Unanswerable Questions from Virginia Tech

When Cho Seung-Hui killed 33 people at Virginia Tech, including himself, the media were understandably flummoxed. And ever since, the news has been dripping with the “why” question—as if understanding his motivation, or the circumstances that led to his act, would offer some balm to the rest of us. If only we could understand why it happened, these stories suggest—if only it could be made to make sense—then maybe we would be able to accept it and move on.

And so now we are confronted daily with evidence of Cho’s mental illness, from secondhand reports to his self-videotaped rantings. Ah, we can say with a collective sigh, he did it because he was crazy.

But the questions don’t stop there. The next is more of a “how” than a “why”—how could an obviously insane person, someone with a history of involuntary commitment, legally obtain guns? There’s more comfort in asking “how”: “how” suggests a process, something we can imagine taking control of. “Why,” on the other hand, connotes an issue far beyond our comprehension. “Why” is the realm of karma, where the gods alone decide.

I can offer the short answer. Cho was able to acquire guns for the same reason that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were, or Son of Sam, or Aileen Wuornos. They acquired guns because we live in a society whose priorities and values are upside-down. In the United States, guns are a basic human right. Unlike healthcare or a living wage or marriage or control over your own uterus, a gun is something that anyone can have.

But it’s the first question I really want to get back to: why. In the popular view, that was the simple issue: Cho killed 33 people because he was mentally ill. Next?

I haven’t heard much discussion about why he was ill—what biological or experiential circumstances twisted the chemicals in his brain, gave him delusions, denied him the ability to connect with his fellow human beings. Mental illness allows him to be dismissed. It allows the rest of us the comfort of assuming he was inexorably different, that such a thing would never happen to us. It allows us to dehumanize him.

Chemistry was my attempt to get past that initial fear of mental illness, my attempt to rehumanize its victims—indeed, to see them as victims rather than monsters. Granted that Zach, the character in the book, is not as severely troubled as Cho evidently was. I don’t know if I could have written such a sympathetic portrait of someone whose delusions were as debilitating and dangerous as Cho’s. But my experience researching the book—and, of course, my experience living through the circumstances that inspired it—gives me a perspective that I find missing from the current national discourse.

Perhaps it’s none of my business to know why Cho suffered as he did. And it certainly doesn’t, in any way, excuse what he did. But, whatever the reason, it is well to remember that there were 33 victims at Virginia Tech. We may never understand, and surely we will never accept. But let’s also refuse to live in denial. Mental illness is not a deus ex machina; and turning our eyes from it will not make it go away.