Virginia Tech shooting reveals hard truths

The massacre at Virginia Tech was not a national news story for me. It was a local reality. The shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, grew up not far from my home. One victim came from our neighborhood and another half dozen from the general area. My son, John Paul, graduated from Tech four years ago, and the buildings and campus are well known to our family. There is no making sense of what has no sense, but at least we can honor the dead by thinking clearly in this tragedy's aftermath.

One thing a local perspective does is to keep you from looking at the event through abstract and lazy journalistic eyes. As the commentary has droned on, it's clear that events like this are a godsend for broadcasters, who, by and large, have way too much time on their hands. And like everyone with idle hands, the devil's work is not far off.

Before we adopted happy talk about the human condition as the default setting in the West, events like this were rightly understood as belonging to the mysterium iniquitatis. Evil exists. It exists in nature, and it exists in human nature. The actual moral responsibility of the poor shooter only God knows, of course. But the evil is palpable and clear.

I detect a desire in the press to move quickly away from this uncomfortable truth to others that are more familiar and, therefore, less disturbing. So we get treated to endless speculations about whether some combination of psychological intervention, social monitoring, security, and gun laws could prevent such tragedies, or whether the massacre will lead to a backlash against Koreans. It won't in my heavily Korean-American town, where everyone is horrified and sympathetic, as I suspect much of America is as well. These are dangerous self-indulgences linked to our illusions about the limitless power of science, technology and politics.

Senseless murder has a very long past and a seemingly limitless future.

Someone with Seung-Hui Cho's record should not be able to buy a gun. Even friends who are big NRA types say that. To prevent such purchases, however, private information has to be much more readily available. According to reports, colleges and universities are between a rock and a hard place in cases like this.

They are not allowed to ban troubled students from campus because of their psychiatric histories, or to release medical information, even to the student's family, without permission. Virginia Tech made various efforts to do something about this particular student and was thwarted by the law at every turn. There are better ways to alert families and authorities, but for some time civil libertarians have been putting obstacles in the way, as if protecting people from others and themselves is not part of civil liberty.

When my older kids started college (one at Tech), I was told I could not even see their grades without their permission. My kids knew they would not see tuition if permission were not immediately forthcoming. Something is deeply wrong in the balance between freedom and responsibility in this and many other areas.

The university's security police have also come in for much criticism for failure to "lock down" the campus after the first two deaths were discovered. This too, I fear, is a fond hope that evil Can be readily wished away. Whatever calmer reflection may discover about their reactions, I doubt the police could have prevented further mayhem. This madman was very lucid. If the campus had been shut for a few hours, he would have struck again later.

Then there is the escape into international hand wringing. You have probably noted that the world press has commented on the peculiarly violent nature of the United States, which is allegedly in love with guns and hot-headed aggression. But this too is a dodge. America is not a particularly violent society given its size and diversity.

Switzerland has far more guns per capita than we do. Indeed, the Swiss are required to keep a gun in every house for the sake of national defense. Yet anti-Americanism trumps facts. The German magazine Der Spiegel, for example, immediately opined that the United States "should be looking at why these kinds of horrible crimes happen so often." A fair point if you defame "often" and also allow that they happen elsewhere. Germany had a suicide shooter/bomber in November 2006 and in 2002 lost 16 people in a high school when a 19-year-old went on a rampage. But perhaps he was a fan of American Westerns, as are many Germans.

Our governor in Virginia, Tim Kaine, is a Democrat and more liberal in several ways than I am. But he is also a real Catholic and he showed more than ordinary wisdom when he cut off the debate that immediately arose after the massacre. He said it was obscene for anyone to use the incident for political purposes of whatever stripe in the very midst of the tragedy.

Amen. Et requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.

[Robert Royal is president of Faith & Reason Institute in Washington.]

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