The Binary Circumstance

Shortly after NBC’s Matt Lauer arrived at the Virginia Tech campus he walked from West Ambler Johnston Hall to Norris Hall to see how long it would take. He said in a report that it took about five minutes. He wondered aloud what the shooter was doing during the two hours between the shootings in the dorm and the carnage in the engineering building.

Now, we have at least part of the answer and it’s a little ironic given Lauer’s report. It appears that Cho Seung-Hui sent a package to NBC in New York.

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Between his first and second bursts of gunfire, the Virginia Tech gunman mailed a package to NBC News containing what authorities said were video, photos of himself brandishng weapons, and a rambling diatribe about getting even with rich people.

[…]

NBC said that a time stamp on the package indicated the material was mailed in the two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire in a high-rise dormitory and the second fusillade, at a classroom building.

The package included digital images of him holding weapons and a manifesto that “rants against rich people and warns that he wants to get even,” according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case.

Add to this the fact that he had no ID on him when he committed the murder-suicide, and it took some time for the police to identify him, it sounds like he wanted to control how he was portrayed in the media. Perhaps he hoped that NBC would get the packet before he had been identified. There were three attempts at getting the zip code correct on the envelope and NBC reported on the Nightly News that if it had had the correct zip code, it probably would have arrived a day earlier.

It has been reported more than once that his writings conveyed a hatred of the rich. I’m going to guess that he was either never explosed to Ayn Rand’s philosophy or if exposed, he didn’t understand it.

Here are some quotes from Cho’s video manifesto:

• “You just loved to crucify me. You loved inducing cancer in my head, terror in my heart and ripping my soul all this time.”

• “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.”

• “Do you know what it feels like to be spit on your face and have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have your throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?

You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. And you want to inject as much misery in our lives because you can, just because you can. You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”

His view of himself as a martyr for some cause reminds me of the 9/11 terrorists. As you can see, religious ideation played a role in his view of himself as some kind of savior and his plot to get back at those he viewed as evil doers.

This kid was in a tremendous amount of pain and he wanted to be sure that everybody else felt it as well.

Again, if he had incorporated the basic tenets of Rand’s philosophy into his thinking, he would not have held self-sacrifice in such high regard, nor would he have held Jesus Christ up in such a bizarre way as a role model.

It now appears that there were many red flags in Cho Seung-Hui’s behavior years before he went out and bought a gun to kill 32 people and them himself at Virginia Tech.

There were clues in his writing, teachers and students who were so frightened of him that they didn’t want to be in the same class with him, and complaints that he was stalking women, and the visit to a mental health facility because a friend thought he was suicidal. He had a fantasy girlfriend.

There were efforts by teachers in the English department to get him into counseling but he refused to go.

This morning I heard several of his fellow students talk on TV of praying to God and how “they know” that their friends who were killed are now in heaven. How could they know that? These beliefs go unchallenged even though there is no evidence to support them.

How can reporters like Matt Lauer talk about Cho Seung-Hui being troubled and make references to his delusions and then listen to other students openly verbalize the fantasies they use to cope with reality while never pointing out that their beliefs are not rooted in reality.

There were the usual stories of self-sacrifice and heroism.

Some delusions are socially acceptable. When they are socially acceptable they are tolerated, encouraged, and rewarded. Religion is at the top of the list of socially-acceptable delusions. Cho Seung-Hui’s fantasies were not socially acceptable or commonly held. People said he did not communicate, was withdrawn, depressed, a loner. Who was he going to talk to?

Can people who are living in a fantasy world themselves help a student like him deal with his own delusions? No way. They will only encourage him to conform to their own delusional view of existence–self-sacrifice to the collective delusion.

They’re already talking about how we need more gun control. How about delusion control?

Guns don’t have a delusions. People do.

I’ve been wondering if the man who killed more than 30 people and then himself at Virginia Tech could have been on a medication that would impact his thinking. While such reactions are rare, I know from first-hand experience that they can happen. And what makes it worse is that your doctor, who is viewed as the authority and the scientist, is telling you to take the medication because it will make you better. So you have a hard time reconciling in your mind the kind of thoughts you are having with the idea of being “better.”

If you decide that the doctor is right, you could easily start thinking that you are the one who is healthy and everybody else is sick.

In my case, I was able to tell myself that I don’t usually think such thoughts and stop taking the medication. Very quickly, I was myself again. I’m totally speculating here, but I wonder if Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior at VPI, was having emotional problems, then got a prescription for something that made his emotional problem worse rather than better.

There is already a hint of this in the latest reports:

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was identified Tuesday as a English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service.

News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic, and that he left a note in his dorm in which he railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus.

Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said. He was living on campus in a different dorm from the one where Monday’s bloodbath began.

A 23-year-old does not have the life experience to know that some of what he has been taught to trust is not trustworthy. For example, doctors are not always acting in the patient’s best interest, or that they have a relationship with drug companies where they get financial rewards for writing certain prescriptions.

The irrational, contradictory premises that serve as the foundation for our culture are enough to drive some people crazy. And there’s no escaping them. They are everywhere.

It’s a full-time job just hanging onto your self in a culture that is built on self-sacrifice.

You’re going to hear a lot of talk about the beauty of self-sacrifice and selflessness in the days and weeks ahead with regard to this tragedy. Commentators will fail to note, however, that that’s exactly what Cho Seung-Hui did.

The current death toll in the Virginia Tech shooting is 31, including the gunman.

From AP/Yahoo:

BLACKSBURG, Va. - A gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech dorm and then, two hours later, in a classroom across campus Monday, killing at least 30 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, government officials told The Associated Press. The gunman was killed, bringing the death toll to 31.

[…]

The massacre took place at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus, beginning at about 7:15 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston, a coed dormitory that houses 895 people, and continuing at least two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building about a half-mile away, authorities said.

Police said they were still investigating the shooting at the dorm when they got word of gunfire at the classroom building.

I feel a personal connection to this tragedy because I spent my freshman year and part of my sophomore year in 1970-71 at Virginia Tech (also known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) and I remember the layout of the campus well and know where the buildings are located.

Given the distance between the buildings it’s amazing that somebody could pull off a mass murder in the dorm and then pull off another massacre in an academic building two hours later without being stopped.

The Virginia Tech campus is built around a huge drillfield, a remnant of when they had a big ROTC program. (Campus maps: Hi-res pdf, Lo-res pdf) You can see cadets in their uniforms in the video footage about the shooting so they apparently still have the program.

The dorms are on one side of the drillfield and many of the academic buildings are on the other. In addition, there are multiple rows of buildings around the drillfield. It was a very large campus back when I went there and I’m sure it’s much bigger now.

Some students bitterly questioned why the gunman was able to strike a second time, two hours after the bloodshed began.

“What happened today this was ridiculous. And I don’t know what happened or what was going through this guy’s mind,” student Jason Piatt told CNN. “But I’m pretty outraged and I’ll say on the record I’m pretty outraged that someone died in a shooting in a dorm at 7 o’clock in the morning and the first e-mail about it — no mention of locking down campus, no mention of canceling classes — they just mention that they’re investigating a shooting two hours later at 9:22.”

He added: “That’s pretty ridiculous and meanwhile, while they’re sending out that e-mail, 22 more people got killed.”

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a couple of interesting e-mails in her post about the VPI shootings.

The first deals with the fact that a law that would have allowed students to carry guns for self-defense on campus was recently defeated and the VPI administration was happy about it. People who want to commit crimes always seem to have guns but the people who need them to defend themselves rarely do.

The second is a chilling account from from a student who was in Norris Hall when the shooting took place. In that case, barricading the door to their classroom with a desk was a simple, heroic act of self-defense that saved their lives. Bravo!