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| Campus Shootings and Status Anxiety |
| [Opinion] Career and academic failures have led to mass murder in the U.S. and abroad |
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Jason Hahn (woowhee)  |
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Published 2007-04-17 18:15 (KST) |
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Monday's mass shooting on the Virginia Tech campus is the latest in a long line of similar university horrors in American history. Regardless of what is known or unknown about the gunman at this point, the event was clearly one of the saddest and most violent massacres to have happened on school grounds in America.
Gun control questions aside, situations like the one in Blacksburg, Virginia demand that we not only mourn, but also that we reflect upon the history of these somber and frightening events.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| It becomes necessary to examine the shootings of the past to see what they have in common. This becomes of utmost important for anyone who wants to find the answers to why these things happen. What causes people to erupt in such a dangerous fashion? How can we prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future?
One group of shootings stand out because of similarities in the killers' circumstances. In each case the person carrying the gun was unhappy about the direction his or her life was taking. In some of the cases below the killers were anxious about, were failing or had failed university courses. In one case the killer had been unable to follow a particular career because of lack of academic success.
On Oct. 28, 2002, Robert Flores Jr., 41, shot and killed three of his professors before taking his own life. Flores was failing out of the University of Arizona Nursing College. According to eye witness accounts, he spoke briefly with each victim before shooting them multiple times. He brought five guns with him along with 250 rounds of ammunition, and allowed a roomful of students to leave after he had shot two professors right in front of them.
On Jan. 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, shot and killed the dean of the Appalachian School of Law, L. Anthony Sutin, along with professor Thomas Blackwell, and student Angela Dales. Odighizuwa shot and wounded three others before running out of ammunition, which is when he was tackled by two students. The disgruntled former student had been dismissed from the Virginia-based law school.
On Aug. 28, 2000, James Easton Kelly, 36, got into a heated argument with former English professor John Locke, 67. Kelly had recently been dropped from the doctoral program at the University of Arkansas. He brought the letter informing him that he had been kicked out of the program with him to Locke's office, and after the two had argued they were both found dead on the floor with gunshot wounds to the abdomen. Kelly had purchased the gun five years prior to that day at a pawn shop. He brought 90 rounds of ammunition that day to Locke's office.
On Sept. 17, 1996, Jillian Robbins, 19, hid amidst bushes with a 7 mm rifle outside of Penn State's Hetzel Union Building. She shot five times and killed one student while wounding another. As she was unloading her rifle, Robbins was confronted by Brendon Malovrh, who took away her weapon. Robbins tried to stab Malovrh, but ended up stabbing herself in the thigh. Malovrh tended her wound until the police arrived on the scene. Robbins said that she did not know why she acted the way she did. She enlisted with the Army Reserves in 1994, but was discharged in June 1995 because she did not have a high school degree.
On Aug. 15, 1996, Frederick Martin Davidson, 36, hid a handgun in a first-aid kit and walked onto the San Diego State campus. Davidson was a graduate engineering student at the school and was slated to defend his thesis before three professors. He shot and killed all of them and was apprehended afterwards.
On Nov. 1, 1991, Gang Lu, 28, was a graduate physics student at the University of Iowa. He was angry that his doctoral paper did not receive an academic award. He shot and killed five people affiliated with the school, including Linhua Shan, who had received the honor that Lu did not.
The six killers described above are not the only people who have turned to murder because they were unhappy with the direction their lives were taking.
In an unprecedented killing spree in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea in 1982, Woo Bum-Kon, killed 58 people, including himself, while wounding 37 others. Woo was a Korean police officer who was unsatisfied with his career direction and was struggling to bear the financial burden of holding the traditional wedding demanded by Korean society.
On April 26, 1982, Woo got into a fight with his girlfriend and proceeded to his police headquarters where he consumed alcohol and ransacked the armory. He took a rifle and some hand grenades along with him as he began going from door to door and killing anyone who answered his knocking. Woo used his police status to gain entry into people's homes, and proceeded to either shoot them or detonate grenades, and eventually blew himself and three others up after eight hours of killing.
There are an infinite number of ways that we could interpret these shootings. The killers were individuals from different backgrounds. Undoubtedly they were motivated to commit murder by a complex interplay of factors, such as psychological health, family background and personality.
Though there are many gray and unknown areas in all of these cases, there is a single common thread that binds each together. It is from this common thread that we can hope to gain understanding and wisdom to help prevent these sad situations from happening again.
Life, as we can see in the cases outlined above, is completely unpredictable. Enrolling in a university is no guarantee that a degree will be awarded, failure is always a possibility. When we decide to follow a particular career we also risk failure like Jillian Robbins or frustration like Woo Bum-Kon.
The fantasy that life plans will always work out is something that only a fool would rely on. Even though most Americans live in a relatively cushy, safe, and free environment, we are still surrounded by uncertainty. No one is guaranteed anything, not even tomorrow.
So, why do people attempt to find value in things that are so unreliable? Why are careers and degrees valued so highly that a few unstable individuals are driven to kill when they don't get what they want?
If you actually succeed in one arena of life, you will certainly fail in another sooner or later. We are always moving from keystone to keystone, trying our best to base our lives on something or someone that we think will give us lasting fulfillment. As long as we keep following this vicious cycle we are setting ourselves up for self-inflicted harm.
This is the common thread in all of these seemingly senseless acts of dreadful violence. They are the result of our habit of placing our lives and our identities on our careers, the approval of others and financial comfort. All of which are volatile.
This is the root issue that people must realize, grapple with and eventually face if there is to be any real healing. If we do not, there is little hope for change in our future and only growing dread for even worse falls yet to come.
We must seek to find our foundations outside of ourselves and all our rickety identities and encourage each other to do the same, even through temporary collapses.
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©2007 OhmyNews
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