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April 18, 2007 -- Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-hui was a moody loner who took antidepressants and wrote gory fiction, news reports say. But nobody could have predicted from this that he would commit violent acts, experts tell WebMD.
Officials have identified Cho, 23, as the gunman who Monday shot and killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.
"When a tragedy like this happens, we want to know how to defend ourselves and our families. We are very eager to see this as a gross aberration that might have identifiable warning signs," Jeff Victoroff, MD, tells WebMD.
But that simply isn't the case, says Victoroff, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and an expert on human aggression and the neurobiology of violence. People like Cho have, throughout history, appeared without warning in every human culture.
"It is true that people like Mr. Cho and the Columbine shooters exhibited some aberrant behaviors that, with 20-20 hindsight, might have tipped off sensitive observers," Victoroff says. "But we don't usually attend to those warning signs because they are so common among adolescents. ... We will never be altogether safe from such people."
Unless they have previously acted violently or threatened violence, there's simply no way to predict whether a person will commit a violent act, says Robert Irvin, MD, medical director of a long-term residential treatment program that is part of the Bipolar and Psychotic Disorders Program at Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.
"The greatest predictor of acts of violence is prior acts of violence. Lacking that, we cannot say who will be violent and who will not," Irvin tells WebMD. "There is no reliable predictor of who or who not to avoid. Because that quiet, lonely person who is not so verbal may be very fearful himself and the least harmful person in the world."
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