Putting blame where it belongs.

This is my last entry on the sad events that took place on Monday at Virginia Tech.

There were two really good opinion pieces that came out today that I would like to bring to your attention. The first comes from Linda Chavez:

"Thirty-three people are dead; 32 of them innocents, gunned down by a young man who then killed himself. We want to know why. We want to understand how such a horrific thing could happen on a bucolic college campus. Could it have been prevented? Do we need better laws? Did university officials ignore the warning signs of a dangerous young man bent on destruction? Did police fail to protect students in the hours between the first shootings in the dorms and the massacre that ensued in the engineering building later that morning? "

Ms. Chavez's column goes through all of the questions that every one of us have had running through our heads this week. What went wrong? Could we have prevented this?

"In the end, we will never know why Cho Seung-Hui chose to murder students and teachers at Virginia Tech. Surely not by looking for clues in the videos and 1,800-page manifesto he mailed to NBC in the interlude between the first shootings and his final killing spree. In the videos, Cho reads from a script in which he is the victim, and all around him are his persecutors. Cho fancied himself a martyr when he was nothing more than a puerile narcissist. There has been much discussion of Cho's mental state. A parade of psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health experts has weighed in to posthumously diagnose Cho as mentally ill....blaming the doctor who let Cho go, or even blaming mental illness for what Cho did, it seems to me, is wrong. It is almost as if we have succumbed to Cho's fantasy. He is simply a victim, carrying out an inevitable course of action that others have allowed to happen. Perhaps it is easier in our postmodern age to ascribe illness to evil. Surely no one in his right mind would do the things that Cho did, we want to believe. But this explanation, like all the others that have been offered to try, even after the fact, to exert some control over what happened, misses the point. "

The point is that the person responsible for Monday's tragedy was Cho Seung-hui and on that note we come to the second column.

"The problems are not bullets but single-parent families and the absence of male authority figures. Not pistols but parents never seeing their kids because both are working. Not rifles but teachers unable to chastise children. Our malaise is an obsession with self-esteem when kids actually need and want boundaries and borders. If we control anything it ought to be the endless discussions about young people's feelings and our encouraging them to act out their slightest whim. If we limit anything it ought to be the constant attacks on family, chastity, faith and duty and the television stations that deaden the mind and the sensibilities with graphic violence, grotesque pornography and vacuous pop videos. After which hosting long discussions asking why kids go wrong. The mantra of the modern youth. I want, I know, I am, I'm cool, I'm everything. You're nothing, you don't understand, you suck. Feel my pain or I'll destroy you. Most of these attacks in schools and colleges have nothing to do with the United States, the race of the murderers or the type of guns used. They are about the killing of morality and the destruction of standards and unless we act now we're going to see far more of the consequences. Wake up and smell the cordite. "

Our children are dying but not from guns. They are dying from the indifference that has been shown to them by the very people that claim to be working "for the children"....