The New Criterion

OK, we now know that the person responsible for the Virginia Tech bloodbath yesterday was a 23-year-old English major named Cho Seung-Hui (pronounced Choh Suhng-whee) from South Korea. No one familiar with the art of the cliche will be surprised that this wretched chap is being described as--I hesitate to say the words, they seem so pat--but yes: "He was a loner," quoth Larry Hincker a spokesman for the school. They’re always "loners."

I said "we now know" who killed those 30-odd people, but perhaps I spoke too quickly. Europe, in its wisdom, looks beyond the smoking gun; it eschews the simplistic answers that satisfy us crude Americans; to you or me, it might seem clear that if a deranged (help me Don Imus: am I allowed to say that?) South Korean walks into a college dormitory and mows down a few dozen people, the deranged South Korean is, in any relevant sense, responsible for the killings.

But that’s only if you are a shallow-pated American. If you are a sophisticated European, you see things in a more nuanced, complex way. Sub specie Europae Mr. Seung-Hui is not only, or maybe not even, the person responsible; he is also a victim of, of . . . Well, of American society for one thing. It seems almost too good to be true, but it is true: Spiegel has the European scoop on who really killed those poor people in Virginia. Maybe Mr. Cho Seung-Hui pulled the trigger, but perhaps the person more deeply responsible is . . . Charlton Heston. You might have thought, as did I, that Charlton Heston was deathly ill and confined to his home in Beverly Hills. But that just shows how impoverished your imagination is. These right-wingers are crafty.

With a view to Monday’s deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, European newspapers are blaming the lack of gun control measures in the United States and implying that Charlton Heston is indirectly responsible for the scope of the killings.