First really good post reflecting on the on the violence at VA Tech I’ve seen so far, and it comes by way of Andrew Sullivan…

Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:

Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.

Yes.  Yes!  But Sullivan doesn’t get it…

So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.

But it wasn’t random.  There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all.  It certainly wasn’t in this case.  He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out.  He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo.  It was cold and brutal and calculating. 

There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal.  But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people.  I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…

Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.

There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover.  Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents).  Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating.  Ask me how I know.  But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much.  If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be?  Nobody, that’s who.

Here in Baltimore, they still remember this one…

Four-day Maryland standoff ends; captor dead, hostages unhurt

March 22, 2000

DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.

The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.

"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.

That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.

"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.

"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."

"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.

Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.

Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.

Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.

You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here.  He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk.  He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car.  He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in.  For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area.  He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages).  A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away.  Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.

To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face.  If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.

[Update…]  Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all.  So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all.  Cho seems to have simply just been mad.  As in…crazy.