I'm starting to think the whole key to stopping Cho would have been..

[Virginia Dare]

through tightening the stalking laws. If he had been forced into mental treatment by the state after the two incidents with stalking he may have had a chance. He could have been given the choice, mental treatment or jail. It sounds like there was evidence and proof that he had been committing these acts, and for whatever reason the young women chose not to press charges. Just speculation on my part, but there may have been some pressure from the school not to. This needs to change too. There needs to be a zero tolerance policy for these types of acts.

I'm not sure what the laws are regarding stalkers and guns, but I do know that in some states, even if you are taken into custody for spousal abuse, your guns are taken for a minimum of one year.

[bklyncowgirl]

1. What do you have to do to get kicked out of college these days anyway?

Aside from not paying your bills, of course.

It seems to me that the guy was enough of a problem where the school would have been justified in putting him on some sort of probation--get counseling or get out.

[EFerrari]

2. Really - setting a fire in the dorm! Hello, McFly!

:shrug:

[AZBlue]

7. You hit the nail on the head.

Don't pay...buh bye.

Set fire to a dorm, threaten suicide, write disturbing stories, stalk women....let's sit down and discuss next your schedule for next semester, shall we?

[Virginia Dare]

12. That is true, and I fully agree with that..

however, he could just as easily committed those acts anywhere, or he could have easily come back to the campus and done it. He was in such a psychotic state, I think he was intent on murdering a lot of people.

[louis-t]

14. When a winger radio host made the same statement, I thought:

kicking him out could have just as easily been the thing that sets him off. How does kicking someone out solve anything? His grudge is with people on campus. He would come back just as disgruntled former employees come back.

[bklyncowgirl]

32. My point was that this was a person in serious need of psychiatric care

He needed treatment. He should have been required to accept treatment as a condition for his remaining at school. If he refused to deal with his problems and/or his behavior did not change then the should have been expelled as a danger to everyone around him.

Is it fair to the other students to have to go to class with someone who justifiably scared the hell out of them even if he did not go postal.

[RFKHumphreyObama]

33. I thought the same

I've mentioned here previously that one of my accquaintances in my college dorm was expelled from campus under police supervision after displaying threatening behaviors to another female student who was one of my inner circle of friends. Cho seems to have behaved much worse than this guy ever did but he seems to have got off rather lightly considering he was not only stalking but also attempting to set fire to a dorm room

[Nikia]

35. I agree

That would have been best for him and everyone else.

[Zuiderelle]

3. And how long would they keep him locked up? As long as we do some murderers?

Who get out and murder again, or rapists who get out an rape again? He was ordered to mental treatment after one of the stalking incidents. Apparently that didn't stop him.

The only way to have stopped him would have been to make it impossible for him to have purchased those guns. Far fewer people would have died if his only available weapon was a knife or a crossbow, for instance.

[Irreverend IX]

5. If the judge had forcibly committed him...

That would have stopped him from purchasing the guns. The judge instead ordered him to do outpatient treatment, which does not prevent gun purchases. I think that any court order to receive mental treatment should bar someone from buying guns, but I don't see why any other laws are necessary.

The university should have expelled him as soon as his stalking behavior came to light, and they definitely should have kicked him out when he started that fire. People who do stuff like that have no business being in college in the first place.

[Virginia Dare]

8. Apparently he wasn't forced to stay in mental treatment..

long enough to get diagnosed and treated. Why is that?

You could never make it impossible for him to purchase the guns unfortunately, there's always the black market. As long as he was in that state of mind, which was psychotic in the extreme, he probably would have found a way to get the guns. Money talks in that business.

I don't disagree that the gun laws are too lax, and he was able to get the guns and ammo way too easily, and legally. Something's not right there.

[louis-t]

34. I believe it was because he checked himself in.

That's why it didn't go on his background info.

[sandnsea]

4. Mechanism to trigger "adjudication"

From what I can see, there isn't a good mechanism for a psychiatrist to easily adjudicate. We need a law that says the psychiatrist can verbally inform the patient, send written notification to the patient and court - and give the patient ten days to respond, except in emergency - and then the name goes to the database.

To my knowledge, no state has a good mechanism for including names of dangerous psych patients to the gun database. All the changes in mental health treatment won't matter if there's no structure to send names to the database.

[gratuitous]

6. I don't know about "forcing" folks into mental treatment

But surely with a minor re-tooling of our national budget and spending priorities (seems to me that spending more than a billion dollars a day for "defense" is a ripe cluster of low-hanging fruit) we could afford to beef up our health care system to provide screening for mental and physical health. How might Monday have been different if the Virginia Tech shooter had had access to free screening and evaluation, followed up with professional mental health services? And if that sounds expensive, there are probably 34 families who feel that it would be worth every penny.

[Warpy]

10. You're expecting reasonable behavior and good judgment

from the very people who are least capable of it.

[Virginia Dare]

11. That's the problem..

he had access to the school mental health facilities but he refused treatment. Because he was over 21, and also because of privacy laws, the school could not get his parents involved, not that there is any evidence that would have made the difference.

[EFerrari]

13. Some people don't have the insight or, it waffles on them

when they are stressed out.

[Warpy]

9. The stalking consisted of cell phone photos and a couple of

creepy emails. What that should have provoked isn't a visit from police regarding a stalking law violation but some sort of order to report to the school shrink accompanied by campus cops.

If only they'd followed up on this guy, even every six months, they'd have spotted the deterioration that everybody else saw and gotten his parents involved in getting him some help.

Family members of mentally ill people have their hands tied right now. Involuntary commitment requires a demonstration of danger to self or others, meaning there has to be a weapon in hand or a failed suicide. This definition is far too narrow, IMO, because danger to self includes not being able to care for one's own well being and danger to others should include behaviors like simple stalking and repeated verbal threats. These things should be enough to qualify for involuntary evaluation and treatment, if necessary, and it has to cover more than 72 hours. If anything is found, it should be followed up.

That's all that would have saved this guy (and he was miserable), his parents, the people he murdered, and their families all this grief.

[EFerrari]

25. My ex seems to be out there and not doing very well.

Yesterday, I sent out an email to some of his most adult and responsible friends that said, you can't count on this system and you have a choice to be one of the 20 people who didn't follow through for him just like the 20 people who didn't follow through for Cho or you can do the right thing for your friend and bend ears until one says "I give". My ex won't go on a shooting spree but there will nevertheless be needless destruction and consequences if he is left to his own devices in the same way.

We do have our hands tied AND the house seems to be on fire. We HAVE to deal with the situation exactly as it is now until it changes. Okay, so we have to impersonate Harry Houdini -- tough, that's the job. Not one of those "20 people" had a clear shot at getting Cho handled AND they needed to try urgently anyway.

Most people don't know that. They seem to believe someone else knows better or can do more.

That's simply not true today. I hope we have better resources soon. This is so needless.

[bobbolink]

15. Here's an "extreme" proposal.....

Why don't we, as a society, start taking OUR violence seriously, and realize that we, AS A SOCIETY, have a problem, and start understanding what WE, AS A SOCIETY, need to do?

Making it all an individual problem may help you feel better about yourself, but it does NOTHING to keep this pattern from happening over and over and over and over.....

As Michael Moore said in Bowling for Columbine, Canadians have as many guns, but don't have all the violence. What is it about USians that we go for violence?????

Isn't that the crux of the matter?

Don't other societies have "mental illness", and if they do, why don't they, too, have all these shoot-em-ups?

WE, AS A SOCIETY, have a bad problem here. When are we going to look at our SOCIETY, instead of just wanting to lock up more and more people as a preventive? Doesn't that ever occur to you that it sounds just a bit like the whole Gitmo strategery??????

[Virginia Dare]

17. Agreed, violence is way too glorified in our society..n/t

[bobbolink]

23. That's true, but not all I'm saying.

It's also too easy to blame everything on violent movies, songs, etc.

It's part of the symptomology.

WE NEED TO LOOK AT OUR SOCIETAL VIOLENCE!

[Bluerthanblue]

19. so well put- agree with you 100%- we need to look homeward

[bobbolink]

26. Thank you! We've been a violent nation since DAY 1.

None of this should come as a surprise.

The only surprise should be that there isn't MORE mass shootings!

We think violent, we talk violent, and we run each other down constantly (yes, right here in River City, too!), and don't look for ways to build each other up rather than tear each other down. It's all part of the cycle of violence.

When are we going to look in the mirror and ask the right questions, instead of looking for safety by targettting and punishing those who are "different"????

[treestar]

29. Yes, exactly. We've tried laws and controls for decades and that

does not guarantee anything. Someone willing to kill themselves can get away with anything in the last few hours, that's a fact no law or system of security can beat.

We need to figure out who is so out there that they feel they don't belong to society, and figure out how to get them in rather than just punish them. It seems we prefer to feel superior to them.

[bobbolink]

36. again, you're singling out individuals, rather than seeing this as a societal issue

"We need to figure out who is so out there that they feel they don't belong to society, and figure out how to get them in rather than just punish them. "

Solves NOTHING of our societal violence.

Just manipulates, so that you feel "safer".

[Karenina]

31. It took me MONTHS to decompress

after moving to Germany from L.A. Police helicopters, drug dealers, shootings, earthquakes in SANTA MONICA had rendered me a nervous wreck. I instinctively hit the dirt one day, trying to encourage the sheep to come talk to me, the moment I heard shots fired. The Jägers were shooting at pheasants. They saw my reaction in the distance and took it quite seriously. A Stammtisch (community gathering around a big table with lots of beer) was immediately scheduled for that evening where ALL the regulations about gun use and hunting game (they are VERY STRICT) were thoroughly explained to me. What touched me so much was the high level of "menschlich" concern. And the pheasant was delicious.

COMMUNITY.

[bobbolink]

37. Your post brought tears immediately to my eyes, and I thank you so very much!

That is such a strong statement about community, (I hate to use that word, because it's been so misused, but right now don't know the appropriate word), and understanding, and support for those who are injured.

God, how I wish I had somewhere to go to get that kind of understanding and support!!

Thank you... thank you... thank you... :hug:

If only we USians could get off our superiority high-horses, and learn to listen and care like this! Maybe we wouldn't have so many walking wounded.

:cry:

With your permission, I would like to use your example for a letter I'm writing--what you said is soooo profound!

[Karenina]

38. Please, feel free , Bobbolink!!!

Whenever I see your posts, I send "good thoughts" to you and yours. Our lives are not easy, but we DO have each other. :hug:

[damntexdem]

16. True. But better emergency management might have stopped the killing ...

after the two in the dormitory.

[Virginia Dare]

24. I think he used the first murder as a cover for the others..

he knew that the authorities would be concentrating on that scene, giving him time to lock himself inside Norris and commit the other murders. He made it look like a domestic shooting, which would throw immediate suspicion on somebody else, I really do think he had all of that planned out in his twisted mind.

Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech authorities fell for it. Very tragic.

Why he targeted that specific girl, and why he chose those classrooms in Norris Hall, I haven't heard any theories on that, but it's obvious he had been planning this for some time.

[Cleita]

18. He definitely needed to be institutionalized until a treatment

program that managed his disease was implemented. However, today with our health care system in tatters, the money to take care of these mental health patients doesn't exist anymore except as bandaids. Those who can afford it get treatment and those who can't make the decision for themselves or whose families can't afford them don't.

[virginia mountainman]

20. Minor problem...

His "stalking victims" did NOT want to press charges....

Their really is not any law to tighten, on that end of it. None of the victims signed out an warrants.

[Virginia Dare]

30. Maybe they didn't press charges..

because it wasn't worth their while? From what I understand stalking is very hard to convict in a court of law, the way the laws are presently written. You have to prove that the person intends you bodily harm.

[atreides1]

21. Maybe or Maybe Not

Yes the young women chose not to press charges, perhaps they just decided that they didn't want to deal with the hassle of going to court and having to testify? As for your speculation that the school might have pressured these young women not to press charges, why? It's not like Cho was on any of the sports teams, it hasn't been reported yet that he was academically gifted, so what kind of motivation would the school have?


I do agree that there needs to be a zero tolerance policy for these types of acts, and said policy should be applied to all students.

As for stalkers and guns, not sure what the law in Virginia is.

Now let's look at what happened in 2005 regarding his Official psychiatric evaluation

On December 13, 2005, Cho was temporarily detained for a psychiatric assessment, as he was suspected to be mentally ill and a danger to himself or others by a Montgomery County, Virginia district court. Virginia Special Justice Paul Barnett certified in an order that Cho " an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness," and directed that as a "Court-ordered Out-Patient he follow all recommended treatments." Following a psychiatric evaluation and medical exam which noted Cho's flat affect and depressed mood, he was told to undergo outpatient care and was released on December 14, 2005. Some reports state that Cho is believed to have been taking psychiatric medications for depression, but there is no record of this in federal prescription databases.The fact he was not committed meant he was still legally eligible to buy guns, avoiding the ban on those who have been involuntarily committed from owning firearms.

Everything was done in accordance with the current law, but notice that he was placed in an Out Patient status and was told to undergo care, before being released. Cho was an adult and was expected to follow the courts orders.

The question is what action did the court take to insure that he was seeking treatment and taking his meds?

[Dora]

22. I had a peeper on my porch once. The police, OMG...

Years ago, I had a peeper on the my apartment patio, trying to look into my bedroom between the slats of my miniblinds. I was alerted to his presence by a very skittish cat.

I called 911, and as a police car pulled up, he walked away from my apartment. The policeman stopped him, then came to my apartment. I affirmed that it was the guy who had been on my patio, and that I was really creeped out.

The pig of a cop told me that the peeper wasn't trespassing on my patio, and hadn't really been doing anything wrong - nothing provable in a court of law. NO KIDDING. This "officer" of the LAW discouraged me from pressing charges.

I had two more run-ins with this peeper, and each time he got away before the police showed up. Finally, one night I heard him knock over something on the patio, and long story short - I chased him through my parking lot while I was dressed in my bathrobe and screaming profanities.

He never came back again, and I continue to live happily ever after.

But it's my opinion that LAW ENFORCEMENT continues to do very little to protect women from predators, and dismisses women's fears and concerns as hysteria and/or imagination. I've seen women's complaints about law, justice, and misogyny in the U.S. culture here on DU, and the number of men here who say, "Who, me? I resent that!" instead of addressing the issue and participating in an open dialogue makes me gnash my teeth.

[nadinbrzezinski]

27. It really depends on the state and the city

locally they are trained to take you seriously

but I am aware I live in some ways, in an exception to the rule community

[treestar]

28. Extend the domestic violence laws to dating relationships

It is fairly easy to get a restraining order against an ex-husband or a live-in boyfriend in most states (or vice versa if the woman is the violent one).

But most states don't extend that to dating relationships.

These restraining orders prohibit the person from having a gun, at least for a time period.

Not that they can't get one anyway. But at least they might not be able to buy it legally, as Cho did. Which could make it harder to get.

No effect on the Columbine case, either.