Excellent post: couldn't have said it better myself.

The sad thing is: some of the students at my high school have already started looking at this guy and relating to him....is the media coverage breeding more of these killers?

All I can do is let them know this guy had a legitimate mental disorder and hope they don't try to mimic his actions.

Teenagers are impressionable....how else could someone like Paris Hilton get so much media attention?

she sucks dick on camera.

there's that.

It's not just teenagers who are impressionable.

How else could an inarticulate boob like George W. Bush get half the vote...twice?

Oh my goodness...

It doesn

I find it sad that the one thing you have to say about this is full of bigotry , hatred and a misplaced anger that has decided to attack the mentally ill population for the actions of one disturbed individual.
Your post is fascist ideology at it's finest. A lobotomy ? What then , forced sterilization, internment , euthanasia ?
And how does your thinking about this differ from racism ? If a black student with no history of mental illness had done the shooting , would you have drawn the conclusion that integration of African-Americans was the problem in our society ?

Looks like PD doesn't accept trackbacks. Maybe that's for the best. I fell in love with your blog a week ago, and like to died when I found this post yesterday. It's more than a little disincentivizing, but I understand the anger, and hope in time a cooler head prevails.

I find it amusing that you draw the generalization that this person was just one of the thousands of mentally ill people in this country. Pinks didn't say all the mentally ill, he said "people that clearly should not be mainstreamed" Why do you assume he meant all the mentally ill? I sense internal bigotry here.

Hate me if you want to, I agree with Pinks on this one. Its not racist or bigoted. People with mental illness makes people violent. If that tendency can be identified then action should be taken to protect the rest of the human family. Remember one person's rights end the instant they infringe on someone else's. It seems fairly obvious that this person one was mentally ill, and two that he no intent to deal with his illness in a productive fashion. He was involuntarily committed. He was acutely anti-social, and his writings, and I mean his academic writings, were extremely disturbing. This person should not have been free in the general population. If a lobotomy would have made him less likely to be violent, then cut his brain right on out. If it would have unreasonably reduced his quality of life and made him less of a person, then just shoot him in the head, life over, its quality is moot.

Now I pray that if I ever become violently mentally ill that my family will have the foresight to protect me, and more importantly the world from me.

BacchusXY,
My comment about attacking the mentally ill population was not aimed at the part of the statement about mainstreaming people who should not be mainstreamed. It was for this:

"He was schizophrenic or somehow else deranged. He should have had a lobotomy years ago."

So he should have had a lobotomy , because he was schizophrenic or deranged?
That statement, although specific to Cho, implies that people who are schizophrenic or somehow else deranged (mentally ill) should be given lobotomies simply because they are ill.
Cho was just one of thousands of mentally ill people in this country , and only a tiny percentage of the mentally ill become violent. If you knew your facts , you would know that the mentally ill are more often THE VICTIMS of violence.
Any psychologist can tell you that predicting behavior is an extremely difficult and often inaccurate task. It would be a horrific crime to cut out brains or shoot people in the head at the word of someone who only suspects a possibility of future violence.Cutting out brains and shooting people who have an illness that affects perception, and therefore, judgment- is an act of violence in and of itself. To suggest doing so an anti-social statement, and quite frankly very disturbing.
Involuntary commitment didn't help Cho, because coercion never helps anyone- particularly those who already feel persecuted.
It likely only added to his delusions and made him fearful of treatment. So, if that is what was available to him, this was a tragedy waiting to happen.
Your "solutions" are violent, and I don't know if you are mentally ill - but what you suggest is violently evil. I hope someone does have the foresight to protect the world from you and your like-minded thinkers.

Nah, stilling running the streets not killing people.

Again you take a specific pronoun "He" and extrapolate it to mean "all people who may be schizo or deranged." That's not what he said, and its not what I said, you took it to mean that. Your illogical leap is that it implies anything beyond Cho.

And back to specifics what should we done with Cho? Involuntary commission seems to be off the table because it hurt him more and made it worse, we can't lobotomize him, we can't put him out of our misery? What should we as a society do with the violently and potentially violently mentally ill? Leave them alone and hope the get treatment?

Violent criminals belong in prison whether they have a mental illness or not .
As for POTENTIALLY violent people- EVERYONE is potentially violent - mentally or otherwise. So lucky for all of us that a potential for violence is not a crime that could earn us a lobotomy or forced drugging or civil commitment.
Accurately predicting violence is damn near impossible. Based on your suggestions for cutting brains and shooting people in the head,
I wonder what might prevent others from deciding that you too may be dangerous .
As I have stated before, the mentally ill are more often the victims of violence. Terrible violence is committed everyday by people who live and work in mainstream society and who do not carry a diagnosis of mental illness, and those are the people who commit most of the violent crimes. So why the focus on Cho's mental illness as the cause of his actions ? There is no reason to think that there is a causal link between his illness and his violence. Why worry so much about what to do with the very few mentally ill who could be potentially violent , when society is filled with people (who of whom don't have a mental illness) committing violent crime everyday? The violence around us has much to do with numerous overwhelming social problems that are not being adequately addressed. That Cho happened to be mentally ill is a huge distraction from the real issues at hand, and a very convenient distraction at that.
Getting back to "the specifics", It is true that coercive measures such as involuntary commitment often drive people away from seeking treatment. That is one of the problems with the current mental health system. Involuntary commitment itself is not a treatment. The "treatment" in a hospital these days generally consists of drugging patients into a compliant stupor as quickly as possible,at which time they are deemed no longer a threat and released back into society with their prescriptions- just as Cho was. The mental health care providers deemed him not a threat. So, how do we trust that they can also decide who is a threat ?
Should we have locked him away in a hospital just because he was schizophrenic (and who the hell knew he'd become violent ?), while there are people already convicted of murder and violent crimes like rape and child molestation who get released back to the streets from prison everyday?
And no, we couldn't have lobotomized Cho. It's not even legal to do so anymore, and hasn't been for a very long time due to the fact that it was a horrifically violent "treatment" used indiscriminately (even on children who misbehaved), and only as a means of control. What they do now with the psychiatric drugs accomplishes the same effect, only without the inconvenience of hammering an ice pick under the eyelid and through the orbital cavity into the patient's brain. Sometimes those very same drugs create and worsen violent behavior, much like lobotomies sometimes did. It's a real possibility that the medication that Cho received was responsible for the escalation into violence. Those drugs often create or compound the very same symptoms that they are intended to subdue.
As for putting him out of his misery- that's exactly what he did for himself , and it resulted in the most devastating possible consequences for so many other innocent people.
This was not about Cho not wanting to deal with his illness in a serious way. There is no truly adequate system of care for the mentally ill in this country, because the treatment focuses almost entirely on using drugs to treat brain disorders that may or may not exist, while refusing to address the emotional, behavioral, and resulting social problems that lead to the kind of isolation that Cho was experiencing, an isolation that would undoubtedly have fueled his paranoia. Cho's behavior is merely an extension of the violence already rampant in this society and nothing more.
Your suggested approach will fix nothing, and what happened at VT is very likely to happen again somewhere else while people are all caught up and engaged in what could've been done to Cho's brain to keep him from killing.

Still think Pinks is right.

But you make a good unrelated point. The mental healthcare system in this country sucks and we need to do something.

What would you do? Ideas? Suggestions? Being productive instead of just bitching?

At least Pinks and I have a solution

I love your "solution". Let's try it out on you first and see if it does any good.