THE YOUNG man who killed all those people and himself at Virginia Tech started, once again, the national search for a scapegoat. Who is to blame?
The gun-control lobby blamed the easy availability of firearms. The fringe of the gun lobby blamed the Virginia Legislature for not allowing all the students at Virginia Tech to carry guns.
A few, who believe — in a kind of skewed social Darwinism — that all people are ultimately responsible for their own fates, blamed the victims for not having rushed the gunman and disarmed him.
University administration and police have been blamed for not recognizing immediately what was going on and allowing the gunman to mail his loony screed to NBC and go all the way across campus to kill many more people.
The mental health and court systems have been blamed for allowing the gunman out on the street after it was clear that he had severe mental problems.
There is an element of truth in some of these assertions (forget the one about blaming the victims). Like the shooters at Columbine, the killer in Virginia was a perfect storm — an instance in which flaws and blind spots in American society came together to allow tragic loss of life.
The gunman was, by any reasonable standard, insane and a danger to himself and others. In spite of that, he was not forced into treatment. A nation that has been willing in recent years to limit the rights of its citizens in so many ways to provide the illusion of security has not been willing to provide real security by making the necessary connection between courts and hospitals to track people who are dangerously mentally ill.
In spite of the court’s finding, information about the mental health of the gunman was not entered into the national database used to control the sale of firearms.
There is, as there always is, plenty of blame to go around. But most of the blame cannot be placed on individuals. The blame belongs on an imperfect system — on an imperfectable system.
It is a system in which absolute security must be traded for a reasonable level of freedom.