April 17, 2007
The Tragedy at Blacksburg Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 08:00 AM EST The horror at Blacksburg yesterday leaves all of us searching for answers. We aren’t even certain yet that there was only one gunman. What can history tell us? History, I think, stands silent with the rest of us at this moment. Recent history forces us to ask an especially dark question—could this be a new kind of planned, organized suicide attack, a new manifestation of the organized terror that has gripped the globe in recent years? But there is no evidence of that and no cause, at least so far, to expect any. The chance seems remote. Looking at other recent massacres—Columbine, Oklahoma City—we find no more than one or two deranged individuals behind them. Jack Kelly addressed this in his AmericanHeritage.com article on the 1966 mass murder in Austin, Texas, which was until yesterday the deadliest school shooting in American history. In that case the shooter, on the University of Texas campus, killed 15 and injured 31 over a period of an hour and a half before being shot dead himself by SWAT officers. He was a 25-year-oldd named Charles Whitman. He had a brain tumor that may have affected his behavior. He had been a heavy user of methamphetamines. He hated his father with “a mortal passion.” He had been court martialed from the Marines for disciplinary problems. But the vast majority of people who fit any of those descriptions never kill anyone. No explanation ever truly made sense of what had happened, and probably none could. As Jack Kelly wrote, “It’s no fun for us who are left to contemplate the senseless violence that erupts from the clear sky of a seemingly normal personality. We are left only with the stark tragedy itself, and its victims, who are not numbers but human beings.”
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