Apr 19, 2007 3 min read

For whatever reassurance it’s worth, there are almost 18 million students at more than 4,000 U.S. two- and four-year colleges and universities. Students on those campuses are by and large safer there than anywhere else. The chance of a college student falling victim to a mass murder, particularly the deadliest school shooting in our history, is statistically microscopic, although this is of no comfort at all if you or your loved ones are that statistic.

But it is important to keep that as a frame of reference in thinking about that deadly spring morning at Virginia Tech when a senior English major identified as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, killed himself and 32 other people.

Already there are demands that the university president and the campus police chief resign over their handling of the incident. But, really, how and why do you plan for an insane killer stalking your campus? The Associated Press counted 10 campus shootings over the past 41 years, only one of them approaching Virginia Tech’s in lethality.

The police reasonably thought the first two killings possibly involved a love triangle, a domestic dispute, and that the killer had left campus; and the police in fact did pursue and apprehend a suspect. It would be prescient police work indeed to believe the killer would lie low for more than two hours before embarking on a shooting rampage in a distant classroom building.

None of this is meant to minimize the pain or importance of that tragedy. The 32 students and teachers were valuable people with so much to contribute; they are a loss to all of us.

There will be calls for better security measures and stepped-up surveillance, none of which can see where it counts – the human heart. But what of the suspected killer himself, invariably described, as so many of them are, as a “loner”?

The Associated Press reports “that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic, and that he left a note in his dorm in which he railed against ‘rich kids,’ ‘debauchery’ and ‘deceitful charlatans’ on campus.” A teacher is said to have described him as “troubled,” and he was also alleged to have set a fire in a dorm and stalked several women students.

Clearly, Cho showed warning signs, but warning of what? Are we willing to ask university administrators to determine that one student is going through a mental bad patch but that another student exhibiting similar behavior is a menace who must be barred from campus?

The dilemma only differs from 9/11 in scale: How much money are we willing to spend, how much in privacy and liberty to surrender so that we are only slightly safer at the margins?