Cho Never Received Outpatient Treatment

Shockingly, Cho never received the mandatory treatment he was court-ordered to have in December of 2005 (Hat Tip: Bugs):

Seung Hui Cho never received the treatment ordered by a judge who declared him dangerously mentally ill less than two years before his rampage at Virginia Tech, law enforcement officials said, exposing flaws in Virginia's labyrinthine mental health system, including confusion about the law, spotty enforcement and inadequate funding....

When a court gives a mandatory order that someone get outpatient treatment, that order is to the individual, not an agency," said Christopher Flynn, director of the Cook Counseling Center. The one responsible for ensuring that the mentally ill person receives help in these sorts of cases, he said, is the mentally ill person. "I've never seen someone delivered to me with an order that says, 'This person has been discharged; he's now your responsibility.' That doesn't happen."

Yes, it's always best to let a mentally ill person decide whether or not they need to attend court-ordered treatment. Maybe the next step should be to let criminals decide whether or not they want to go to jail or not.

Shooter is Man from South Korea

The shooter in the VT massacre has been identified:

Police identified the classroom shooter as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a senior from South Korea who was in the English department and lived in another dorm on campus. They said Cho committed suicide after the attacks, and there was no indication Tuesday of a possible motive.

"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

It seems that everyone is blaming the "American gun culture" on what happened but perhaps Cho Seung-Hui took his cues from another infamous mass murderer, Woo Bum-Kon, also from Korea:

Bum-Kon had an argument with his live-in girlfriend in the afternoon of April 26, 1982. Enraged, he left the house and went to the police armory, where he began consuming large amounts of whiskey. He became moderately drunk, raided the police armory of its weapons and built a personal arsenal. Bum-Kon then stole a single high-powered rifle and some grenades and left the armory. It was by this point around dinner time. He walked from house to house, and abused his position as a police officer to make people feel safe and gain entry to the home. Then he shot the victims, or killed the entire family with a grenade. He continued this pattern for the next eight hours, and into the early morning hours of April 27.

Bum-Kon committed the worse mass murder in known history, killing 58 people--could the Virginia shooter have been trying to do the same?

Update: Commenter sophizo points out in the post below this article from the Washington Post which states that the killer was an "English major from Centreville" and that he was a native of South Korea and immigrated to the US as a child. The article also indicates that the woman killed in the first dormitory shooting had no link to the killer. Thanks to the commenter for pointing out this article.

Does the US Need Better Reporting Laws for the Mentally Ill?

The mentally ill (those determined to be so by the courts etc.) are supposed to be barred from buying handguns, but frequently the information is not given to the NCIS:

But Rand and others—including federal officials—say that enforcement of the provision in the law barring the mentally ill from buying handguns has been erratic at best. More than 20 states don’t report any mental health records—including court records of mental commitments—to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the central federal database for background checks on firearm purchases, according to Paul Bresson, a FBI spokesman. Other states, including Virginia, do report some records, but officials acknowledge that the state and federal databases are complete. Asked if Virginia should have submitted a record of the Temporary Detention Order on Cho to the bureau, Bresson responded: "We rely on the state to submit the data to us. We don't interpret the law. All we're doing is providing a database for them." Still, Bresson added, "based on what we now know, it would seem that it would have been a record that should have been in the NICS”...

Whatever the reason, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York, contends that every year thousands of gun purchases by mentally unstable and other unqualified people have been falling through the cracks. McCarthy has been sponsoring legislation that would offer incentives to states to report more records of mental illness and commitments to federal and state databases.

One person in the article mentions that the problem is with the medical community that has traditionally opposed making such records available on privacy grounds. Confidentiality in mental health is very important, but then, so is making sure that the mentally ill do not obtain guns illegally. Can we really rely on someone like Cho marking "yes" to form 4473 asking “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective or … committed to a mental institution?” I think not.

Cho ruled mentally ill and released

Cho was ruled mentally ill by the courts and released. This is quite typical, given the degree of deinstitutionalization in our country, it is a wonder we don't have more violent people. In my documentary, Six, about six teens who commit mass murder, some of them were mentally ill and the ringleader, Natasha Cornett was released after only 11 days in a mental hospital even though there were documents stating she was a danger to herself and others. There is very little liability in this country when it comes to releasing the mentally ill back into the community or not taking dangerousness seriously. I once was doing an evaluation of a man who told me he was going to kill himself years ago. I called the local mental health center and they told me to "drive the guy over in my car." The level of stupidity and incompetence in the area of mental health is staggering.

Why No One Trusts Experts

It is important when on TV to think before you speak because sometimes what you say can be misconstrued or add to sterotypes that lead others to discount expert opinions. Sebastian at Snowflakes in Hell has a post and link to a CNN video showing a discussion of risk factors between three experts discussing pregnant women killed by boyfriends. One of the risk factors is men who own guns, says the commentator and asks criminal profiler Pat Brown to comment. "Psychopaths are fascinated by weaponry ....If you are hooking up with a guy with a big gun collection or those big ninja knives it's a big red flag, he's not doing yoga....if he loses it with you or in his life--he may eliminate you." A poor choice of words.

It implies that men who own guns may be psychopaths who will kill you. That's silly, and I hope that Ms. Brown did not mean to say this--it is false. Psychopaths are very rare anyway, and gun owners are common. The fact is that the majority of legal gun owners in this country are found to be more law abiding--not less. The Department of Justice did a study and found that "Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use (than boys who own illegal guns) and are even slightly less delinquent than non-owners of guns." Ms. Brown would probably be careful to avoid smearing an entire racial group with charges of criminality, and I hope that next time she'll be careful to avoid similar statements about gun owners.

And by the way, Say Uncle, in response to your question, am I psycho? Not for being a gunowner but that's about all I can vouch for at the moment.

Update: Criminal Profiler Pat Brown responds in the comments:

Wasn’t it just a few months ago when I got wailed on by the left during the Virginia Tech massacre for suggesting kids should carry guns to school to protect themselves? Sometime during the many interviews I did that week I said something to the effect that if we allowed concealed carry on campuses maybe someone would have taken Cho out. I am a big fan of concealed carry because I know criminals carry concealed weapons all the time and I would like to even the field with some honest citizens carrying a few themselves so criminals don’t think no one will shoot back. I think of how many lives would be saved if only someone in the school or company could defend against mass murderers instead of allowing these killers from mowing down a bunch of sitting ducks who are desperately try to hide behind furniture to save their lives.

Now, after doing interviews on the Jesse Davis murder, those from the right are taking one statement out of context and going nuts about it. It seems they think that I believe any man who owns a gun is a danger to women. If I thought that, I guess I would be talking about my own father and my own son. They have guns for personal protection. For that matter, my daughter has guns for personal protection and I also own firearms for personal protection. I am all for gun ownership for personal protection. Clearly, I was not saying a man with a gun is a psychopath.

Nor was I saying a man who might have a collection of guns is a psychopath. I know many of these men as well. They are hunters or lovers of antiques or do a lot of target shooting. What I was talking about during the Paula Zahn Show was the combination of psychopathic behavior and an obsession with weaponry as psychopath love weapons as it gives them a feeling of power and control. Psychopaths do indeed have a fascination with guns and knives and just because the rest of us might happen to own weapons or even have a number of them as a hobby doesn’t eliminate the fact that psychopaths may also be shopping at the gun store with us.

Women must learn to differentiate between psychological healthy men and unpsychologically healthy men if they want to keep from getting into a dangerous life threatening situation. No one trait will be proof that an individual is a psychopath but add a bunch of traits together and this is a warning. A kind, honorable, honest man with a gun collection is not a psychopath or a danger to anyone but a lying, manipulative, arrogant creep who has a cache of twenty weapons is someone a woman wants to get the hell away from. A man who teaches history at the local junior high school and happens to have a collection of Asian swords is not someone a woman should be frightened of but a man who obsessively watches ninja flicks, brags about how he used to be in the CIA, can’t keep a job, calls women sluts and whores, and owns a huge collection of swords and daggers, now there is a guy a woman wants should avoid like the plague.

Anyone who watched the actual Paula Zahn Show and paid attention to the whole conversation and intent would clearly know I was not labeling gun owners psychopaths. Unfortunately, when words are taken out of context and printed on the Internet, often the meaning of those words get misunderstood. I apologize to any gun owners (who aren’t psychopaths) who thought they were the target of my statements. I respect your constitutional rights to own firearms and would never want to see those taken away. I, like you, want to be sure I can protect myself and my family. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

"How on earth was this time bomb allowed to go on ticking for so long?"

So asks Allah Pundit over at Hot Air who has a round-up of "personality quirks" exhibited by the VT killer. The press and other sources at this point have painted Cho Seung-Hui as a text book case of a school shooter. We all know the characteristics--loner, mental health problems, possibly delusional, yada yada yada. And as always, the blame game begins. Mainly as I saw on the MSM last night with shows like Dateline or 48 Hours, the gun is blamed and Katie Couric's concerned face is flashing on the TV once again along with "experts" to describe the terrors of "death machines."

It would be so easy if the complexities that went into the making of a killer could be boiled down to "where did this guy get a gun?" It takes responsibility away from trying to understand what went into the making of the killer, and why we, as a society did nothing to stop him. I can only talk in generalities here, for this case is unfolding and I do not know all of the facts. But I do know some facts about young people who kill or threaten others in schools and universities.

The violence-prone individual is more likely to have enduring personality pathology, such as a paranoid, schizoid, narcissistic, or antisocial personality, and a long history of difficult interpersonal relationships. He may ruminate about perceived slights or injustices for months or even years. Because he is often a loner, he has no circle of friends to correct his misinterpretations of other people’s intentions and behaviors. Because he looks at the world from a very egocentric point of view, he is unable to correctly perceive the effect of his behavior on other people. The emotion he feels is not everyday anger but profound and intense hatred of those who have allegedly demeaned or wronged him. His thinking is so faulty that he can justify assaultive behavior on the basis that he is the innocent victim (Beck, 1999). This faulty thinking was evident in the 22- page letter sent by the University of Arizona shooter Robert Flores to a local newspaper, to be read after he succeeded in killing his teachers and himself.

Student violence is more likely to occur during times of high stress, such as final exam periods, or despair arising from suspension/expulsion from a program. Rampage killers, such as those at the Appalachian School of Law, University of Arizona, and Case Western Reserve, tend to be males with a history of work and relationship failures. They often have a preoccupation with weapons or war regalia, even those that serve no purpose, such as nunchucks or throwing stars. A common characteristic is aspiring to more than they can achieve; when their unrealistic ambitions are thwarted, they blame others for their failures. They are not acting on impulse, but rather enacting purposeful, predatory violence that they have been planning for a long time. However, there is often a final, precipitating event, involving an affront or rejection, within hours or days of the murders. This final affront destroys any remnants of hope.

What I am amazed by is that in many school shootings, especially in universities, school authorities and others were told that there were problems or in some cases, the eventual killer had already made threats but no one did anything. The schools deny any responsibility at all in most of these cases although, sometimes they end up being sued for it. But what is money when people's lives are at stake? It's often the case that when the killer finally lashes out, the people who knew him aren't surprised -- they'd been predicting something like this for weeks or months, but no action was taken.

In my opinion, if we have mentally unstable students who have made threats, have behavioral problems, etc. in universities and schools who do not hold themselves or the student accountable for their behavior, there is no other alternative than to extend the civil right to concealed carry to the potential innocent staff and students who may encounter the wrath of such a person. If universities and schools won't take responsibility -- and they won't -- then someone has to.