Cho's Explosion

A lot of writing on the web indicates that Cho Seung-Hui had an explosion or a meltdown and they wonder what the specific cause of that meltdown was.

This is a good example from CNN 360 blog:
Then something happened. Whatever was boiling inside Cho exploded with lethal fury. In the ultimate act of hatred, he destroyed even himself, leaving others to decipher the ultimate question: Why?-- By Jill Dougherty, U.S. Affairs Editor for CNN International

This would indicate that the deaths on the campus of Virginia Tech were 2nd degree murders; however, this is untrue.

You simply have to look at the information. There was a receipt in Cho's backpack for the gun he used. It was dated in March. One would assume he purchased a generous amount of ammunition at that time as well.


As indicated in this article , Cho waited 5 weeks before using the gun to kill his fellow students and teachers at Virginia Tech. According to his teachers, Cho was intelligent if off-balance. The purchase of the gun and the ammunition indicates premeditation. There was no 'moment' where some action like flying doves in Mars attacks set him off to kill a bunch of people. Like Mars Attacks, Cho and the aliens always planned to kill a bunch of people.

He isn't a marksman. He really didn't have a legitimate reason for purchasing a handgun. His life wasn't threatened, theft while prevalent in schools usually isn't enough to want to own a gun for prevention and bringing a fun on campus is most likely illegal and certainly against the school's rules.

So, why would you buy a large number of rounds for a gun (even if we grant the point that he had a reasonable reason to buy the gun)? If you need to protect yourself, you might buy enough rounds to fill a clip. That's all you need. By the time you've gone through a clip of ammunition you are either dead, killed the intruder or put a bunch of holes in the wall. It is pretty unlikely that he refilled a single clip every time he needed to reload, either. He probably purchased multiple clips, so that he could reload as quickly as possible.

So, what does all this mean? Gun purchase, huge number of rounds, probable multiple clips....? It means it was premeditated. He was planning on doing it sometime. It was only a matter how how badly he felt that day that he decided that he was going to punish all these people for being who they are...

After all, he came from Korea. There is little doubt in my mind that life was considerably harder for him then in his formative years. To see the massive amount of waste in American culture, the resources frittered away that could easily help his people and then on top of that... How they reject him and how intent he was on doing things. That women would reject his advances and increase the feelings that he doesn't belong here, that there is no woman for him in the future.

I can see his side all too well; unfortunately, no one ever told him that the way things are - is not the way things will always be. His parents never drilled in to him that the most important thing in life was the future of humanity and not the future of self. Really, the self is so small in the enormous tide of billions of human beings. I know we like to think that we are individuals, that we are special and no doubt I suffer from that delusion as well. But when it comes down to it, this idea of self-importance probably tore in to Cho when faced with the outward evidence that he didn't matter, that all the suffering he saw didn't matter in Korea and that the point of all the money in the world appeared to be...a bunch of rich kids spending their money and wasting their time fooling around.

But the point of this entry is simple. Cho planned this horrible event. It was not a crime of passion or a lack of control. I'm sure we'll see more people speaking in the future of a Cho shooting people with an emotionless look on his face (much like the look on his face in any number of pictures on the web now. He probably felt hopeless, like he wasn't important struggle with the mental attitude that he must be important and probably felt the tide of College kids doing unimportant things and didn't want to be swept in to that tide. How could he possible stop being assimilated in to this culture?

The sad point is that many of the people he killed had infinite horizons ahead of them. Academic achievers that could have done an unknown amount of good for human society - the human future. A future like a Chinese proverb of many ants working together to achieve greatness. We may not always cooperate well together, but certainly we are better off in many ways in the present than humanity has ever been in the past.

Cho himself had a future. Perhaps if he controlled his anger and continued to write he could have been the next horror author that send chills down readers spines. But now, there is nothing.