Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted April 20, 2007.

Another rampage massacre, this time the worst ever. Which means another fake attempt at trying to understand this uniquely American crime -- these interminable rage killing sprees in our workplaces and our schoolyards.

What makes the Virginia Tech massacre more horrifying isn't just the body count but the reaction of the living: The official fake soul-searching is more idiotic than ever, revealing, if anything, a culture that is so insanely delusional and incapable of self-reflection that it almost makes these rampage massacres seem relatively natural.

The footage from Seung-Hui's "media manifesto" has played on cable news on an endless loop for days now, and no one has considered the merits of his grievances -- except to cast them as proof positive that Cho Seung-Hui was one sick guy.

Of all the idiotic reactions, so far none tops an article posted on MSNBC.com, written by an "investigative reporter" with the ill-begotten name of "Bill Dedman." His investigation allegedly revealed that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter, displayed alleged classic warning signs of a rampage shooting. Citing a landmark Secret Service study of schoolyard rampage massacre, Dedman observed, "In more than three out of four school shootings, the attacker had made no threat against the schoolteachers or students. But most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. The attackers posed a threat even though they hadn't made a threat."

In other words, if you think someone's weird, but he hasn't threatened anyone, he's a threat.

There are two very serious flaws in Dedman's investigation. First, if the profile of a schoolyard rampager is someone who doesn't threaten anyone but who raises suspicions, then America will have to open up a new GULAG archipelago to hold all of the millions of kids who fit this description. But the second flaw is even more serious: the Secret Service study Dedman cites draws exactly the opposite conclusion: There is no way to profile a potential schoolyard killer. That was what was so shocking about the report. Everyone who has studied these rage massacres knows it. Everyone but journalists like Dedman, that is.

What Dedman's article reveals isn't just the sloppy work of a typical mainstream hack but, rather, of a culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre -- one that doesn't implicate it in the crime.

It is is far more difficult to deal with the possibility that other factors may have led to the massacre, factors that are still too painful and close to us to consider. For example, how was this nerdy South Korean immigrant treated at his suburban high school and at Virginia Tech? What is the campus life like? What was it about Virginia Tech that made it the setting for the first student-on-student college massacre? And why were there copycat threats at campuses across Middle America over the following days?

Consider the recent history of schoolyard massacres in America, and you'll see why I ask those questions.

Schoolyard shootings got their start in small-town America, making their appearance in 1996. The white, suburban middle-class massacres that Columbine popularized got their start in rural towns like Moses Lake, Wash., West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark.

True, there had already been schoolyard shootings. In Kentucky alone, there were two that occurred before the Paducah massacre, one in Carter County in 1993 and another in Union in 1994. What was new about these modern school rampage shootings was that they caught on and found sympathy with a broader audience.

Never before had people considered that a schoolyard massacre could happen at any white middle-class suburban high school in America. But through the Moses Lake-Paducah-Jonesboro rage massacres, this new phenomenon entered the collective adolescent conscious. They provided a new context for something already felt, already brewing, but not yet expressed.

In his book "No Easy Answer," Brooks Brown, a former Columbine student and childhood friend of one of the Columbine killers, explained how the rage rebellion context reached his school:

The end of my junior year (1998), school shootings were making their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Miss. Two months later, in West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. ...

Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. ...

When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how "it was going to happen at Columbine next." They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.

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Mark Ames is editor of the eXile, a Moscow English alt weekly. He is the author of "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond," from which a portion of this text is adapted.

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