On April 16th, a bitter and twisted student waltzed into Virginia Tech University in the USA and killed 32 of his fellow students, before taking his own life.

The attacker's name was Cho Seung Hui. From all accounts and reconstructions, his life over the years preceding the attack indicates that he was a very psychiatrically disturbed individual. He was taken to a mental health clinic in 2005, after a judge ruled that he might be dangerous. This occurred due to unwanted messages that he was sending to female students. However a medical examination found he denied any suicidal feelings and posed no immediate harm to anybody.

Teachers recall that Hui wrote poems filled with violence and profanity, which even prompted one of them to contact campus authorities out of concern at what this disturbed young man might me heading for.

Now, I'm not going to get into a debate about American society and what makes such "school shootings" a regular occurrence there (please see link for a timeline of school shootings in the USA). In my opinion, there are disturbed young people in all nations in the world who are liable to seriously harm themselves or others. The only difference in the USA is the relative ease of obtaining firearms. It should be noted that Cho Seung Hui obtained both of the guns used to commit this attack through perfectly legitimate means. If guns were that easy to obtain here in Britain, chances are that we would witness many more shootings here than we currently do. Needless to say, it is for Americans (and nobody else) to choose between such occurrences and their "sacred constitutional right" to bare arms.

The wider issue at stake is about how to deal in a preventative rather than reactive way with the members of our society who have mental health issues that may lead them to do something drastic or crazy. This issue is global and not solely restricted to any nation.

There have been incidents in Britain too where a "ticking time bomb" has not been adequately dealt with by medical authorities. To date there are at least 249 British victims slain by individuals who were receiving psychiatric treatment but whose risk levels were underestimated. Even more tragically there have been cases of mental health patients who have tried to "turn themselves in" to mental health institutions, been rejected, who later went on to kill.

If these individuals had access to guns as easily as in the USA, chances are we would have seen mass gun killings from these individuals, rather than "just" stabbings. There is a website and charity dedicated to tackling such occurrences, the Zito Foundation, which is named in memory of Jonathan Zito who was killed by a mental health patient in 1992.

The whole way in which society in general and the medical authorities in particular need to deal with mental health issues needs a serious overhaul, to help both patients and possible future victims from coming to serious harm. Mental health treatment needs to become a far more important priority and people who may be having issues should never be dismissed as being of "relatively low risk". People's lives are at stake.

[Source of Photo: AP. Picture grab from a video aired by NBC News on Thursday, April 19, 2007. It shows Cho Seung–Hui pointing a gun to his head. The video was part of a package mailed to the network on Monday, April 16 between Cho’s first and second shootings on the Virginia Tech campus]