[Media] 9/11, The VT Shooting and America's Selective Sense of Fatalism

When violent tragedy strikes in America, it often seems that the first question to come out of the clearing smoke is, "How could this have been prevented?" And in hindsight, yes, we are all geniuses, but the real reason we continually obsess over this question in certain cases is that, it seems to me, we have a selective (and often backwards) understanding of fatalism.

As authorities try to sort out exactly what happened yesterday on the Virginia Tech campus – reports indicate that two students were murdered in their dormitory two hours before one student, identified as Cho Seung-hui from South Korea, killed 30 more people, and then himself, in a rampage through a classroom building in what is the most deadly massacre in U.S. history – certain media outlets are already reporting that the incident could have been prevented . The New York Daily News front page headline for today is "They Didn't Have To Die," and the New York Post, along with many others I imagine, is running a story titled "School Delay Proves Deadly." And so, in our selective sense of fatalism, we are already asking what "could've" been done.

I call this our "selective sense of fatalism" because the media seems to determine when we should and should not see events as preventable based on some sort of matrix of sensationalism. This act of terrorism at Virginia Tech (and yes it was terrorism) and the question of prevention is in stark contrast to the most infamous event in our recent history: 9/11. What questions did we ask on September 12th, 2001 about what could've been done? What officials did we blame? None. We accepted the attacks of 9/11 as fact almost immediately, as something that was destined to happen.

And yet at Virginia Tech we only see what could've been done, never understanding that the very nature of a lone gunman makes him one step ahead of police. The irony is that, as we watched the VT massacre and asked why the police had not locked down the entire campus after what appeared to be an isolated domestic incidence two hours before, a report detailing a French Intelligence officials warning to the CIA about an al-Qaeda airline-hijacking plot nine months before the September 11th attacks is released with little attention.

How is that we expect campus cops to prevent the rampage of an unknown lone gunman on a sprawling suburban campus in the span of two hours, and yet accept that our government, with the best trained military in the world behind it, cannot prevent an attack involving a group of terrorists using commercial airliners as their weapons in a nine month span? It is our selective sense of fatalism at play.

The Virginia Tech shooting deserves at least as much of our sense of fatalism, if not more (and, in my opinion, definitely more), than the attacks of 9/11. It is a scary thought, but it is the truth, when I say massacres by lone gunmen often cannot be stopped until it is too late. The two killings that took place in the dormitory two hours prior to the rampage left no indication of an impending massacre, and police had no reason to be searching for a man on that quest. They had no reason to send a wave of panic through the school halls by locking down the entire campus until it was too late. And they had no reason to indiscriminately impede the movement and freedom of thousands because one might be a suspect. It is a simple fact that you cannot prevent what you do not know will happen. The campus police at Virginia Tech were not sitting around reading copies of "My Pet Goat." They were trying to catch up with a gunman who was one step ahead of them with concealed plans and concealed weapons.

Welcome to the world. It is a scary place. Everyday we step out into it we run the risk of a madman we do not know killing us. Simply based on the fact that it is a very rare occurence in this country does not mean that it is always preventable. If anything, the opposite is true.

Freedom is not a perfect ideal. Freedom of thought, in this case, led one man to massacre 32 others. That is a reality, a reality that makes us vulnerable to lone gunmen everyday. But I realized something about vulnerability a long time ago: it is one of the foundations for a stable relationship. Our love of freedom in this country is strong because we run the aforementioned risks everyday. In a facist state of thought police and martial law, the Virginia Tech massacre would not have happened. So it is because I love my freedom that I say, in a two hour window with little information to go on, this massacre could not have been prevented (as for 9/11, that is for another blog at another time).