Plus One

Thirty-two bells tolled today at a Nevada college for the victims of yesterday's shooting in Virginia, for the families who lost a son, a daughter, a mother, a husband.

They forgot one.

Thirty-three people died on that Virginia campus. One of them was the young man who pulled the trigger. What he did was horrific, almost beyond most of our ability to contemplate. But he, too, was a victim.

A victim of what, exactly, we may never know. He was a loner, isolated, suffered perhaps from deep depression. Something drives a human being to commit such atrocities. Something broken, something lost.

But whatever drove him, whatever broke in his heart or his mind, he was a human being. Just like the other people who died at his hand. I don't expect a memorial to him, or an outpouring of sympathy. Still, to leave him out of the count of the dead just seems callous. He may have lost sight of the value of a life, but that doesn't mean we should.

Think of his family. Like those other 32 families, they lost a son and brother yesterday. But in a way, they may have lost more. The other victims are being honored, remembered, eulogized. Bells chime out in their memory. But the shooter's family isn't part of that national mourning. Their loved one has had his humanity stripped from him.

Dehumanizing him is natural, I suppose. If we treat a man who could do such a thing as a monster, we can more easily pretend we share nothing in common with him. That it could never be us, or someone we know, who falls so far into mindless, hopeless despair and anger.

If he's just human, like us, well ... who knows?

His name was Cho Seung-hui.

He did a terrible thing. And he was his own final victim.