Violence, Children and the Virginia Tech Tragedy

We are all shaken by the tragedy that took place on the campus of Virginia Tech a few days ago. With 32 innocent people--most of them young students--murdered for no reason, many of us are asking why 23 year old college senior, Cho Seung-Hui, suddenly exploded in this rage. There are many people asking why he wasn't identified as an at-risk individual earlier.

From outside the country, we hear many commentators noting the violent nature of American culture. Many European and Asian countries are amazed at the ease by which American citizens are able to gain access to guns, knives and assault weapons. The power of the NRA lobby has made sensible gun control a difficult measure to implement. Many of us agree that hunters should be permitted to hunt with rifles, but the gun advocates push the envelope by insisting that there be NO limits on their rights to bear arms. Their argument: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people". While the latter sentence is true, the prior one is not, and an onlooker does not have to be a forensics expert to note that if gun laws were more strict, Cho Seung-Hui would not have been able to kill as many people as he did. If we agree that psychopaths will kill whether or not they have access to guns, let us also acknowledge that if Cho would have been forced (by reasonable gun laws) to exact his brutality with the use of a mere knife, he would never be able to create the carnage that Cho created.

But a more important issue here is the violence that we find in our society: the violence that we encourage, the violence that we tolerate, the violence that we have become numb to. Poetry professor Nikki Giovanni made some important statements when she commented on the creative writing work that Cho was giving to her during the semester that he was in her class at Virginia Tech. She told him that she was not going to accept or tolerate the vicious nature of his writing. Cho told her that she couldn't refuse to accept it, and she shot right back, "Oh yes I can." This is the type of stand that all of us have to take whe we see violence being encouraged and tolerated in our communities and schools.

As an attorney and an author, I have a great appreciation for our civil rights that are afforded to us by the Constitution, but we cannot misinterpret that as suggesting that hate speech (and what could have been more hateful than the writings--and recorded video--of Cho Seung-Hui?) should be accepted and embraced. Too many music videos, computer games and films aimed at young people glorify violence, murder and assaults on individuals. Violence has become so much a part of our culture that many of us forget that young people who are raised with it are also slow to recognize its impact on the human psyche. Violence is now seen as entertainment. A murder or a shooting is no longer the "money shot" at a crucial moment of a film or a video game; it is now the ongoing backdrop to the rest of the show or game. In these films, killers are no longer the bad guys who get punished; they are often the heroes who win applause from the viewers.

My wife and I do not allow our children to watch films or to play videos that permit the killing or maiming of people. This may make us appear to be pollyannas to some, but we want our children to be sensitized to the violence in our society so that they can recognize it in themselves and in others when it rears its head. Right now, the parents and family members of Cho Seung-Hui are strangely silent, so we don't really know if his was a childhood that embraced a culture of violence. But if we continue to surround our children with images of violence, we will create young adults who see it as an inevitable future for themselves.