It is hard to forget the massacre that occurred on Virginia Tech’s campus on April 16, 2007. Cho Seung-Hui, a senior English major, killed 32 people and injured many others before ultimately taking his own life. He began his day that fateful morning sending a package to NBC studios that included a written statement and 28 video clips that featured Cho expressing his intense anger and motivations for killing. He expressed: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”
Following the massacre, much information about Cho’s life, personality, and tendencies were revealed. For the most part, his attack came as a surprise to many of his classmates and family members who described him as quiet and reserved. His roommate, Joseph Aust, told BBC news that Cho “was a very anti-social sort who was very quiet and never talked at all.” Many revealed that they always believed that he was lonely because he did not associate with people and sometimes didn’t even respond to friendly greetings from others.
A fellow student revealed that on the first day of literature class in 2006, Cho wrote a question mark on the attendance sheet instead of signing his name. The students came to know him as “question mark kid.” Cho experienced similar ridicule in high school as well. Chris Davids, a high school and college peer of Cho’s, revealed that once in English class, the teacher asked students read aloud. Cho initially refused, but after being threatened with a failing participation grade, he began to read in a strange, deep, and spooky voice. Davids expressed, “As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to
This evidence reveals that Cho was clearly a troubled boy. But, were his feelings of social rejection, loneliness, and anger enough to motivate him to execute the deadliest school shooting in history? Recent research says yes. Lowell Gaertner, Jonathan Iuzzini, and Erin M. O’Mara, in their article, “When Rejection by One Fosters Aggression Against Many: Multiple-Victim Aggression as a Consequence of Social Rejection and Perceived Groupness,” hypothesized that that rejection and perceived groupness function together to promote multiple-victim incidents of aggression. They performed two experiments to test their proposition. The first experiment revealed that rejection by one or a few persons can precipitate aggression toward many. In other words, the rejectee often associates rejection with the group the rejecter(s) belong to and therefore retaliates against the entire group.
The authors reveal that rejection may lead to aggression as rejection threatens self-esteem, reduces self-control, decreases the ability to control antisocial urges, and may perpetuate the use of aggression to gain respect and avoid future rejection. Also, rejected persons may act aggressively as a revenge tactic and as an attempt to gain retribution. For example, Cho expressed in his manifesto: “Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only if you didn’t fuck the living shit out of me…Ask yourself what you did to me to have made me clean the slate.” This statement portrays the idea that due to rejection he experienced from his peers, he was forced to perform violent actions to “clean the slate” and gain vengeance.
Research reveals that the social rejection Cho experienced throughout his academic career may have played a significant factor in his decision to carry out the Virginia Tech massacre. His isolated and withdrawn nature further exacerbated his feelings of loneliness and exemplified his perception of being a social rejected and underappreciated member of the Virginia Tech community and society at large. The video clips that he left in his wake reveal the true underpinnings of his psyche and his deep desire to deliver the ultimate “payback.” Despite the social psychological analysis’s that could be formulated to determine Cho’s motivations, his shameful actions will never be fully understood or forgotten.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6564653.stm
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