Current event

It is more of a Massacre than a Suicide

Sometimes I wonder why people choose what is convenient over what is right and proper . We deal with situations in ways that will unburden us the most , taking the shorter route to solutions rather than the long and fruitful one . In effect , we tend to miss life lessons that we ought to reap along the way . Last April 17 , 2007 at Blacksburg , Virginia , not just the USA , but the whole world , was shocked as a Virginia Tech student took away the lives of 33

people including himself and left physical and psychological scars in the soul of a lot more

CBS news coined it as the deadliest one-man shootout in the history of modern-US (www .cbsnews .com /stories /2007 /04 /18 /viginiatechshooting /main .2697827 .sht ml ) The shooter , Cho Seung-Hui , a 23-year old English major , executed a psychologically-rooted escape to reality in a fatal form that he consciously chose . Purchasing 2 hand guns a month and a week prior to the incident (www .abcnews .go .com /US /story ?id 3048108 page 2 ) Cho did not make any efforts to conceal his identity , and worse , he seemed to be too proud that he even mailed photographs and video-manifestos to an international broadcast station , explicitly telling the world that he did it (www .cbsnews .com /stories /2007 /18virginiatechshooting /aim2697827 .html

The massacre-suicide took place in two vicinities cut apart by a good 2-hour interval - (www .abcnews .go .com /US /story ?id 3048108 page 2 ) good enough that police officials and school administration could have done much better to prevent the second shooting to happen . It raised a lot of unanswered questions . Why was the second shooting allowed to happen ? Why didn 't the police catch Cho at once ? Why , in the very first place , did Cho kill the students and professors ? So much more that it makes me realize something - in the middle of our own worlds at that time , we were unconscious that a lot of people had been dying

At this point we can only conduct investigations on what transpired not just on the event itself but also on Cho 's thought processes at the planning and the execution stage . His memorabilia and the other evidences such as the video manifesto and the "suicide note " that he left suggest that he loathed people of the upper social status and this served as his motive to commit such a horrendous thing

We can only do so much in terms of speculating . Taking into consideration the background of the killer as stipulated by people around him , Cho appeared to be a loner and a person who distanced himself from others in spite of his friends ' effort to reach out (www .cnn .com /2007 /US /04 /17 .cho .pro /index .html ) and this , according to Fairbairn (1995 ) is a sign of a suicidal person . He lived away from his parents and he had not been seen visiting their house in Washington in the...