Virginia Tech Tragedy: Teaches Us What We Already Know

Now that I've had a few days to think it over, I've concluded there are no new lessons to be learned from the shootings at Virginia Tech Monday morning, when student Cho Seung-Hui committed the deadliest gun massacre in the history of the United States, murdering 32 people and then killing himself. To try and discover meaning in an event like this is only human nature, to attempt to pin a moral on the story only natural. But all of the lessons I've taken from this tragedy-some good, some bad-are things we should already know.

The first and most emphatically made point is that human beings are capable of monstrous evil. Already political activists are trampling one another to define the massacre according to their pet issues-gun control advocates see it as the perfect excuse for stricter anti-firearms laws, second amendment defenders use the opportunity to suggest that the best answer to gun violence like this is more guns, media watchdogs point fingers at our violence-glorifying popular culture-when the only party truly at fault is the man who killed 32 people, mostly his peers, then committed suicide. Cho Seung-Hui was apparently a very troubled guy, but nothing short of genuine insanity should absolve him of an iota of responsibility for what he did. We can talk about what may have influenced or enabled him until we run out of breath, but the guilt still falls on him and him alone. Sometimes people do unconscionably bad things. That's nothing new-Cho Seung-Hui, when he picked up his guns and used them in the worst way you can ever use a gun, merely reminded us of it.