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I was wrong about one thing in my Wednesday post. I thought that we would never know what was going on in the mind of Cho Seung-Hui, who murdered over 30 students and professors at Virginia Tech before shooting himself. What I didn't know at the time was that he had sent NBC a gruesome manifesto including audio and video of rambling tirades of hatred and Cho posing with guns, knives and even a hammer.

This man was clearly psychotic and paranoid, possibly schizophrenic. His rants were directed at a nameless "you", whom he taunted for being rich and spoiled and whom he blamed for forcing him into a corner and whose blood on his hands could never be washed off. He compared himself to Jesus, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Yet despite this graphic glimpse into the mind of a deranged murderer, I keep hearing that the real problem is our "deteriorating society", a lack of morals, our failure to shield our children from evil, the conspiracy to keep God out of the schools. Oh, and that this sort of thing didn't happen prior to the AIDS epidemic or whatever scapegoat suits the purpose. I find this view so disturbing that I would feel remiss in not addressing it.

The massacre was carried out by a man who was extremely mentally ill. This man had an imaginary girlfriend, identity issues, was stalking co-eds, threatened suicide, and so disturbed professors and classmates with his writings that the police were consulted. He could not be engaged in ordinary face to face conversation; he was so silent that his fellow students wrongfully assumed that he did not know how to speak English.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were also mentally ill, particularly Harris, who was having problems with his anti-depressant medication Luvox. By the time they opened fire at Columbine High School in my former hometown of Denver, Harris had been reported to the police multiple times for threats of violence in person and on the internet, his teachers had expressed concern at his violent writings, and both worshipped Hitler, who has nothing to do with American society. The only thing I see as being our society's fault is the ease with which these killers were able to obtain automatic weapons and outrageous amounts of ammo.

Violence has existed since the dawn of man. There are several bloodbaths described in the Bible. Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about the depravity of their societies and lack of morality thereof; it's not like senseless murder is anything unique to the US.

Could Cho Seung-Hui's killing spree have been prevented? Maybe. But speculation in hindsight is just that.

Perhaps if he had been committed to an institution when he was sent to counseling for being suicidal, someone would have evenutally seen that he posed as much a threat to others as he did to himself. Perhaps if any of the girls he stalked had pressed charges, his criminal record would have caused him to fail the background check when he attempted to purchase those guns. Perhaps if it were impossible or nearly so for a civilian to acquire automatic weapons, we'd be looking at much fewer casualties assuming Cho would use regular pistols instead.

But someone as mentally ill as Cho might have used other illegal means to carry out the same end. He was probably intelligent enough to disguise his true motives from even the most seasoned psychiatric expert (I was able to quite easily fool a mental hospital into early release when I was a suicidal teen, so I know it can be done). And he was quite successful at appearing non-threatening to most people even when they realized there was something not quite right about him.

When I was a kid, I avoided one of my classmates who was teased for being overweight. It wasn't his weight I cared about; it was the way he unsettled me when he looked at me, some sort of blackness behind his gaze, but there was nothing overtly threatening about him beyond that, so he never got into any sort of trouble. Until he sexually assaulted a younger kid, that is.

Perhaps in a different society, it would have been more difficult to obtain the means to kill so many at once. But these killers would not have been model citizens anywhere in the world. They just would have been less famous.