Sociology > Depression > Blacksburg's Silver Lining: Maybe this time the status quo will change
| Topic: |
Sociology > Depression |
| User: |
"Fred Goodwin, CMA" |
| Date: |
26 Apr 2007 01:30:30 PM |
| Object: |
Blacksburg's Silver Lining: Maybe this time the status quo will change |
Blacksburg's Silver Lining: Maybe this time the status quo will change
http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110009988
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
In the wake of an event such as Virginia Tech, our system moves heaven
and earth to figure out what went wrong and how to make sure it
doesn't happen again. This of course is what we did after September 11
and after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina.
Here's what's really unnerving about this inevitable "process": In
June 2000, the Bremer Report of the National Commission on Terrorism
described virtually everything we needed to know about preparing for
the kind of attack that occurred in September 2001. Similarly--and you
can guess what you're about to read--in 2002 the Final Report and
Findings of the Safe School Initiative, conducted by the Secret
Service and the Department of Education, told us virtually everything
we need to know to prevent a Virginia Tech.
The good news here is that we are not as stupid as we seem. We have it
within our power to assign smart people to look at a manifest public
problem and offer sensible fixes. (To be sure, not all commissions
do.) Still one must ask: Why do we refuse to take our own best advice?
After the Blacksburg murders, one of the first words uttered in awful
memory was "Columbine." Well, Columbine was among the main reasons for
the Safe Schools effort. Also Springfield, Ore., West Paducah, Ky.,
and Jonesboro, Ark.--all sites of widely publicized school shootings.
In all, the study investigated 37 such attacks in schools from 1974 to
2000.
Most interesting, the study was led by the Secret Service. Why? The
study doesn't quite put it this way, but it was because the Secret
Service's main job in life is preventing the nuts from killing
someone. Simply, the study's goal was to try to figure out what is
"knowable" before an attack.
One of the Safe School report's most relevant findings, for the
purposes of stopping another Virginia Tech, is that the 37 school
attacks weren't typically carried out by severely ill, unhinged
psychotics like Cho Seung-Hui. This is not to say they were happy
campers (the study interviewed 10 perpetrators in depth). Though few
of them would get off by reason of insanity, they were all mentally
very unhappy campers; and what is more, other people knew that. And in
nearly every case, someone knew they were planning the attack: "In
nearly two thirds of the incidents, more than one person had
information about the attack before it occurred."
Among the reasons widely adduced for not doing something about Cho's
violent proclivities are HIPAA and FERPA, the confidentiality laws for
health records and college students' records. Well, there's no FERPA
for high schools. There is merely the weird cultural refusal to turn
in bad actors to adult authority. In one school attack, so many
students knew it was coming that 24 were waiting on a mezzanine to
watch, one with a camera. The enemy is us.
Prior to the studied assaults, some 93% of the attackers behaved in
ways that caused concern to school officials, teachers, parents, the
cops or other students. "In one case, the student's English teacher
became concerned about several poems and essays that . . ." well, you
know the rest.
Psychological flameouts were indeed present in virtually all the
attacks--depression (61%), prior suicidal attempts or thoughts (78%),
a sense of loss, feelings of being persecuted or in fact bullied.
A lot has been made of the police failure to apprehend Cho for two
hours. Fair enough, but that's not typical. In the Safe Schools 37
incidents, most of the attacks were stopped by administrator or
teachers, largely because half didn't last longer than 15 minutes. The
cops stopped only 25% of the attacks--an argument for deputizing and
arming someone in the schools. (In testimony this week to the Senate
Homeland Security Committee, the head of the association for all
campus cops explained the "safety issues" that mainly keeps them
distracted: "At the top of the list are issues related to high-risk
drinking and the use and abuse of illegal and prescription drugs.")
After September 11, we learned from the 9/11 Commission that the left
hand of the CIA didn't know what the right hand of the FBI was doing,
that they wouldn't talk to each other, or under Justice Department
rules, couldn't talk to each other. But before all that, the Bremer
anti-terror report in 2000 described "complex bureaucratic procedures"
that hampered the CIA and an FBI suffering from "bureaucratic and
cultural obstacles (my emphasis) to obtaining terrorism information."
Cultural indeed. Over time we have accreted a culture in the United
States--of rules, laws, liability concerns and mindsets--that adds up
to no-can-do. Or, Attorney may I?
After 9/11 the consensus that we had to do something sank quickly in
the swamps of partisanship; wiretapping and incarcerating terrorists
became mainly a debate game for politicians and newspaper writers. If
there is a sliver of silver lining in the Virginia Tech aftermath, it
is that there seems to be a willingness to look hard at the status
quo--no matter what assumptions pre-existed about rights, privacy,
stigma, coercion, security or whether we can blame it on Karl Rove. On
Tuesday, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a
piece by a professor titled, "Why It's OK to Rat on Other Students."
Here, as with the message screaming off the pages of the Safe School
report, the exhortation is to do something, no matter what the
intimidations of the law or received wisdom.
What this means is that some college presidents, and their lawyers,
rather than rolling over before those confidentiality laws, should
tell some aggrieved student who is refusing to take the medication
prescribed for his psychosis: So sue! Let a judge decide whether 32
deaths warrant a reconsideration of these restrictions.
As well, there is no hope unless a light goes off in the collective
socket of our elected politicians, which illumines just how much their
oh-so-needed laws siphon time and energy out of the daily lives of
institutional leaders who a long time ago had the common sense and
personal authority to chuck out a Cho Seung-Hui.
At the Homeland Security Committee hearing this week, Sen. Joe
Lieberman (I) remarked, "We want to respect the privacy of the
individual, yet ultimately I think we have a greater responsibility to
protect the safety of the community." Sound sensible? If embraced by
our politics, that notion would overturn 40 years of jurisprudence and
conventional wisdom that, of late, has turned deadly. After
Blacksburg, it could happen.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial
page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on
OpinionJournal.com.
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| User: "johns" |
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| Title: Re: Blacksburg's Silver Lining: Maybe this time the status quo will change |
26 Apr 2007 04:01:04 PM |
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You forget the "arrogance factor". The cheese-eaters will
never let you get away with allowing just anybody to report
a security issue. This is about self-glorification and the
control of information. An observant janitor is a better
security agent than all the Suits and jargon users
combined.
johns
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