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The Structure of Murder
Depue wrote about what may have motivated Cho, based on what is known about other mass killers. Such people "act out of a distorted sense of unfairness and disappointment stemming from their own actual inadequacies and unsatisfied needs for attention, adulation, power and control." Cho experienced plenty of weakness during his sickly childhood — often humiliating for a boy - and he failed to grow emotionally as well. As a result, other kids shunned him, which only contributed to his feeling of failure. Those pursuits in which he did well did not make him happy. As such, he developed a lot of anger but had no means to absorb or dispel it. Other people not only paid little attention to him, they even thwarted him by rejecting his writing and his ideas.
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| Students Mourn Outside |
But so what? Lots of us have to experience social rejection and hurdles in life. What was it along Cho's life path that gave him the impetus to exact payback in a high death toll? No one on the panel is able to address this, mostly because we know so little about Cho and only a smattering of generalities from our database of mass murderers. Few have been as young as he was. The report's profile presents him as a sort of whiner who resents that he didn't have what others had, so he decided to punish them.
It's likely that there was something else that tipped the balance: an undiagnosed mental illness. There's a political cartoon making the rounds that features a bridge collapse next to a sign signaling the results of our tax cuts. Something similar can be said for the shortcuts in our mental health system. There are just not enough resources to apply to someone who needs the kind of individualized care that Cho seemed to. He might have been well-guided through high school, as the report indicates, but those resources do not easily generalize to a large university.
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