Warning signs? You mean like the violent and sex-themed, not-remotely-creative plays he wrote, including overt themes of hatred toward father figures? You mean like being committed in 2005? You mean like several people going to the campus police to complain about him? You mean like a professor willing to quit before she has to continue teaching a class with Cho in it? You mean like allegations that he'd only talk to his roomate via IM? You mean like that he set (partial?) fire to a room? You mean like his fellow students, classmates and professors couldn't really get him to talk at all? You mean like the allegations that he wore sunglasses pretty much all the time, indoors too?
Was it so difficult to identify Cho as a hazard? I don't mean every single one of those elements is a problem -- certainly some people wear sunglasses indoors -- but together there's a clear pattern that hasn't been so evident in most other rampage shooters. The nearly complete refusal to communicate is what really worries me. Even loners don't ignore people who are trying to talk to them. They're just shy, typically, and that's evident to the people trying to talk to them. Everyone who's commented on Cho suggests that he was not shy like that.
The writing and his being committed in 2005 indicates that there was something very wrong with him going back years. There are plenty of people who write violent creative works, but they're nothing like those two plays of Cho's.
There are also plenty of loner introverts, but they still talk to people when addressed, unlike Cho. Those who are so introverted that they don't talk are rare, and don't generally write with anything approaching the violence and obscenity of Cho's works. That seems to be the main theme Cho wrote on. I didn't get anything from either of his plays other than the idea that fathers and teachers are sociopaths and students and children invariably get beaten down when they have any chance of standing up to those authority figures -- and when they do stand up or have a chance on their own, it's through luck or through sociopathic deceit no better than what's alleged on the part of the authority figures.
I don't even want to know what was going on in Cho's household.
There are plenty of people with authority willing to make a citizen's life miserable if there are drugs involved, or if the person illegally carries a weapon, or in a number of other victimless circumstances. Why can't those law-and-order legal and administrative factotums do something in cases like this before there's a horrific problem?
Has liberalism gotten so bad that suggesting there might be a problem with Cho a month and a half ago, based on his behavior, writing, and previous commitment, would be challenged by the ACLU? If so, we have a problem, and we need to roll back liberalism. But we need people in positions of authority who understand the subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between people like Cho and people who are harmlessly asocial or who express their creativity through violence -- like Stephen King or Quentin Tarantino or Leigh Whannell.
Is that an impossible task? Are people who gravitate toward the bench, and toward administrative posts with control over student discipline, simply not equipped to make such distinctions? Is the ACLU incapable of tempering its cries of discrimination and free speech violations no matter how deranged and antisocial someone is?