The Coalition of the Swilling

I agree that the shooting is on Cho, not his tormentors; but it's reasonable to say that any of his classmates could have done the brave thing and stood up for him, and given him a reason not to become a vengeful monster.

Again - this is NOT an excuse for the shooting. Something like this is useful to remind the current group of schoolkids that there's always a chance for them to play a little part in the next Cho's life, and it ought to be for good. It's instructive to the bulliers not to be total jerks, even if their target doesn't go on to shoot up the neighborhood. A gentle answer turneth away wrath...

Hmmmm.

Kids are barbarians and rightfully so. Frankly a lot of children are being insulated from the harsh reality of life already. Any more insulating and we might as well put them in a bottle.

I kinda feel for that Cho. I went through that same sort of nonsense when I immigrated into a very rural portion of New Hampshire from South Korea. It sucks when you're the outsider. But life is tough and anybody who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.

If Cho really couldn't handle it, then he should have blown his brains out and left everyone else alone.

I don't understand the comments about that murderer being picked on as a kid. That is irrelevent.

No matter what, a person has a moral responsibility to NOT murder 32 innocent people. Nothing excuses it. Not even if he were tortured by fellow school children instead of just laughed at.

The correct lesson for him to learn is that there was a reason people laughed at him, and it was his responsibility to learn that.

Laughing at other kids is a bad thing, but two wrongs don't make a right.

If Cho went postal on someone who called him a chink and beat or shot that one person to death, I might give the defense a pass on using that excuse to try to reduce his sentence.

Not for this, though.

My wife emigrated from Taiwan when she was 11, speaking not a word of English. Middle school is tougher to emigrate into than elementary school - Cho got a passs on that one. My wife got picked on all the time by the Guidos in Westchester County (funny enough, most of the blacks left her alone, although there is very little love lost between the blacks and the Koreans / Chinese in NY).

To my knowledge, she has not shot up a classroom, although both she and I were sorely tempted to do bodily harm to college students when we were TAs.

("very little love lost between the blacks and the Koreans / Chinese" ~ that's true in LA, too)

My life sucked as a kid, at home and EVERYWHERE ELSE ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH. But I had Bingley to pound on, so there goes my excuse. And it did save the world from another axe murderer.

You all owe Bingley BIG time.

"…was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy…"

That's basically my childhood biography and I've never shot at anyone (even in Desert Storm when I was armed with an M-16, M2HB, two AT-4s, and an M-47 Dragon plus government sanction to lay waste to our enemies.)

Bullying is a complex problem with many gradations. Almost every child is bullied or mocked periodically by peers. Lots of kids are shy and talk funny, or have some physical feature that sets them apart from the norm (a lot of strikingly beautiful women were considered ugly in school because they looked "different" from Suzy Stereotype). But persistently being bullied throughout the school years by everyone is frankly a sign that there is something seriously wrong with the kid's social cues. I also find it disturbing how some press comments stress Cho's rejection by girls as a root cause of his murderous rampage. He was a deranged stalker. I'm sure the girls he glommed onto knew it in their bones and were too scared of him to be "nice." He wasn't some misunderstood underdog; he was a nasty piece of work.