Virginia Tech

Another way of reading some of what I said last week would be as a statement that I would say something about the Virginia Tech killings, and what I think they mean in policy terms. This is really tough to do, in part because I still think it's kind of tacky to be making political points with this horrible situation, but mostly because there isn't much to say.

I mean, 33 people are dead because one kid was deeply and profoundly screwed up. I think it's the height of tacky to attempt to diagnose exactly how he was screwed up from the videos-- shades of Bill Frist and Terri Schiavo-- but it's abundantly clear that something was just not right, and that was the ultimate cause of everything that happened.

The natural question at this point is to ask what can be done. In the wake of this sort of incident, people always want to do something, even if that something is an absolutely moronic symbolic overreaction like at Yale, where they've banned fake weapons from the theater (see also here-- astonishingly, this seems to be the work of a lone Dean. Usually, it takes a committee of five or six faculty to come up with something this jaw-droppingly idiotic...). The really hellish thing about the Virginia Tech situation, though, is that it doesn't really seem like there's anything to be done.

The gun question is obviously the big one, but even there, I'm not sure what you could realistically do. If you look at the timeline buried in the Sunday New York Times piece, he bought the guns weeks in advance. Waiting periods obviously weren't going to be a significant obstacle, and background checks wouldn't've turned up anything.

I'm not sure what realistic policy would've prevented him from getting a gun. Short of banning guns entirely, which isn't even on the table, and even if you did that, you've have to round up millions of the damn things, and I'm not sure how that would be accomplished. Maybe by taking a page from Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and claiming a plan to melt them down and make a giant statue of Jesus?

And guns were just the easiest tool to hand. This kid was clearly crazy, but also still rational enough to make and execute detailed plans. If he couldn't get a gun, he very well could've made a bomb, and done his damage that way.

Maybe something should've turned up on a background check? Maybe, but how and why? Yeah, he had a history of being kind of creepy, but absent some sort of legal action, you can't just go putting notes in people's files. Lots of people are kind of creepy at some point in their lives, and end up being all right. You can't go taking away constitutional rights from all of them.

Really, the only way he would've been prevented from gaining access to weapons would've been if his interactions with the campus counseling services had been recorded and passed on to law enforcement, and that is a road you do not want to go down. Over at Inside Higher Ed, Ira Socol makes an impassioned plea for the privacy rights of students seeking counseling:

In the United States today this is a real concern. Because of a failed national health policy, anything recorded about one's physical or mental health can, and probably will, be used against them. It can eliminate job opportunities. It can halt the acquisition of health insurance. It may eliminate educational opportunities. It could even, if combined with certain ethnicities, block the ability to fly on airlines. And on campuses it can have you dropped from courses, removed from student housing, or expelled from school.

If we want those in trouble to seek help, we must assure them that these things will not happen. I am not saying that counselors, faculty and administrators should not take action when imminent threats arise -- that they must continue to do. But I am saying that universities would best protect their students by ensuring that their mental health services are available, accessible, free, and fully confidential.

He's absolutely right. The privacy of medical records is a really troubling issue, especially when it comes to mental health. The stigma attached to some of these problems is great enough that people who desperately need help will avoid it if they think that it might turn into part of their "permanent record." If you start passing records from student health services onto law enforcement, you'll drive away the students who most need to be reached.

Couldn't he have been forced to get more treatment than he did? Maybe, but it's extremely difficult to force people into mental health treatment, and there are reasons for that. Putting somebody into psychiatric care against their will is a devastating process for all involved, and not something to be undertaken lightly. There are tight limits on those processes because the potential for abuse-- both deliberate and accidental-- is extremely high.

See also Dave and Jake, who have similar thoughts on the problems of mental health care.

What about the campus security/ police aspect? Well, what about it? They're getting a lot of flack for failing to lock down the campus quickly enough, but really, given what little I know of campus safety, it seems like they were doing a pretty good job. A lot's being made of the two-hour gap between the first shooting and the email to students, but two hours is actually a pretty good response time, given the number of people who have to be involved, and the amount of information that needs to be processed. And they apparently thought they had a good lead during that time-- the Times mentions that they sought for and found the ex-boyfriend of the first woman who was killed, thinking him a likely suspect. They determined he wasn't involved right about the time the second round of killings started.

In the end, you're left with questions like "Couldn't somebody have reached out to this kid more?" I'm sure that the student support staff at Virginia Tech are suffering through sleepless nights asking themselves that, but the few details we have suggest that there's not a whole lot that could've been done there, either. The Times describes a few students as making attempts to befriend him after the infamous English class incident, and all were rebuffed. Obviously, we don't know what really went on, and we probably never will, but as much as it sounds like a bad punch line, people have to want to change for this sort of thing to work. If he was sufficiently messed up to refuse attempts at human contact, well, there's not a whole lot you can do.

I don't think people appreciate how difficult the job of student support services is on a college campus. You throw together thousands of adolescents, who are a little goofy at the best of times, most of them away from home for the first time, many of them experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex, and other intoxicants, and then you assemble a too-small staff of underpaid people, and ask them to sort out which students are actually crazy and which ones just have poor social skills. It's a damn near impossible job, and it's amazing to me that they can find people to do it.

Yes, it'd be great if they could find a way to catch people like Cho Seung-Hui before they hurt themselves or others. I'm sure every student services officer in America is staying up late trying to figure out ways to keep students from falling through the cracks, but there's only so much you can do.

So, what should we do in the wake of this incident? Hell if I know. Try to be a better person, I guess, and try to be better to those around us. In the end, I think that's pretty much all we've got.