Reflections on Virginia Tech

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

A YOUNG man comes into Lucinda Roy's office. She is the head of English at Virginia Tech, a university. He is a student whose bloodthirsty “creative writing” has set off alarm bells. He insists that his teacher is over-reacting. He is not really angry, he says. His poetry is satirical; it is supposed to make people laugh. His sunglasses and cap half-hide his face. He speaks “in the softest voice I have ever heard coming from a full-grown man,” says Ms Roy, “so soft in fact that I have to lean forward to hear him.”

That was in October 2005. Eighteen months later the young man shot and killed 32 people, mostly fellow students, without uttering a word. Then he killed himself. As the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre approaches, crazed gunmen are in the news again. A jobless man in New York state murdered 13 people on April 3rd. A jilted husband shot up a nursing home in North Carolina on March 29th. Why do such horrors happen? Some people are turning to Ms Roy's new memoir to find out.

“No Right To Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech”, published by Harmony, is a fine work. Ms Roy is a good writer and a good person. Her interactions with a future killer are oddly touching. She coached him with his dreadful writing and tried to soothe his irrational rage. Yet her attempt to make sense of his final explosion meets an insuperable obstacle. It is futile to draw conclusions from such an unusual event.

That is not how it seemed at the time. Every television screen vibrated with debate about the slaughter. But it changed no one's mind about any broad principle of public policy. Pundits seized on it as gory evidence to support whatever they already believed. Advocates of gun control, such as The Economist, took the opportunity to reiterate their opposition to guns. Despite a history of mental illness, the killer had had no trouble buying two semi-automatic pistols and several kilos of ammunition. Had he been refused, innocent lives might have been spared. Not so, argued the pro-gun pundits: the real problem was that students were not allowed guns on campus to defend themselves.

Ms Roy favours gun control. It irks her that Virginia still allows gun shows to sell guns without background checks to weed out buyers who are criminal or insane. But she admits that the gun nuts occasionally have a point. Armed students do sometimes subdue school shooters. Ms Roy lists examples. Whether more guns on campus would lead to fewer deaths, as some claim, or more, as others insist, is impossible to prove. There are too many confounding factors, and too few school shootings, thank heavens. In any case, the gun nuts' thesis is unlikely to be tested. Few teachers would feel comfortable in a gun-filled classroom. How do you give an “F” grade to an armed adolescent?

Another popular argument, after Virginia Tech, was that the media were partly to blame. The killer had watched coverage of a previous massacre, at Columbine High School in Colorado, and decided to copy it. He also wanted to be famous. He filmed himself posing with guns and spouting an incoherent manifesto of grievances. Between his first two murders and his last 30, he posted the footage to NBC, a television channel, hoping they would broadcast it. They obliged. He thus became an icon to other deranged loners. A young man with a large collection of guns was arrested in Nevada last year after he sent threatening e-mails to two women whom the Virginia Tech killer once harassed. His lawyer said he was just trying to start a discussion about school violence. He is about to go on trial.

Ms Roy agrees that some of the reporters covering Virginia Tech were insensitive. (Lexington was there. It was bedlam.) And making killers famous surely encourages copycats. But Ms Roy cautions against a rush to judgment. The media allowed people at Virginia Tech to find out what was going on in real time—no small service. And investigative reporting, she argues, helps to hold institutions accountable. She thinks the university's leaders should have been more open about their failure to provide the killer with adequate counselling, among other things. Given the risk of lawsuits, it is hardly surprising that they clammed up.

The massacre produced at least one hero: Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who sacrificed his life to save his pupils by barring a door with his body while they escaped through a window. The media eulogised him, but obviously could not interview him. They could talk to Ms Roy, however. And since she had sounded an early warning about the killer, urging him to get counselling and sharing her fears about his mental state with the university, reporters beat a path to her door.

What to do?

With hindsight, it is easy to blame the university for not taking her concerns more seriously. But what, exactly, should it have done? The warning signs were hardly conclusive. Until the last two-and-a-half hours of his life, the killer committed no crimes. He stalked some female students, but they did not press charges. When Ms Roy first heard about the massacre, she did not guess that the killer was her former pupil. He was not the only creepy young man on campus. Ms Roy describes another student who scared people by, for example, anonymously posting a poem celebrating the rape of a disabled woman to a teacher's door. As far as Ms Roy knows, this student never hurt anyone. “The assumption that it is easy to identify potential threats is faulty; almost all the students who write about homicide have absolutely no intention of killing anyone,” she says.

Virginia Tech now has better locks on classroom doors and a brightly-lit ticker telling staff and students what to do in an emergency. But there is no reliable way to prepare for the unpredictable. And that, alas, is the only lesson to be drawn from April 16th 2007.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington