School Shootings: My Son Was at the Virginia Tech Massacre

[DonViejo]

Jan 13, 2013 4:45 AM EST

As the mother of a Virginia Tech student who hid as his classmates were massacred, I can sum up the proposals to flood our schools with more guns in one word: madness. By Azar Nafisi

I will not forget April 16, 2007. It was a calm spring morning and I was making coffee, getting ready to go back to my writing. The news was on and I kept hearing a voice repeating: gunman on campus. It took me a while to digest the fact that the gunman was on the campus of my son’s university, the only university he had applied to because, from the very start, he knew he wanted to go to Virginia Tech.

It took us hours before we could finally reach him on his cell phone. He, along with his classmates, had been locked in the building adjacent to the one where his fellow students and teachers were being massacred. Having experienced a war and a revolution I knew how the immense relief you feel upon discovering that your loved one is not among the victims is accompanied by immense guilt, because you also know that someone else is mourning even as you are celebrating.


Dara returned home as soon as he could, unable to tolerate the invasion of his beloved campus by media, and by intruders that prevented him from the solitary space needed to somehow come to terms with the tragedy. I could not help reminding myself that our children had survived a war and a revolution only to be so near death in a small friendly town called Blacksburg. In Iran the only people with guns, the only ones we were afraid of, belonged to the regime. Over the 18 years I spent in the Islamic Republic, I was filled with anxiety about the Revolutionary guards raiding our schools, universities, malls, movie houses, restaurants and coffee shops. Never in those years did I or anyone I knew worry about ordinary people going on killing sprees.

This new tragedy—26 individuals, 27 counting the shooter’s mother, and 20 of them children—has brought back all the horror of the tragedies before it. It is the anger and helplessness that makes me write, the intolerable rage as I listen to the NRA chief blaming videos, movies, media, mental health, every element that exists in other democratic countries and yet has not led to the scale of violence America has been experiencing because of guns, and brazenly suggesting that good guys with guns will solve the problem of bad guys with guns.

-snip-

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/13/school-shootings-my-son-was-at-the-virginia-tech-massacre.html

[Kalidurga]

1. This should be required reading...

"Drugs don't kill people"... She nails the problem of the NRA logic right there.

[sad-cafe]

2. this is good

I could not imagine the horror these kids go through.

[Scuba]

3. My son was at Tech when the shooting occurred also. It took many hours before I ...

... was able to get through to him on the cell phone. By that time, he was sitting in a barber's chair, getting a haircut.

"Sorry, I would have called if I'd known you were worried" he told me.

Thanks for the link to this article. Good stuff.

[xchrom]

4. Du rec. Nt

[kag]

5. It scares me a little

When she talks about mandating that everyone carry an assault rifle. I know she's being satirical, but I can just hear the "nuts" saying "Hell, yeah! That's exactly what we need!"

[green for victory]

6. Seung-Hui Cho

as I listen to the NRA chief blaming videos, movies, media, mental health,

Cho, a senior English major at Virginia Tech, had previously been diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder. During much of his middle school and high school years, he received therapy and special education support. After graduating from high school, Cho enrolled at Virginia Tech. Because of federal privacy laws, Virginia Tech was unaware of Cho's previous diagnosis or the accommodations he had been granted at school. In 2005, Cho was accused of stalking two female students. After an investigation, a Virginia special justice declared Cho mentally ill and ordered him to attend treatment.[5] Lucinda Roy, a professor and former chairwoman of the English department, had asked Cho to seek counseling.[6] Cho's mother turned to her church for help.



The Virginia Tech Review Panel detailed numerous incidents of aberrant behavior beginning in Cho's junior year of college that should have served as a warning to his deteriorating mental condition. Several former professors of Cho reported that his writing as well as his classroom behavior was disturbing, and he was encouraged to seek counseling.[52][53] He was also investigated by the university for stalking and harassing two female students.[54] In 2005, Cho had been declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice and ordered to seek outpatient treatment.[55]

The Virginia Tech Review Panel Report faulted university officials for failing to share information that would have shed light on the seriousness of Cho's problems, citing misinterpretations of federal privacy laws.[56][57] The report also pointed to failures by Virginia Tech's counseling center, flaws in Virginia's mental health laws, and inadequate state mental health services, but concluded that "Cho himself was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health" in college.[1] The report also stated that the classification detail that Cho was to seek "outpatient" rather than "inpatient" treatment would generally have been legally interpreted at the time as not requiring that Cho be reported to Virginia's Central Criminal Records Exchange (CCRE) and entered into the CCRE database of people prohibited from purchasing or possessing a firearm.

Cho's underlying psychological diagnosis at the time of the shootings remains a matter of speculation.[58]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_Massacre

*************

He also took a prescription medicine. Neither Mr. Aust nor Mr. Grewal knew what the medicine was for, but officials said prescription medications related to the treatment of psychological problems had been found among Mr. Cho’s effects.

This article states: "At least five times in the chapter on mental health, Virginia Tech employees responded to your requests for information by saying their records were missing. Are you concerned about these missing or unfurnished records? (President Charles Steger acknowledged later Thursday that some employees mishandled documents and are no longer employed by Tech.)"

"It's a curious matter to us as a panel that some of these records have disappeared from the Cook Counseling Center. He was triaged three times -- once by phone in November, once by phone in December and once in person in December. And all three of those reports are gone."
http://ssristories.com/show.php?item=1725
**************

The people can not be trusted with the truth

[truth2power]

7. What could be in those reports that wasn't supposed to get out?...

It seems that anything indicating he was mentally ill wouldn't be a surprise. Why, then, are the recored gone?

No, I don't believe they just "happened" to get lost.

[riderinthestorm]

8. Most mentally ill people are the victims rather than perpetrators of violence.

Stigmatizing anyone with a mental illness isn't the way to go imho.

Its easy access to guns that's the problem in ALL of these cases (since not all mass shooters are mentally ill). Its not video games, or special ed classes, or mental healthcare (or the lack thereof), or bad parenting, or bad school security....

Easy access to guns is the only constant in every single one of these cases. Period.

[WillyT]

9. HUGE K & R !!!

[marions ghost]

10. K&R

:kick: