Episode 348: Virginia Tech: Mental Health and Mass Murder

On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we talk one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, the Virginia Tech massacre. On April 16 of 2017, South Korea born Seung Hui Cho took two pistols on a deadly rampage across this university campus, killing 32 and wounding 17. From students to faculty, he spared no one, until he finally took his own life. So what was his motivation, and why did this event add the notion of mental health into the national debate on gun control?

Cho moved to the US with his parents when he was 8 years old. His family claims he was an unnaturally quiet child, isolated and avoiding physical contact even by family. As he got older, he was diagnosed with severe depression as well as selective mutism, and just two years before the shooting, he was ordered by a judge to seek help for his mental health after a suicide threat. Quite simply, he was not well mentally.

Once he started as a student at Virginia Tech, he got in some trouble for disturbing compositions in his creative writing classes (he was an English major), and he was also recorded as having stalked a few female students. With all that background, he decided to buy a pistol, and then 30 days later, buy another one. Then, it was time for him to use them.

At 7:15 AM, he shot and killed two students in one of the campus dorms at Virginia Tech. Two hours later (after sending a video manifesto to the new), he stormed a lecture hall and shot up several classrooms. The accounts of the survivors show heroism and horror—from a holocaust survivor who died, so his students could get out the window to a newly recruited member of the US Airforce who died a hero trying to keep Cho from entering his classroom. But of course, since this is a mass shooting, things don’t all add up.

What makes people think this one is a conspiracy theory, and how does it stack up to other mass shooting conspiracies? Was Virginia Tech complicit due to faulty security policies? What was Cho’s connection to his victims, or were they random? How did he get so many head shots with guns he had virtually no practice with? What did he say in his rambling tirade that he sent to the media? What do Matt Lauer and Jay Leno have to do with any of this? Listen, laugh, learn.

Thorough Timeline: https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/virginia-tech-shootings-fast-facts/index.html