[Bill,
April 24, 2007]
Where do we report crazy people?
Short answer: We don't.
The problem with events like the Virginia Tech shooting is we think, as a society, that we should have done more or at least something different. My response is, perhaps there's a lesson to be learned, but the horrors of life come in all sorts of different forms, and the warning signs pointing to any individual one are usually obvious only in retrospect.
Let's not be too hard on ourselves because a psychopath caught us off-guard. Part of what makes psychopaths so hard to predict is that they are psychopaths and we are not. And confusing us further: There are at least a million obsessive, troubled souls muttering to themselves and bitching about some grievance, real or imagined, for every true psychopath who picks up a gun and guns people down. If you go looking for the next Cho among your closest friends and associates, all you'll do is wrongly accuse someone and probably hurt someone's feelings by implying they are potentially homicidal maniac.
My point is not that people at VA Tech didn't make serious mistakes. My point is that they didn't act much different than you and me — that is, they gave a misfit the benefit of the doubt. And that's why these shootings are so horrific — because they encourage us to stop giving others the benefit of the doubt. People start to talk about "zero tolerance" and other such things, which usually defy common sense.
In a free society and in a fallen world, a small percentage of people will do monstrous things. They will be different things from what we expect, yet be familiar. History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, as someone wise once said. Will there be more school shootings? Yes. Do we know how they'll work: Only in the biggest generalities. Can we prevent them through rigorous security? Sure, but as Jack Dunphy said, you won't want to live in that world. So no.
Can we do more? Maybe. If it's common-sense stuff, stuff we already should have been doing all along.
But let's not over-react and go around pointing to the weird, the troubled, the lonely, the sad and the just plain different — and saying, "You are potentially the next Cho. You are a potential killer. I should have a place to report you to have you checked out."
The problem with events like the Virginia Tech shooting is we think, as a society, that we should have done more or at least something different. My response is, perhaps there's a lesson to be learned, but the horrors of life come in all sorts of different forms, and the warning signs pointing to any individual one are usually obvious only in retrospect.
Let's not be too hard on ourselves because a psychopath caught us off-guard. Part of what makes psychopaths so hard to predict is that they are psychopaths and we are not. And confusing us further: There are at least a million obsessive, troubled souls muttering to themselves and bitching about some grievance, real or imagined, for every true psychopath who picks up a gun and guns people down. If you go looking for the next Cho among your closest friends and associates, all you'll do is wrongly accuse someone and probably hurt someone's feelings by implying they are potentially homicidal maniac.
My point is not that people at VA Tech didn't make serious mistakes. My point is that they didn't act much different than you and me — that is, they gave a misfit the benefit of the doubt. And that's why these shootings are so horrific — because they encourage us to stop giving others the benefit of the doubt. People start to talk about "zero tolerance" and other such things, which usually defy common sense.
In a free society and in a fallen world, a small percentage of people will do monstrous things. They will be different things from what we expect, yet be familiar. History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, as someone wise once said. Will there be more school shootings? Yes. Do we know how they'll work: Only in the biggest generalities. Can we prevent them through rigorous security? Sure, but as Jack Dunphy said, you won't want to live in that world. So no.
Can we do more? Maybe. If it's common-sense stuff, stuff we already should have been doing all along.
But let's not over-react and go around pointing to the weird, the troubled, the lonely, the sad and the just plain different — and saying, "You are potentially the next Cho. You are a potential killer. I should have a place to report you to have you checked out."
Interesting, the folks who wrote the DSM-IV created a category called "Schizotypal Personality Disorder". Essentialy, if you're a Trekkie, a gamer, collect baseball cards, play the autoharp, pay attention to the clues on Lost, or do anything at all outside of some arbitrary distance from the statistical norm, you're in the club.
Still, one of my favorite fun facts about mental illness is that schizophrenia is a "rare" disorder that only affects about 1% of the population. If one in every hundred people were to suddenly burst into flames, would we consider that "rare"?
yeah, when people say things are rare -- there's 300 million of us in this country. it doesn't take that many extremely rare statistical outliers to make it seem like we're living in total anarchy.
I like your example, too. One in 100 bursting into flames would make it common. It would also sell fire extinguishers.