No comments but worth a look
http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110009988
WONDER LAND
Blacksburg's Silver LiningMaybe this time the status quo will change.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, April 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
In the wake of an event such as Virginia Tech, our system moves heaven and earth to figure out what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn't happen again. This of course is what we did after September 11 and after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina.
Here's what's really unnerving about this inevitable "process": In June 2000, the Bremer Report of the National Commission on Terrorism described virtually everything we needed to know about preparing for the kind of attack that occurred in September 2001. Similarly--and you can guess what you're about to read--in 2002 the Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative, conducted by the Secret Service and the Department of Education, told us virtually everything we need to know to prevent a Virginia Tech.
The good news here is that we are not as stupid as we seem. We have it within our power to assign smart people to look at a manifest public problem and offer sensible fixes. (To be sure, not all commissions do.) Still one must ask: Why do we refuse to take our own best advice?
After the Blacksburg murders, one of the first words uttered in awful memory was "Columbine." Well, Columbine was among the main reasons for the Safe Schools effort. Also Springfield, Ore., West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark.--all sites of widely publicized school shootings. In all, the study investigated 37 such attacks in schools from 1974 to 2000.
Most interesting, the study was led by the Secret Service. Why? The study doesn't quite put it this way, but it was because the Secret Service's main job in life is preventing the nuts from killing someone. Simply, the study's goal was to try to figure out what is "knowable" before an attack.
One of the Safe School report's most relevant findings, for the purposes of stopping another Virginia Tech, is that the 37 school attacks weren't typically carried out by severely ill, unhinged psychotics like Cho Seung-Hui. This is not to say they were happy campers (the study interviewed 10 perpetrators in depth). Though few of them would get off by reason of insanity, they were all mentally very unhappy campers; and what is more, other people knew that. And in nearly every case, someone knew they were planning the attack: "In nearly two thirds of the incidents, more than one person had information about the attack before it occurred."
Among the reasons widely adduced for not doing something about Cho's violent proclivities are HIPAA and FERPA, the confidentiality laws for health records and college students' records. Well, there's no FERPA for high schools. There is merely the weird cultural refusal to turn in bad actors to adult authority. In one school attack, so many students knew it was coming that 24 were waiting on a mezzanine to watch, one with a camera. The enemy is us.
Prior to the studied assaults, some 93% of the attackers behaved in ways that caused concern to school officials, teachers, parents, the cops or other students. "In one case, the student's English teacher became concerned about several poems and essays that . . ." well, you know the rest.
Psychological flameouts were indeed present in virtually all the attacks--depression (61%), prior suicidal attempts or thoughts (78%), a sense of loss, feelings of being persecuted or in fact bullied.
A lot has been made of the police failure to apprehend Cho for two hours. Fair enough, but that's not typical. In the Safe Schools 37 incidents, most of the attacks were stopped by administrator or teachers, largely because half didn't last longer than 15 minutes. The cops stopped only 25% of the attacks--an argument for deputizing and arming someone in the schools. (In testimony this week to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the head of the association for all campus cops explained the "safety issues" that mainly keeps them distracted: "At the top of the list are issues related to high-risk drinking and the use and abuse of illegal and prescription drugs.")
After September 11, we learned from the 9/11 Commission that the left hand of the CIA didn't know what the right hand of the FBI was doing, that they wouldn't talk to each other, or under Justice Department rules, couldn't talk to each other. But before all that, the Bremer anti-terror report in 2000 described "complex bureaucratic procedures" that hampered the CIA and an FBI suffering from "bureaucratic and cultural obstacles (my emphasis) to obtaining terrorism information."
Cultural indeed. Over time we have accreted a culture in the United States--of rules, laws, liability concerns and mindsets--that adds up to no-can-do. Or, Attorney may I?
After 9/11 the consensus that we had to do something sank quickly in the swamps of partisanship; wiretapping and incarcerating terrorists became mainly a debate game for politicians and newspaper writers. If there is a sliver of silver lining in the Virginia Tech aftermath, it is that there seems to be a willingness to look hard at the status quo--no matter what assumptions pre-existed about rights, privacy, stigma, coercion, security or whether we can blame it on Karl Rove. On Tuesday, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece by a professor titled, "Why It's OK to Rat on Other Students." Here, as with the message screaming off the pages of the Safe School report, the exhortation is to do something, no matter what the intimidations of the law or received wisdom.
What this means is that some college presidents, and their lawyers, rather than rolling over before those confidentiality laws, should tell some aggrieved student who is refusing to take the medication prescribed for his psychosis: So sue! Let a judge decide whether 32 deaths warrant a reconsideration of these restrictions.
As well, there is no hope unless a light goes off in the collective socket of our elected politicians, which illumines just how much their oh-so-needed laws siphon time and energy out of the daily lives of institutional leaders who a long time ago had the common sense and personal authority to chuck out a Cho Seung-Hui.
At the Homeland Security Committee hearing this week, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I) remarked, "We want to respect the privacy of the individual, yet ultimately I think we have a greater responsibility to protect the safety of the community." Sound sensible? If embraced by our politics, that notion would overturn 40 years of jurisprudence and conventional wisdom that, of late, has turned deadly. After Blacksburg, it could happen. Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
