Was talking to my mother about Virginia Tech. I remember their football team, coming from Ohio State. I remember Cho Seung-Hi‘s teacher – Nikki Giovani – from a shout out in a Kanye West song. Today at work we had a department meeting with 19 people. The massacre is very random, and very close to home. It’s weird that Genesis pointed out his adolescent and violent plays. The school and Nikki Giovani caught him at that point and tried to help him via private tutoring, but it was just too late. From what I’ve read I think the University did, actually, a great deal. They actually reached out to the kid as much as an institution can, but for this random kid it wasn’t enough. There’s no one to blame, cause even the killer is pitiable. There are just 32 dead humans, less than the 100 a day you get in Iraq. There probability of it ‘happening to me’ is lower than me getting in a bad car accident. But it resonates nonetheless.
From the reports I’ve read, Cho Seung-Hi didn’t talk to anyone. Like ever. If a teacher called on him in class he simply wouldn’t answer. He never made eye contact. When asked to write his name on a sign-in he put ‘?’. He simply didn’t interact in a basic human way. We all have problems and neurosis, but he simply did not interact. He IM’d, but he didn’t have a MySpace or Facebook page. The last murder I read about was deeply documented on MySpace, online where even loners can find comfort. He just wasn’t there – until he was on every station.
The sheer amount of people he killed is unbelievable, plus 29 injured at last Wikipedia. At the office meeting today I was thinking of how there were 19 of us there, like in a university English class. In one room that Seung-Hi walked into, only four students walked out alive. So random, so dark, so deeply hurtful to friends and parents who just let their kids out of the home. For the mothers, and fathers, to lose someone at that moment of promise. For the lifelong friends you make in college, to lose one of them.
On a personal level it’s shocking. On a network level – a policy level – it’s not really about gun control or university policy, it’s just a part of the global insecurity. Spam, Terrorism and Gun Violence are all similar threats to the human network, with a similar structure. If you have X people you get Y crazies. In a time where people have access to technology ranging from Cheap AK-47s to Commercial Planes to Computers, you will get abuse. It’s not a moral problem as much as a statistical one. You’re never going to fix all the ‘bad’ people – especially if your population keeps growing. You have to fix the network.
Virginia Tech had ample information – Nikki Giovani asked for security and finally for Seung-Hi to be removed. There was paperwork, conversations among administrators. That information just didn’t connect to any security networks. American federal law enforcement is in shambles – still reeling from 9/11, spun further off course by Bush-era incompetence. State police have no particular legal or operational recourse for a ‘kid that doesn’t talk’. The solution, in fact, isn’t more heavy handed security. I actually don’t know what the final solution is, but there is a method to that solution.
Traffic and Smeed’s Law
One record of network death is road accidents. Those happen generally through human behavior and like any animal behavior, they are measurable. Car accidents kill an estimated 1.2 million worldwide. Which – given the vast amount of people that don’t own cars – seems tiny. However, in the United States there are about 43,000 car fatalities for about 10,200 gun fatalities. Basically, Americans are about 4 times more likely to die in a car crash.
What’s weird about car crashes, and I’m getting sleepy, is that they are declining at a mathematically predictable rate. Specifically, the formula above. It’s unfortunately named Smeed’s Law, and it basically states that:
Smeed’s Law, after RJ Smeed who first proposed the relationship in 1949, is an empirical rule relating traffic fatalities to motor vehicle registrations and country population. Thus annually increasing traffic volume leads to a decrease in accidents per vehicle. It was posited after an analysis of figures from a number of countries over several decades.
Smeed’s formula is expressed as:
or, weighted per capita,
where D is annual road deaths, n is number of registered vehicles, and p is population.
![{D over p} = .0003 times {sqrt[3]{n over p}},](https://i2.wp.com/indi.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/d7b816aeea89aae5fb756e747fcead33.png?w=970)
So, increasing network traffic means less accidents per vehicle. The mechanism is unclear, but the formula predicts actual behavior in 62 countries. That is, this is just a what, not a how. How is a speculation – I’d guess that networks are self-healing and that they adapt to the environment. If driving without seatbelts is destructive to the human network, the network will adapt that part of itself. Haltingly, through the halting technology of laws and institutions, but nonetheless. In the same way I think that Terrorism, Spam and Gun Violence – the jaguars of this night – will eventually be resolved. Or, as it were, evolved out of. Because we have to.
good post.
I can see where you are coming from on this and have been thinking on similar lines recently.
I also recall a similar concept described in something, called “structuation theory”. The basic assumptions are that:
* Social life is not the sum of all micro-level activity, but social activity cannot be completely explained from a macro perspective.
*The repetition of the acts of individual agents reproduce the structure.
* Social structures are neither inviolable nor permanent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_structuration
The gun law debate has now been rekindled in the US. In Australia we have very strict gun laws, implemented after a major shooting incident in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996; 35 people were killed. Since then, fingers crossed, we have not had a similar incident.
While on a subjective level I prefer strict gun control, I agree that it may be too simplistic to think that gun-laws are going to be an answer to such a problem. I recall Michael Moore, in his documentary, “Bowling for Columbine”, point out that it is legal to carry guns in Canada, yet the crime rate is much lower than in the US.
On the other hand, yesterday, I saw an interview with Tony Mauser, father of a victim in the Columbine massacre, and gun control lobbyist who quoted a statistic which made me see his viewpoint. According to Mauser, in the US, more than twice the number of people who were killed in Virginia tech die everyday, as a result of gunshots. Maybe currently, US society is not able to handle lenient gun laws, and there has to be some sort of gun control to reduce these figures as a short term measure to save lives. There are always good and bad people, and a gun in the hands of the wrong person is lethal, and it probably is not worth taking the risk of allowing such freedoms.
Actually, just as I finished the above paragraph I had a second look at this statistic you quoted:
“in the United States there are about 43,000 car fatalities for about 10,200 gun fatalities”.
A question just popped up in my mind:
What are the statistics comparing gun ownership versus car ownership in the US? I would assume that more people own cars than guns, and that may explain the larger number of car fatalities.We also, need to consider the fact that there is a more direct relationship between guns and death than a car and death. The intention of owning a car is not to kill or threaten someone.
Incidents like these force us to question and reasses the status quo. Not simply about gun control, but about social interactions and behaviour within a context. I agree with you, in a society like the US where there is freedom to discuss, assess and re-evaluate, the system has a greater chance to adjust and adapt.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts that popped up when I read your post.
By the way…I agree…good post.
Good post – I really like your analysis of Seung-Hui’s personality. Not been following the story as closely as I normally would but liked your analysis. Did you hear about the video he was meant to have sent to NBC? Check out this
On the issue of Network deaths and Smeeds law however (as much of a statistics hound I may be) I am not entirely sure I agree. I believe that the simplicity of the model has much to be desired. As the network increases then so does the natural entropy. Thus the ability to predict becomes much more chaotic as opposed to stochastic. Thus I would expect a second or third order partial differential equation to give it validity. It is not dissimilar to stock market fluctuations..
Every society has its misfits, psychopaths and lunatics, the US is no different in that respect.
However, it is in the US that a psychopath can get his hands on an automatic weapon. The result is what you have seen. Had he been armed with a club, knife or other object, which is all he would have had in most countries, how much harm could he have done?
On the subject of gun control, if American’s can accept licensing on their motor cars, why not on guns? One needs a license to drive, and every motor vehicle must be registered – that is all you need with guns.
When licensing, common sense (the most uncommon commodity in the US it appears) rules are needed. Some distinction needs to be drawn between sporting weapons (shot guns and rifles), automatic weapons (machine guns) and hand guns.
A license for a sporting weapon should be obtained relatively easily, those for handguns (whose only use is in killing people) should be more difficult and licenses for automatic weapons should be made available only in the most exceptional cases.
The NRA will claim that this will deprive citizens of guns while allowing criminals free access to them. All that is needed to deal with this is to make the possession of an unlicensed weapon a criminal offence. Mere possession should allow the cops to bung the owner in jail and this will give them more than enough leverage to clean out all the guns from the gangsters.
Am I the only person who keeps reading this “Vaginal Tech”. Am I?
You can imagine my initial horror a couple of nights back when I visited CNN and read the headline as “Massacre at Vaginal Tech”. Seriously WTF. I mean I smoked weed, but I figured I wasn’t that high. Or was I? Food for thought…..there is a strange saying. Why would you need food to think? If anything when you eat, you think of the stuff that is gonna come out of your ass the next morning. Speaking of which, I just had a beef steak, medium rare, and while I was eating – and yes I was stoned as an Apsara at Sigiriya – I imagined all the particles of food – the beef – going down my throat, into the stomach and reforming itself into the shape of the original cow from whence the beef came from. And the next day, I’d shit out so much that there will be enough shit to reform this original cow. Fuck I am stoned tonight.
So whaaaz up niggas and hos? all my homeys in the house, come and grate your pelvis against the nearest bitch *cliched rap beat plays in the background* *cue for cliched Black dude to pretend like he is orgasming* Yeah, Ahaha…..that’s right, Salute the Wes’ Side…Fuck ’em East Side.
In Sri Lanka, the rap dudes are also pretending like there is an East vs West battle goin’ on. I mean, I always knew they were fucking delusional – Iraj once had the fucking audacity to call himself a “musician” – ha! who would have thunk it? – but this was fucking incredible. I mean, unfuckignbelievable. So unbelievable that I would believe Bruce Halford was gay. Oh wait..
So how are you buggers tonight? All partying no, machangs and machis? Is that the feminine of ‘machang’ – ‘machi’? I believe that is the lingo in Tamil Nadu although I can’t vouch for this fact since I’ve never been to Tamil fucking Nadu nor do I intend do. I am Tamil I should – like its every Tamil’s pre-written destiny in the Mahabaratha (or was it the Ramayana) to visit Tamil Nadu and pay a visit to Rajni Kanth or Kamal Hassan, bow down and touch their feet and ask them to bless me. I mean WTF? Who the hell are these ma fuckers? Ma fuckers – ha! thats awesome cause I once knew a girl name Margret who we affectionatley called Ma. She was a slut too. Perhaps that is how the word came into the English lexicon.
Sexicon – Define Sexicon. Anyone? Yes Mr Penis? No Mr Penis, Sexicon is not a con who you find irrefutabley sexy and wish to procreate with. Sexicon is something whose very definition is beyond definition. Like God. How the fuck do you define God?
I define God as the stoned dude upstairs with a really fucked up computer running on a Casanovian 5, 10 gig processor, with 100 Gigtetrabytes of RAM and 1000 Tetgigabytes of Hard disk space. Heck of a computer that. Yes, god is merely a nerd on the PC and Planet Earth is merely his Sim game, his World of Warcraft, his Age of Empires. And us? We are merly well drawn animation figures in a alternate realty.
I so need to get laid.
When you vote in a government of mass murderers, and empower the weak with weak ideologies, sooner or later the few that are left awake are going to snap. And then the US media loves to find something to scapegoat and harp on the individual’s ‘mentality’, because they are scared to address the real problem – the breakdown of their neurotic society. 32 American deaths are nothing compared to 600 thousand Iraqi ones. It’s sad that blood needs to come to every doorstep before they realise that.
Jack, I’m right this moment on a military history site where the very topic is being debated. Most of the voices are American, male, in their 30s and 40s, and generally a bit right of centre. The majority of them are suggesting that the answer is more guns! I had made the same comment as you, that he couldn’t have killed 32 people with a hammer or a baseball bat.
Some of them are suggesting that more access to firearms be permitted to “normal” citizens, claiming thaat if there had been other armed students at Virginia Tech, they could’ve shot the bugger before he did too much damage:)
David,
that view only to be expected from the right of centre Americans. i suppose we will have to wait until they kill each other in sufficient numbers and regualr fire-fights erupt in the streets before they realise the facts.
You could pose the question: “if an average citizen needs to carry a weapon in order to ensure his personla safety as a matter of course, is this an indication that law and order has broken down?”
I presume that unless lawlessness and anarchy rules, this shoul not be necessary.
The availability of means of destruction does tend to correleate well with higher levels of destruction. I attribute Sri Lanks’s high suicide rate to the ready availability of poisons (ferliser, insecticide, kaneru seeds, gamoxone etc).
“David,
that view only to be expected from the right of centre Americans. i suppose we will have to wait until they kill each other in sufficient numbers and regualr fire-fights erupt in the streets before they realise the facts.”
Actually all they would need is a nice, upper middle class (read: rich) white teenager from the popular clique (read: Abercrombie & Fitch model types) to go on a rampage with Daddy’s gun collection offing other nice, upper middle class white teenagers in the popular clique to get Americans to realize their inherent jackassedness.
So long as the vast majority of victims and perps of gun violence are from the ethnic minorities, white America won’t give a fuck and will defend their right to own a weapon.
If they are so hung up on holding on to their precious 2nd Amendment you could always do what Chris Rock suggested and just make bullets really fucking expensive.. at least then you would know the victim probably really deserved it.
Amazing how this blogger tries to tell us americans whats going on in our neck of the woods and who should be doing what including this david blacker dude.
You guys need to take a good long hard look at yourselves, man your societyand government and monks are all screwed up.
Youre committing genocide and yet I don’t see one single article about the number of those Tamils that are getting killed. I ‘ve got some Tamil friends here at College man, you guys need to shut the fuck up about guns and Iraq.
The guy was mad, yep he had access to guns but someone should have stopped him. The writing was on the wall. Absolutely man, he was certifiable. Whats you’re excuse for sitting around “commenting” on Iraq when you’re own country is in a hole a big black filthy evil hole.
Grow up Sri Lanka and stop pointing fingers whilst you stand on your so called Buddhist mantle of peace and nirvana.
Fucking unbelievable.
Mate, how come your flag is australian?!
Mate – coz I’m over here not upstate New York and the Aussies are our allies as opposed to you guys who just steal all the fucking aid we gave you after the Tsunami that you used to buy arms and start
I’m black right, so yeah, I find your “aryan” neo-nazi rethoric offensive. Got it? Your crickets are as black as the west indians so I don’t get why you think you’re “aryan”.
I’m here doing post-grad. What’s your claim to fame “comment” aka the loser who writes this blog and then talks to himself.
See you round mate. In the states, this blog would get shut down and the guy that writes it would get shut down.
You’re right, “stopdakilling” in the states, they would behave like every American does. Deny everything. Deny it so that they can feel bad for about a week, say how sorry they are, then go back to watching American Idol and living a lie. What America has is conflict within. Funny that they’re trying to show another country how to settle their affairs.
People like you are a waste of the gift that is human life. Keep living in denial, and keep making excuses.
Stopdakilling…if you were Korean, and didntsayaword, the similarity would really have been uncanny. Not everything is about the alleged subjugation of Tamils you know mate? And if you haven’t seen a single article on this blog about the issue burning our country I suggest you take your head out of your ass and wipe the shit out of those blurry eyes of yours.
We think we’re “Aryan” cos Sri Lankans are descended from the REAL definition of Aryan, not your Nazi Definition. But think is, you don’t fall into either definition. What a loser.
If you are for real…some facts… many of us Australians like the Brits, dont like the fact that the prime minister is an ally of George Bushes war on Iraq. To add a Sri Lankan slant… same Australian prime minister denied asylum seekers from the North and East of Sri Lanka entry into australia despite protests from refugee/human rights advocates (http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=1130).
Thats why I wasn’t sure if you were for real.
I think its ok for Sri Lankans to for instance point out injustices in other countries, in the same way it is ok for people elsewhere to protest about injustices in Sri Lanka. Injustice, in Sri Lanka, America, or Timbuktu, is injustice. After all we all belong to the same species…homo sapien…I think? Hope Sri Lankans will speak up for me if my rights are violated and people in Australia are not willing or able to speak up for me. A truly democratic country, needs to be open to scrutiny by the local and International community and if Australia and America want to grow and change for the better into the future, they need to listen and act on constructive criticism…not give excuses by pointing to other countries’ human rights violations etc.
Made a mistake of engaging with people like stopthekilling etc….being lead off the topic. Will try to aviod that in future to the best of my abilities!
To be consistent, Virginia…re the aryan/dravidian thing: Found this posted on another blog recently, have a look at this:
Genetic affinities of Sri Lankan populations Human Biology, Dec 1995 by Kshatriya, Gautam Kumar
Also, interesting quote:
“The fact that the IE speech community includes people of diverse race, from the dark-skinned Sinhalese to the white-skinned Scandinavians, definitely implies that the spread of the language cannot be equated with the spread of a racial type. Languages can and do migrate across racial boundaries. That the IE languages crossed racial frontiers during their expansion accords well with established perspectives on the spread of IE, e.g. by I.M. Diakonov:”
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060824215955AAg0inG
This is completely off the original topic. Probably shouldn’t have posted this up. Seen this debate constantly going through this and other blogs and have refrained from commenting! Hope the educational system in the country will rectify this soon.
The thing is a city cop and a rural sheriff were both part of the discussion and the cop said that it was a fact that the police could only get there in time to clear up the mess so it was better for citizens to protect themselves, and the sheriff said how on several occasions his life had been saved by citizens who were armed. They admit that there’s a law and order prob, but blame it on psychos, gangs, terrorists, the media, Bin Laden, the internet and little green men. Basically, everything but inadequate gun laws. Most of them have grown up on a diet of Hollywood, haven’t really seen much violence first hand, and think arming the general populace is the answer. I pointed out the fact that nine times out of ten when an ordinary guy pulls a gun on a criminal he’ll hesitate to use it, have it taken off him and used agaainst him. No point. Finally the moderator locked the topic cos it was going nowhere. Check it out yourself: http://www.hfmodeling.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=SquawkBox&file=index&req=viewtopic&topic_id=97450&page=1
Wonder what Stopdakillin’s doing down in Oz where they have fairly good gun laws which allow ownership under certaain conditions.