Kathryn: Agreed, the situation of families of people like Cho needs consideration. Jennifer Morse does a useful thing in reminding us of that–I have seen very little comment elsewhere on this point. There’s a multi-culti angle to that, too, as Jennifer says. In different times & places, people have dealt very differently with crazy family members–locked ‘em in the attic, kicked ‘em out, taken refuge in denial, and so on. (Though of course no cultural conclusions can be drawn from a sample size of one, from curiosity I looked up the murder rate in S. Korea. It’s 2.0 per 100K–below the world average, though not sensationally so. Germany is 1.2, the USA overall 4.3. On the same tack, a friend who lives in Japan emailed me about TV coverage there of the VT murders. He added that the whole thing was swept off the front pages by the shooting Tuesday night of the Mayor of Nagasaki. “He was the second head of the city’s government to be attacked by a gunman,” says Asahi Shimbun . “Gun culture”? Tell us about it.) Still and all, social-services “interventions” are a very blunt tool, as the recurrent stories of parents grossly abusing children in our cities show. Locking people up is pretty blunt, too, I’ll grant, but… less lethal.