Virginia Tech

I haven't been paying much attention to the coverage of the shootings. It's a tragedy, in the same way (though more infuriating) than a hurricane or other natural disaster. I think we all know the reasons this kind of thing happens from time to time: in this country there are a lot of people with untreated mental illnesses or people who are on the tipping point; people are under a lot of stress, especially related to work, family life, and school; we have a culture that glorifies violence and two or more generations now who have spent a ridiculous amount of their lives plugged in front of television or video games; people are unmoored, adrift in a society that allows them to be anonymous, that doesn't provide the kind of social/community support and oversight that we once had; and in the midst of this tinderbox of human angst we make weapons of mass destruction (e.g. Glock semi-autonomatic handguns) obscenely easy for anyone to get. To make this happen less frequently we're going to need to address all of those problems, yet there's slim chance we really will because the social and political forces driving them are too powerful. So I turn the channel and try to focus my attention on problems that can be solved (Iraq, health care) or just try to be entertained.

But I was drawn to Barbara Oakley's op-ed piece in today's New York Times, and came away aghast at how inane it was. Inanity in a published forum always gets my attention, so here goes.

She opens by relating her experience with a student she calls "Rick," who seems to have stalked her and once taped a dead cockroach to her door at Oakland University. She couldn't get the university to protect her from this student:

When I complained about Rick to the dean of students, I was told there was nothing to be done — after all, “students have rights, too.” Only after appealing to that dean’s boss and calling a raft of fellow professors who had also come to fear Rick’s strange behavior was I able to convince the administration to take grudging action; they restricted his ability to loiter in certain areas and began nudging him toward the classes he needed to graduate.

In a strange way, I could see the administration’s point. Rick looked fairly ordinary, at least when away from his sleeping bag and pet cockroaches. It must have seemed far more likely that Rick could sue for being thrown out of school, than that I — or anyone else — could ever be hurt. The easiest path, from their perspective, was to simply get me to shut up.

Clearly, this is a disturbed individual. But what does she expect the university to do, expel him because he creeps Dr. Oakley out? Students do have rights, as do we all, and one of those rights is to be left alone, by and large, until you do something to harm someone else. Seems to me the school's response was not only the "easiest path," but the right one as well.

Now she gets to her main point (how it relates to the story of Rick is unclear):

It’s long been in fashion to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born bad...

In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

Excellent, so the problem is good and evil. Glad that's solved. And this leads us to the obvious solution, which is... what, exactly? I guess if we identify someone as marked with the evil gene, we expel them or lock them up.

Along the way, she drops this little nugget:

Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

Now this is especially annoying, because data can be verified. Five minutes of Googling leads me to the UK Home Office Statistical Bulletin report, "Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2005/2006," published in January 2007. Here's a graph from that report:

Figure 2.1 Crimes reported to the police in which a firearm has been used


How quaint, they kill themselves with airguns in the UK! But the main message is, there is if anything a downward trend in crimes in the UK, at least for the last 3 years. Later in the report we read that homicides involving firearms are down from a peak of 97 in 2001/02 to 50 in 2005/06. Fifty! Number of homicides with firearms in the US in 2004, according to Department of Justice figures (30 seconds on Google): over 10,000. Compared to the US, I would hardly call the UK experience a disaster.

How does it happen that the New York Times can't do elementary fact checking? Why did it find this column worth publishing at all?