Cupid's Arrow Hurt Him, So Student Uses Gun to Kill 32

The unspeakable happened at Virginia Tech University, reminding us all that murder at school has “graduated” from the campuses of high school to the hallowed halls of university. Thirty-two students went to school to get educated and, instead, got executed. The shooter shared his pain and suffering, purportedly from being jilted by his girlfriend. He employed two handguns, one a 9mm semi-automatic, to kill 31 other students on the campus of one of the nation’s notable universities. There are no logical answers for why an adult university student would suddenly go berserk and plan and vent his outrage by randomly killing innocent people all around him, picking them off like they were plastic, rotating ducks at the country fair. The questions we have, and the ones that are yet to come, are almost more than we can bear. They assault the mind relentlessly; they come randomly yet with reason. Why didn’t he simply move on after the relationship soured? In what manner did his girlfriend allegedly end their affair? Was he a batterer? How long had he owned the handguns? Did he buy them after his girlfriend jilted him and, specifically, to vent his rage upon others in murderous pre-meditated acts? How could one person kill so many people with just a couple of handguns?

It is this last question that hits us between the eyes and sends us reeling. The shooter’s 9mm semi-automatic handgun apparently (according to my juvenile court school students facing crimes ranging from homicide to terrorist threats) had a “banana clip” capable of holding up to 36 bullets. With such sustained firepower, he never had to re-load. For good measure, he had ammunition belts strapped on. That he mercilessly killed 32 innocent people tells us yet another awful truth: Our gun technology far exceeds our technology for making us better, compassionate, understanding, more loving and forgiving human beings. The perpetrator of this unspeakable carnage apparently planned his acts, acquired “full capacity” firepower, chain-locked his students in separate hallways at different campus locations, one-quarter of a mile apart, and, with the precision of an assassin, committed his demonic deeds. Why didn’t he invest similar efforts in patching up his differences with his girlfriend? Why didn’t he seek immediate counseling for the raging anger taking over his life? Why didn’t somebody notice his change in mood and other telltale signs? Why was he able to methodically kill his first set of victims, then wait for the lapse in security that lifted the campus lockdown and march to the other side of the university and slay his second set of victims? Why? Why? Why?

Unable to tolerate being rejected in love, he decided to make war--and to hell with the human-victim collateral damages. The desire to wantonly kill is such a drastically extreme decision, and yet it is this apparently well-planned and methodically-executed “triumph” that compels our attention. I have spent years in state youth prisons interviewing males and females who have killed. All of them told me the act was not as difficult as they first thought it would be. With simple planning, they got the job done. And that’s where part of the problem lies. We perhaps think, especially at the university level, that taking the life of another is too difficult—either emotionally-wrenching or physically-arduous—to accomplish and, therefore, impossible to achieve. Yet, students who are otherwise mentally sound, but swept off by their emotional, perfect storms, manage to conceive of effective, deadly ways to vent their rage and frustration, and take a whole lot of people down with them in a blaze of gunfire. Remember the Columbine High School shooters? How do we identify and isolate such people without making the school campus a locked-down armed and occupied detention camp for the rest of the student body? That is a question that faces us as we systematically attempt to re-evaluate and make more secure our campuses nationwide, without making prisons of our universities, the exception being that the latter award advanced degrees.

While we are planning and strategizing to make our schools safer, we can begin by building into all our curricula—from middle school to university—required courses in social behavior grounded in law and ethics, as well as courses that engage the mind in problem-solving of cases designed around personal, psychological, and social conflicts and consequences. Cupid’s arrow may have made the alleged shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre a bad lover, but something else is terribly wrong with our system when a couple of handguns, a Glock and a Walther, easily obtained, turned him into a good killer.