Guns and Grief

Dawn broke on April 16, 2007, as it does always, but this day would soon reveal itself to be unlike any other. For this was the day that a twenty-three-year-old student walked onto the campus at Virginia Tech carrying two semi-automatic pistols—a Glock 9 mm and a Walther P22—and fired close to two hundred rounds, killing thirty-two people and injuring scores more in the deadliest shooting rampage in our nation’s history. Minutes later, long before anyone knew any of the facts, reporters filled the airwaves, the Web buzzed with headlines, and the show was on—a spectacle nearly as obscene as the massacre itself.

As reporters dug for the story behind the killing spree and found that the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, had been ordered by a judge to undergo outpatient treatment after he was diagnosed in December 2005 as “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization,” the din increased, and the psychology of the killer moved to center stage. Nearly every news show featured its very own mental health “expert”—psychologists and psychiatrists, none of whom had ever met Cho Seung-Hui and knew almost nothing about him, yet had no problem offering up instant, and often contradictory, psychological analyses to explain why h...