You could predict everything that was going to happen. First the blame game kicked in.
Cho Seung Hui could’ve, should’ve and would’ve been stopped from killing a total 32 VA Tech students and himself if only…If only the university and the Blackburg cops hadn’t detained the wrong person and instead given sufficient warning that a killer was on the loose after the first fatal shooting…If only authorities had kept Cho under some kind of restricted psychiatric care after teachers recognized he was a disturbed young man two years ago…If only guns weren’t so easily procured.
If only. If only. If only.
If only there wasn’t evil in the world. If only life wasn’t so damn unfair.

Here’s the way I look at: Evil is like cancer. It’s a tragic fact of life. Medical researchers are making amazing strides in the study of cancer cells in the human organism. They’re learning how cancer cells replicate and mutate. They believe cancer cells inevitably exist in all people, especially the elderly. The only question is how to determine whether those cells are benign or dangerously malignant.
It’s the same with humanity at large. We’re all one giant organism, all of us swimming around in a churning, ceaseless sea of collective life. We come from the same place,. We’re made of the same matter. We have a common origin and in the final analysis, we are all one.
And just like in the human body, there inevitably are violent, evil cancers within the body of society. Cho was one of those cancers. You can study the possible causes of this type of cancer—isolation, paranoia, anger, cultural dysfunction, etc.
But the problem is that you can’t always predict if and when a cancer will become malignant, whether it will metastasize and attack the good cells.
I think it’s amazing that in the vast ogranism of humanity with all its complex day-to-day issues that anyone was able to flag Cho at all. Metaphorically, he was under a microscope long before Monday’s rampage. His English professor expelled him from class. He wrote violent plays and had a propensity for taking photographs under his desk of women’s legs. Cho was angry, anti-social.
He was counseled by cops. In short, a lot of professionals in academics, law enforcement and psychiatry, deserve credit for their efforts TO HELP THIS KID IN THE FIRST PLACE.
There are a lot of nut jobs out there, who are never detected. And there are lot of people with violent fantasies who never act on those fantasies. There was no way of accurately predicting that Cho was going to act on his.
We still live in a free society and we can’t lock everybody up on the grounds that they’re odious and weird.
Sometimes, you can check cancer in time. Sometimes you can’t.

The other predictable reaction to every mass killing is the reflexive call for greater gun control. No law is going to stop someone who’s hellbent to commit murder. It’s as simple as that. Cho was a methodical killer. This guy had a plan. It’s silly to suggest that he would have aborted any plan to kill, no matter how many gun-control roadblocks were thrown in his path.

Finally, there is the predictable handwringing over sending children to college. Ridiculous. It’s a risk just letting your kid borrow the car to go to the mall.