A week ago we posted about the increasing use of background checks for college students. Most of the usage there has been focussed on catching exaggerations that applicants use to get themselves in the door. But now the pendulum may swing back towards the more traditional background check that looks for criminal history. Yesterday, a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed 32 people on campus, in the deadliest shooting incident of recent U.S. history.
Sad to say, violence on campus is not new. In 1991 a physics graduate student at the University of Iowa, Gang Lu, shot six people after losing an academic award. (The memory of this incident is quite vivid, as I was a graduate student in physics at the time.) Horrible as this was, there did seem to be an understandable motive — revenge is a universal emotion. But there are cases of more detached violence, as well. Perhaps the most similar one would be that of Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people from a clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966.
This story is certain to attract a great deal of attention, both in an attempt to explain such a horrifying event (rarely a successful venture), and how it can be prevented in the future. Should guns be banned? Should more people be encouraged to have guns so that sane carriers outnumber the insane? Can psychological screening and intervention prevent this kind of tragedy? Apparently, the gunman’s writings were so disturbing that he was referred to counseling.
To the extent that we have open campuses, an individual can achieve superior firepower, and incidents are publicized enough to give the perpetrator celebrity status, it is doubtful that we will find a solution anytime soon.