Searching for a Scapegoat

The Opinionator

Give the Virginia Tech administration a break: “The overwhelming majority of murders that take place on campus (or anywhere else) are not a prelude to a mass killing,” writes The Economist’s Megan McArdle, who is guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic Online. “Should we really act as if they were, because it might prevent the 0.001 percent that are?” She continues:

Shutting down campus is not free; if nothing else, it absorbs a huge number of police resources that could otherwise be used to track down the killer in the vast majority of cases where the killer is still at loose, armed, dangerous, and not planning to kill himself. In this particular case, shutting down campus would have been the right answer. But in 99.999 percent of cases, it would have been the wrong answer, and would have placed the public at greater risk, as well as producing mass hysteria on campus. Castigating the administrators for getting it wrong, or rushing to enact legislation that ensures administrators do the wrong thing in most cases, is bad decision-making.

The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat, who is also guest-blogging for Sullivan, adds that there may not be “actually anything significant to learn about gun policy from yesterday’s violence: Extreme, unpredictable events like this one seem like precisely the kind of thing that shouldn’t dictate lawmaking decisions (though of course they inevitably do).” Douthat writes:

If there’s a case for gun control, it’s in the daily run of shooting deaths that don’t make the front page; if there’s a case against gun control, it’s in the daily run of crimes deterred by an armed citizenry (and in more abstract questions of personal liberty), not in the faint chance that a kid with a conceal-and-carry permit might have taken the Virginia killer down.

But The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., says there is a lesson in the Blacksburg, Va., massacre: It was predictable, at least by those who knew the killer. (See this blog post by an AOL employee for some evidence that supports Jenkins’s position.)

“Psychologists make a professional habit of saying that violence can’t be predicted, perhaps true in the clinical setting. In the workplace and the normal encounters of everyday life, however, others do get glimpses of the personality and external circumstances that sometimes combine to produce such mass shootings,” Jenkins writes. “One of our enduring frustrations is that — after we’ve waded through the predictable thickets of adjectives describing the killer as ‘quiet’ and the killings as ‘senseless’ — it turns out warning signs were present [$], that co-workers, neighbors or family members had seen the culprit clearly enough to be afraid.”

Because Americans reject the idea of “trying to lock up people based on their personalities,” Jenkins writes, the alternative is to allow those suspicious friends and neighbors to arm themselves for protection. “If society can’t process and react to warning signs given off by such people collectively, an alternative is to expand the opportunity for individuals to process and react to them personally.”