Guns, Bullets, Blood & Multimedia

from: the australian.news.com.au

Silent kid's sick tirade
A key to understanding the newest mass murderer in the US may lie partly in cultural alienation, writes Robert Lusetich
April 20, 2007

THE strange and tragic irony of Cho Seung-hui is that in life he barely uttered a word to anyone. In death you can't shut him up. Perhaps it is because Cho, who spent countless hours sitting with his only known friend, his laptop, is a child of the impersonal YouTube generation, part of a tribe whose members find it easier to talk into a camera than to converse with another human being.

BLUEPRINT OF A KILLER

Warning signs include obsession with violence, resentment, an urge to blame others, arrogance, contempt and isolation.
In three out of four school shootings in the US, the killer made no threats, but most engaged in behaviour that caused others concern.
Cho Seung-hui was a typical loner. He rarely took off his sunglasses and cap, presenting a barrier to contact with others.

He never spoke in class. His English teacher said he "exuded loneliness".
Cho was apparently infatuated with a beautiful student but his feelings were not returned, triggering feelings of rejection, loss and affront. She was among the first two people to be killed by Cho.
Most people suffer rejection during their lives but do not become killers. Psychologists say that certain people are predisposed to extreme behaviour if pushed.

People with a vulnerability to psychosis are at risk of developing mental illness as their stress levels increase. A strong, secure family can prevent a predisposed person from reaching a crisis.
Some psychologists say a contributing factor is social acceptance of macho violence in computer games and movies. This can desensitise vulnerable young men.

Mass killers and those reacting to rejection don't worry about being caught, unlike serial killers who try to avoid capture. But the 23-year-old South Korean native's desire to justify his diabolical deeds to the world at large is hardly unique.

Theodore Kaczynski, who spent 15 years sending bombs to universities and airlines - hence his FBI nom de guerre, Unabomber - as he retreated from a society he loathed, living like a hermit in the forest, produced a long and rambling manifesto, which he demanded The New York Times publish, and which led to his capture in 1996.

Cho's manifesto is suitably multimedia and his outlet of choice was the American network NBC, although considering the time and care he took in producing it - the video portion is broken up into 27 separate files - it wouldn't have been entirely surprising had he uploaded it on to a MySpace home page before going on to carry out the worst mass killing in modern American history.

Reports from South Korea - where Cho lived in relative poverty with his parents until he was eight, when the family immigrated to the US - suggest Cho had trouble communicating even at a young age.
His 81-year-old grandmother, who identified herself to journalists in Seoul only as Kim, says Cho "troubled his parents a lot when he was young because he couldn't speak well".
"But (he) was well-behaved," she says.

Well-behaved in the Korean culture means he was subservient; he didn't rock the boat, which is of great importance in a strict society where order and obedience, particularly to elders, are expected. For a young boy with communication problems and antisocial tendencies, arriving in the US without knowing a word of English could only have made the situation worse.

"Within the Korean culture, we are known as the 1.5s (one and a half generations)," says Andy Chong, who came to the US with his family when he was five and now lives in Los Angeles. "We're not Korean like the first generation, which is more strict, speaks Korean and has more traditional Korean values, and we're not like the second generation, which the first generation looks at as better because they speak English without an accent, they're more integrated, more advanced. We're sort of stuck in between: we don't speak Korean that well and a lot of us speak English with accents; we're sort of this lost generation, caught in between.

"Obviously, I don't know this guy but if I was going to guess about him, I'd think he was like some guys I've known, some 1.5s. Their parents work long hours, work really hard to make a good life for their kids, and he's the only son, so that's a lot of pressure just there.

"A lot is expected of you if you're the only son in a Korean family and this guy, it looks like he just couldn't handle it. To Koreans, it's a big deal about which colleges their kids go to. I see (Cho's) sister (who works for the US State Department, directing aid to Iraq) went to Princeton: that's Ivy League, that's very prestigious with Koreans. Everyone's impressed when they hear something like that.

"But he's going to Virginia Tech; not bad, but it's not Princeton. And then he's majoring in English, not business or accounting or law or medicine. If you look at the background and the pressure a guy like that is under to do well in life and to repay his parents for everything they've done for him, to carry on the family name, to be successful, to have everyone believe you're successful: if you're not a guy who can handle all of this, which it doesn't sound like he is, then, yeah, I can see him going postal."

Certainly, a portion of Cho's diatribe seems to indicate a hatred of the successful and wealthy: "You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats? Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs? Your trust fund wasn't enough?"

BIZARRE RANT
Selections of Cho Seung-hui's messages posted to NBC:

"You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenceless people."

"Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave?"
"Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive?"

"Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can?"
"You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything."Source: NBC News

Perhaps surprisingly, not many saw Cho "going postal", a popular shorthand expression for mass killings among Americans that was coined when post office workers began killing co-workers in the mid-'80s.

"Honestly, I never thought he was dangerous," one of Cho's university roommates, Karan Grewal, said in a television interview yesterday. "He didn't seem aggressive. He didn't seem like a guy with a death wish.
"He just seemed very lonely. I just thought he was really, really shy. At first I thought he just got (to the US) last year and didn't know English very well, so that's why he didn't talk. I mean it was pretty weird that he didn't talk. I never heard him talking to anyone: not on the phone, not even to his parents."

After nine months of living in close proximity to one another, Grewal said he did not even know what Cho was studying at the university.

All he could say about the country's newest mass murderer was that he spent hours typing on his laptop. Others say he liked to watch wrestling on TV and had recently started going to the gym to lift weights. "I just assume he was trying to get buff," Grewal says. "He was pretty skinny." He says he was shocked when he saw the video clips of Cho yesterday, principally because he looked up at the camera, whereas in real life always looked down when he was around other people, never looking anyone in the eyes.

The character sketch of the archetypal friendless loner is the same as far back as anyone has gone. Neighbours who remember him growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, say he was always by himself and if they approached, even if just to say hello, he would ignore them or leave. "He was just a very antisocial sort who was very quiet and never talked at all," says Joe Aust, who shared a bedroom with Cho at Virginia Tech.
"I tried to make conversation with him but he would give one-word answers. Other times he would just ignore me."

One of Cho's professors, Lucinda Roy, says Cho wore sunglasses even when he was indoors, pulled a baseball cap tight down on his forehead and rarely looked up during a class. He never said anything. She describes him as "the loneliest person I have ever met in my life".
But being lonely isn't a crime. Events took a darker turn for Cho in 2005, when he was caught photographing female students in a class from under his desk. He was also reported by two female students for stalking, which nearly led to him being committed to a mental institution.
Cho, who Aust confirms took anti-depressants - which can trigger homicidal or suicidal behaviour - began expressing a creepy rage and anger in his writing projects.
One of them, a short, quite unimpressive play titled Richard McBeef, is laden with violence and foul language, as well as occasional attempts at something vaguely resembling humour. "You committed a conspiracy, just like what the government has done to John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe," Cho has one of his characters say.

Cho's behaviour became so disturbing that many students in one of his writing classes would not attend if he was there.
Cho spent weeks, if not months, planning this week's massacre. He purchased the handguns - the first on February 9, the other on March 16 - and carefully filed away their serial numbers, began making his videos and taking photographs of himself in various Rambo-like poses, and prepared chains and padlocks to ensure no one could escape Norris Hall once he opened fire.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," Cho says on the tape, "but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."