Two Million Cho Seung-Hui’s

On Monday, April 16, 2007, as I watched early reports about the terrible shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech University the thing that surprised me wasn’t necessarily that the shooting had occurred but that the shooter wasn’t a registered sex offender or a family member of a registered sex offender.

Why would I say such a horrible thing? Because I believe it is inevitable unless we make some drastic changes, and I am surprised that such a tragedy hasn’t happened already.

The most frustrating thing for me on the day that it does happen will be that all of my efforts to raise the alarm – that the efforts of the many groups to which I belong and the many members of those groups who also work tirelessly to raise the alarm – went unheeded. We have already seen several needless deaths of children committed at the hands of those made to bear the burdens of this modern-day Scarlet Letter, namely Dylan Groene and Christopher Barrios, Jr., and I am very fearful that something on the scale of the VT tragedy will happen at the hands of someone pushed over the edge by these Draconian laws, which make it impossible for even low-risk offenders to live healthy, stable, law-abiding lives.

What’s even more tragic about this situation is that it is perpetuated out of red herring mechanisms that exist in the name of public safety but in reality increase the threat against that very safety exponentially above where it would be otherwise.

With over 630,000 registered sex offenders living in our communities as well as their family and friends there are potentially over 2,000,000 Cho Seung-Hui’s coming to a boiling point with every passing moment, with every passing law.

Many experts agree with this, and it is unfortunate that it will apparently take a tragedy the scale of that which occurred at Virginia Tech to wake the American people into demanding a change in these laws.