding the school massacre appear to have been drowned out by a
chorus of some conservative activists who poisoned the attempts at a
thoughtful, sober, and thorough investigation of the tragedy. How else can you
explain the omissions and errors that still exist in the Governor’s Review
Panel Report of the Virginia Tech shooting?
I examine the flaws in that report in later posts.
A variety of causes--including broken communications,
misunderstandings of our laws on privacy, failure to follow emergency
procedures as written, and the incompetence of some people in positions of
power--played into the terrible events before, on, and after April 16, 2007.
There were a variety of interacting causes that aided and abetted Cho’s
shooting rampage. There are a
multiplicity of causes that led to this nation’s worst school shooting and for
intelligent people to brush the tragedy aside saying “no one can be responsible
for when or how others will act” is nothing less than cowardice to face the
truth and a shameful willingness to exploit and manipulate a tragedy for
personal or ideological reasons.
The
Virginia Tech families cannot move on or begin to heal as long as the lies and
the half-truths persist. If one parent reads my words and then takes action to
protect the life of his or her child, then I will consider myself to have been
successful. If one politician, after reading the book, has the will to push
through legislation to keep guns out of the hands of unstable people, and if he
or she finds the determination to address the societal problems that make the
U.S. so violent, then I have been a success. If my words can help prevent just
one campus shooting, then I have met and exceeded my expectations for this
book. So I begin my postings on the Virginia Tech tragedy.
