Virginia Tech: On Identifying Losers

James Q. Wilson (h/t to George Tom) concludes a good article on the Virginia Tech shooting with a strange admonition:

The main lesson that should emerge from the Virginia Tech killings is that we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities.

It is a problem for Europeans as well as Americans, one for which there are no easy solutions — such as passing more gun control laws.

To say that we should try harder is to say that we can be even remotely successful in identifying potential killers before they go on a rampage. We can’t, in the same way that we can’t ensure that such killings won’t occur by beefing up the bloated gun control bureaucracy that currently exists solely to employ bureaucrats. What we can do is accept that someone somewhere will occasionally lose his or her mind and provoke yet another bloodbath, understand that there’s not much we can do about it in the short term, and prepare for it.

That hasn’t stopped reporters and everyone else from agreeing that the state/university gun control/lunatic-identification two-punch is just the solution to the occasional campus massacre. An English professor at Virgina Tech received top billing on TV to report that she felt Cho’s morose scribblings were indicative of a disturbed mind and that she had been frustrated to discover that there were no available avenues through which to hold Cho accountable for his strangeness. Why, she even recommended counselling! If we could compell someone like Cho into counselling, at least a third of the senior and first-year university populations would be crowding into loser tent villages outside therapists’ offices.

Not surprisingly, the left and the right have responded to the killing by talking about politics and culture respectively. I’m on the right, so culture is on the menu here. Does anyone else think it strange that we talk about carting “dark” individuals off to counselling yet celebrate the sort of dark goth culture which gave rise to the Montreal killer and that is especially prevalent in our high schools? Why tolerate leather trenchcoats and eye shadow when we can compel them to wear uniforms? Why allow them to wallow in whiny, self-indulgent groups of emo “f**k the world, I’m sad” whiners when you can compell them to go run laps in gym class. Why let them spend time in vampire or whatever internet chat rooms when you can kick them outside? Why let products of priviliged middle-class homes complain about the horrendous difficulties of their lives when you can say, “oh, shut up.”

And, most importantly, let’s start seeing bullying for what it is: An unpleasant experience that teachers should do more to deal with and that everyone has dealt with at some point in their lives (or at least those victims who never realized that a rock cleverly concealed in one’s fist can equalize almost any size disparity between bully and victim), but which most sensible people let go of when they cross that line into adulthood. Bullying is bad, but coddling the anger of people who were bullied is even worse. Please, grow up and stop being losers.