My brother had a Glock exactly like Cho's. When he died, my son got it as part of his inheritance.
It's a beautiful gun. Cops love Glocks because they are very reliable, don't jam or misfire.
There are maybe 85 million handguns in America. So -- while I am not good at math, it seems to me that it's accurate to say that events like the one at Virginia Tech occur less than 1 time in 85 million.
I'd blame Cho's actions on some things that are much closer to home, and much more likely.
It's very expensive to live in the DC metro region. Some families have a very high income, so they can not only pay for expenses but also luxuries like Mercedes, Lexus and Infiniti for high school students.
Kids being kids, they want what the other kids have, and feel bad when they are unable to have that, whether it's cool basketball shoes or a cool car.
In Cho's case, he got into a cool school but not Harvard or Yale or whatever. VT is a very selective school but not celestial.
And his mom and dad, partly because they live in such an expensive place, partly because they come from a culture where the mom and the pop and all the rest of the family works double duty all the time, he was alone instead of getting lots of mom and dad time like he would have in rural South Korea.
And this was doubly bad because he had -- well they say it was autism but it sounds more like Asperger's syndrome. He was very high functioning.
I know a lot of families with kids like Cho. They work all the time, they don't spend time with their kids, their kids are problems they can't even begin to deal with but work is at least something they can control.
Fairfax is just weird that way. High pressure, but if you screw up, not much support if the family doesn't ask for it.
My son about Cho's age, not Asperger's or autistic, very high functioning but disorganized, they assigned a counselor just to keep him organized. She met with him once a week or so, just to keep his locker organized and his calendar up to date. How many places in the world would do that? It's weird.
And then, all the kids with Jaguars and Mercedes and Lexus and Infiniti and Rolexes and so forth. We tried to raise our kids to say, "OK, those are nice cars but we don't need them."
I mean, there are kids who drive better cars than their teachers could ever afford in their entire lives. Not to mention the high status clothes (don't ask me, I have no idea.)
I think Cho flipped out because he couldn't fit in, and he was too weird for even a normal South Korean relationship, which seems like Mars to the rest of us here.
The men are chauvinist pigs and the women are oppressed by American standards.
No way he'd ever find a girl just like Mom here, he'd have to go back to the Old Country to find a girl like Mom. |
