A Tragedy In Search of a Stereotype

When the dust settles and the TV cameras go to film another tragedy, all that will be remembered will be the young lives cut short, a handful of professors who died by their sides and the image of a lunatic who brought on this unspeakable carnage. And this is the way it should be.

For now, though, there is a human need to package this senseless bloody morning into something we can all understand. We do this because deep down inside all of us there is a need to put our normal thought process into the mind of a lunatic. We should all just stop because there is nothing normal and nothing sane about what the gunman did, and all the TV experts and resident psychologists getting airtime can just spare us their opinions. This was a kid consumed by evil who carried out the most despicable act of turning his evil on innocents.

Naturally it is difficult for the news media to come to grips with a simple and practical explanation. They want to say we live in a culture of guns; we do. They want to tell us our gun laws are too lax; they are. They want us to know he was a loner, a freak; and he was. They want us to examine the fact he was a South Korean immigrant; of course he was. They feel the need to question the administration and the campus police for their lack of premonition; but nobody could have predicted what would happen. They can’t understand why this kid wasn’t watched more closely based on his past behavior; there are hundreds like him on every campus.

What can be done to prevent this kind of sick event from happening again? Probably nothing, but we can learn from the things that aren’t so apparent and stop searching for the perfect stereotype to fit our preconceived biases. We’re much better off leaving this crazed kid in the same category as all mass murderers and mourn those who died. We’ll all sleep better knowing this particular mass murderer is a genetic mutant and in no way resembles 99.99 percent of the rest of us. Rest in peace to the victims.