The Search for a Motive (Virginia Tech)

[Plaid Adder]

My heart goes out to everyone who survived the Virginia Tech massacre, and to the families, friends, colleagues, and professors of those who didn't. It is hard to know what else to say. There have been shootings before on high school and college campuses but nothing ever this big. It is hard to know how to assimilate the information, or the knowledge that any one of us could be taken out by an insane armed person any day of our lives. The fact that I have been brooding over the school shooting phenomenon for at least ten years, and done quite a lot of writing about it in one way or another, doesn't help much.

This morning the news is all about trying to find a motive. Although I understand the urge to explain, I am always a little weirded out when I hear people ask questions like, "Do we know what the motive was?" There is no motive. There is no reason. There is no way to make sense of this.

There were two shootings. One was a female undergraduate and her male R.A., apparently in the same dorm bedroom; the other shooting involved 30 people in a classroom building. Though they won't say for sure, it appears that it was the same shooter. The police were treating the first shooting as "domestic," i.e., a situation in which a man has shot a woman with whom he either was having or thought he should have been having some sort of intimate relationship. That's why nobody was imagining that there would soon be a second shooting involving 30 strangers. From the cop point of view--from the point of view of most people in this crime-consuming, crime-obsessed culture--the first shooting "makes sense," whereas the second shooting doesn't. Therefore, the assumption was that the first shooting was an "isolated incident," containable to that time and place and those particular victims and that particular motive. Therefore, nobody told the rest of Virginia Tech's students about it until after the second shooting had actually already started.

I'm not blaming the VT administration or the police involved. I'm sure they did what they thought was right and it is infuriating to watch people second-guessing them as if they would have done any better at the time. But it does say something about the limitations of the way we think about violence. To me, it does not make any more 'sense' for a man to shoot a woman with whom he has some sort of real or imagined intimate connection than it does for a man to walk into a classroom and take out, to the best of his ability, every human being in it. Both shootings are the result of the same process--I don't know if you can even call it a decision--by which a man tries to assuage his own pain by taking the lives of other people. That never makes sense to me, no matter what the "motives" are. I don't see what reason there ever is for anyone to feel a need to see someone else die, whether it is someone they're close to or someone they barely know. I don't see why anyone would ever find that comforting, or cathartic, or satisfying, or necessary.

I don't think there is such a thing, with a thing like this, as causation. There is the guy's life, and there is this massacre. The links will be drawn in all kinds of crazy ways. But the explanation will never be sufficient.

I'm closing in on 40 and I still do not understand why human beings do what they do to each other. There are hypotheses and reasons and theories but they don't satisfy. The media will never find what they say they're looking for. And though I can't blame them for looking--we will all be doing it--I hope that they can at least refrain from seizing the first half-baked substitute that presents itself and following it down some path that just leads to more pain for everyone.

If any of you reading this know anyone who was killed in or survived the attack, my thoughts are with you, for what it's worth. At the end of the day, that's all you can say, and of course it is not enough.

The Plaid Adder

[soothsayer]

1. One source (ABC news?) says he left a note, so I reckon we'll

get some sense of his motive.

[Plaid Adder]

2. Even if we find out why he said he was doing it,

I still don't think it will ever make sense to me. I don't see any motive in the world that could really lead someone to the conclusion that he needs to kill 30 people.

But there is a lot I don't understand.

The Plaid Adder

[Wickerman]

5. excellent post , how can we ever hope to find a "reason" for this?

There is no reasoning involved in this type of situation.

I know the quotation of pop songs seems trite at a time like this, but Bob Geldof came close to describing the futility of situations like this:

And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die?

[theboss]

3. I don't think there is anything we can learn from an incident like this

Everytime a tragedy like this occurs, different people try to use it as a hook to hang their personal agenda. If we didn't allow immigrants, this never would have happened....if we had stricter gun laws...if everyone was armed....if we didn't have violent video games...if we allowed prayer in school...blah blah blah.

Everyone is probably right and everyone is probably wrong. But I can never draw any connections or conclusions from these events.

[wakeme2008]

4. I disagree

:shrug:
I'm not blaming the VT administration or the police involved. I'm sure they did what they thought was right and it is infuriating to watch people second-guessing them


The head of security should be fired. VT is a large campus, and after the first shooting, the students should have been told. He assumed the shooter had left campus, why did he assume that. Once a person has killed they are more likely to kill again to make their escape.

[LiberalFighter]

6. I agree that should not had assumed it was over.

Until they capture those responsible and take them out of action they don't know it is over.