This case has nothing to do with gun control or lack thereof, and everything to do with the ADA and the other PC laws that have veloved in our country related to mental illness. This kid’s professors were alarmed, and reported him to deans, campus police, and campus counseling service. One professor tutored him privately a few times, apparently at the suggestion of an academic, who offered this as an alternative to dropping him from the class. This prof (Lucinda Roy) was sufficiently scared of him that she arranged a code with her secretary, that if she called the secretary on the phone and mentioned a dead professor’s name that meant it was time to call security.
From an NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18virginia.html?hp
“Lucinda Roy, an English professor, said Mr. Cho’s writing, laced with anger, profanity and violence, concerned several faculty members. In 2005, she sent examples to the campus police, the campus counseling service and other officials. All were worried, but little could be done, she said.
Ms. Roy said she would offer to go with Mr. Cho to counseling, just to talk. “But he wouldn’t say yes, and unfortunately I couldn’t force him to do it,” she said. Students were also alarmed that Mr. Cho was taking inappropriate pictures of women under desks, she said.”
What the hell is wrong with the laws in this country that nobody can force this obviously psychopathic kid into a psychiatric exam, and get him locked up in a secure hospital where he belonged? HE was left in charge of deciding what to do about the demons in his sick mind, even though it was obvious to many, many people in positions of authority at the college where he was a student, that he was not equipped to handle himself. But we’re all told over and over again that “mental illness is just like any other illness” and it’s subject to all the excessive privacy laws and to all the excessive protections of the ADA. And any school official who tried to force him to see a counselor or psychiatrist, or who tried to expel him from the school, would get sued and end up paying this kid a bundle.
“This case has nothing to do with gun control or lack thereof, and everything to do with the ADA and the other PC laws that have evolved in our country related to mental illness.”
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These laws are indeed related in this sense: they all flow from an obsession with building up the state as a messianic institution capable of healing every social ill by a self-refuting network of coercive measures in the name of liberty and human dignity. It is a perverse effort to implement the nightmarish vision of Jack Williamson in his 1940’s story “With Folded Hands”.
http://www.umich.edu/~engb415/literature/cyberzach/Williamson/human.html
Another example of the progression of this mentality was on display, oddly enough, in Taranto’s series on “Zero Tolerance” school practices:
Zero-Tolerance Watch
http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=44339&in_page_id=2
And we do mean “watch”! “A fifteen-year old boy in America was incarcerated for twelve days, wrongly accused of making a hoax bomb threat—because his school had forgotten that the clocks had gone forward,” reports Britain’s Metro Cafe:
Cody Webb was arrested last month, after Hempfield Area High School [in Greensburg, a suburb of Pittsburgh] received a bomb threat on their student hotline—which provides a range of information to students about the school—at 3.17am on March 11th. They believed they’d found the culprit when they traced the phone number they thought was responsible to Webb.
Unfortunately, they forgot that the clocks had switched to Daylight Saving Time that morning. Webb, who’s never even had a detention in his life, had actually made his call an hour earlier.
Despite the fact that the recording of the call featured a voice that sounded nothing like Webb’s, the police arrested Webb and he spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before the school eventually realised their mistake.
Webb gave an insight into the school’s impressive investigative techniques, saying that he was ushered in to see the principal, Kathy Charlton. She asked him what his phone number was, and , according to Webb, when he replied “she started waving her hands in the air and saying ‘we got him, we got him.’ “
The Metro Cafe Web site accompanies the story with a picture of a timepiece atop the caption: “Clocks: fiendishly complicated devices.”
From an NYT article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18virginia.html?hp “Lucinda Roy, an English professor, said Mr. Cho’s writing, laced with anger, profanity and violence, concerned several faculty members. In 2005, she sent examples to the campus police, the campus counseling service and other officials. All were worried, but little could be done, she said.
That's baloney.
I got banned from a university on the pretense that I was a "threat". Yes, I was angry and yelled at them. A university physician had abused his authority and stomped on my civil rights by having my driver's license suspended because I didn't agree with his diagnosis. (Which was later proved to be WRONG.)
The physician wasn't even my doctor, I had no appointment with him, and after the one time I did years before, I told the university clinic I never wanted to see him again.
The stupid university, ACLU, state, etc. didn't care about MY rights as an individual.