After it became clear that the massacre in Blacksburg, Va., would take its place in severity alongside the worst shootings in American history, the question that increasingly weighed on my mind was what the shooter looked like. Apparently my desire was shared by others as once his picture was released, it was broadcast non-stop on all of the major news channels and media websites.
In the days that followed we learned through television, magazines, websites and newspapers everything about the life and motives of one: Cho Seung-Hui, a quiet 23-year-old South Korean studying English at Virginia Tech. This fascination we have for criminal and horrific figures -- Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Al Capone -- might trouble some as it boarders on veneration for the evil, but when examined it can reveal a lot about human nature.
I attended a lecture by Georgetown Law professor John Turley a few years ago. In it, he theorized that the public's fascination with viewing the faces of murderers comes from a natural anxiety people share. People want to look into the eyes of a murderer having full knowledge of their alleged or confirmed crimes and know that they can see their criminal nature shining through. They want to look into their sinister eyes and think to themselves, "Of course he was guilty, just look at him." They then go about their daily lives safe in the knowledge that none of their associates could do such a thing; none of their friends have "that" look.
However, every so often a case comes around when people gaze at a convicted murderer and are met by nothing more than a normal face: the kind of face that could belong to your neighbor, school principal or local police officer. These cases shake the foundational security of the judging masses and call into question everything on which they base their lives. That was the relief of Ted Kaczynski and the terror of Ted Bundy.
So now I ask you: After seeing Cho's face so extensively, can you see the craziness in his eyes? The pictures he took of himself holding his guns and a hammer certainly make his instability more evident than in his mug shot, but even then, I find it difficult to take him seriously. Apparently so did those who knew him.
While many were disturbed by his violent writings, stalking behavior and odd comments, he was only verbally warned by campus security and was detained only briefly for a psychiatric evaluation. At no point was he declared mentally ill or involuntarily committed to a mental institution. At no point did Cho ever directly threaten harm to himself or others, and due to the privacy rights involved in mental and physical disabilities, the little paperwork that existed regarding his mental state could not be shared among the college, his parents or law enforcement.
In the wake of the massacre, many have called for the increased ability of the justice system to detain people against their will on the grounds of mental illness. While such a policy has the ability to prevent future people like Cho from acting on their instabilities, it would also threaten the freedom of a vastly larger number of people who pose no threat to others and are just simply strange.
In 2002, the U.S. Secret Service sought to create a profile of a school shooter based on past massacres and found that almost any profile of a potential school shooter would be too broad and include too many non-violent students to be useful. The only commonality found was that these shooters do not snap and instead carefully and openly plan their crimes as a way to seek revenge against a world that has rejected them.
It is an unsettling truth, but there is no magical x-factor we can look for to determine who is capable of doing what. Separating between the violent mentally ill and the nonviolent strange is more difficult than looking into their eyes.
