Psychology

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, everyone's trying to figure out what made Cho tick and ultimately what made him a killer. People are asking why the warning signs weren't heeded and something done about Cho long before he bought his guns and opened fire. News stories paint a picture of a lonely, quiet kid who didn't have many friends, who spent a lot of time alone. But how many thousands of kids would this apply to?

I was that kid. I was bullied when I was young. Who wasn't? I didn't have friends. I spent a lot of time alone. I read a story recounting how Cho would spend a lot of time playing basketball alone. For me, it was tennis. I spent hours a day on a tennis court, hitting against a wall. I was quiet (though from descriptions nowhere near as quiet as Cho), and was mocked because of it. All that's left me socially awkward, not knowing how to talk to people. What it didn't leave me was someone ready to pick up a gun and start killing.

On a similar note, I've known two women who were sexually molested and abused as kids. One went on to live a normal, healthy life. The other was eaten up inside and whose life became a never ending spiral of disintegration and self-destruction. I don't even know if she's alive now.

This just shows why psychology, while interesting, is not science. There's no predictive ability. I'm not trying to compare myself with Cho. God forbid. But millions of kids probably had experiences very similar to Cho, kids who didn't subsequently go on any rampages. Looking at those motivations is insightful, after the fact, in trying to get a grip on the kid's mind. But these do not define why he became what he became.

So all this talk about warning signs is a little disquieting. Circumstances do not dictate future actions. There are also the intangibles that make the difference between someone who learns to deal with their pain and those who let the pain eat them alive. We read that the warning signs for Cho include violent, disturbing plays. There's a whole industry out there devoted to making movies based on violent, disturbing scripts. Are all the writers of those scripts about to become killers?

In the end, you can't lock up everybody who is deemed to have some psychological problem. You can't lock up everyone who has ever written a disturbing play, or everyone who is quiet, or everyone who doesn't have a lot of friends. You cannot predict who will become a killer. So rather than blaming the doctors and police who failed to have the foresight to know that this one kid among many that passed their way would one day kill 32 people and then himself, blame Cho for ultimately making the decision to go that way.