English Quiz 196

(English Quiz 196)

1. IF YOU WANT A SENSE OF JUST HOW terrible Monday's crimes were, here's something to try: imagine yourself committing them. It's easy enough to contemplate what it would feel like to rob a bank or steal a car; you might even summon a hint of the outlaw frisson that could make such crimes seem appealing. But picture yourself as Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old student responsible for the Virginia Tech bloodbath, walking the halls of the school, selecting lives to extinguish and then ... extinguishing them. It is perhaps a measure of our humanity that we could sooner imagine ourselves as the killed than as the killer, and find it easier to conjure up what it would feel like to plead for our lives than to take someone else's.
Q: 試翻 "It is perhaps ... to take someone else's."

2. That is where the hard work of trying to make sense of a crime like that at Virginia Tech always hits a wall. We can debate, as we predictably do in these cases, what an incident like this means for our endless national argument about guns and violence and the coarsening of the culture. That's well-mapped ground. What remains uncharted is the unlit places in the minds of the people who are capable of doing these things--and, by extension, in all our minds. What is it that makes individual members of a usually empathetic species turn rogue? How does one of our most primal faculties--the ability to understand that things that cause me pain or fear would do the same to you and that I therefore ought not do them--get so completely shut down? Is empathy optional, at least in some people, and if so, how does that emotional decoupling take place? More important, if we can figure out that part of the question, can we figure out how to prevent such things from happening? "We always ask ourselves, 'Is this a person who has no conscience at all?'" says Stanton Samenow, a forensic psychologist and author of the 2004 book Inside the Criminal Mind. "They seem to have an unfathomable ability to shut off knowledge of the consequences, of the difference between right and wrong. It's critical for us to try to understand that worldview and mental makeup."
Q: 試翻 "That's well-mapped ground. ... in all our minds."
Q: 試翻 "Is empathy optional, ... take place?"

3. For all the ink and airtime that follow an attack like the one at Virginia Tech, mass murder is an exceedingly rare crime. The rate of killings in the U.S. involving five or more victims--one generally accepted definition of a mass killing--represented less than 1% of all homicides 25 years ago, and still does today. Among kids, the overall violence figures are actually plummeting, with the number of children under 17 who commit murder falling 65% between 1993 and 2004. Mass killing, says Diane Follingstad, a professor of clinical and forensic psychology at the University of South Carolina, "is a low-rate-base thing. It just does not happen very often." When it does happen, the people likeliest to commit the crime fall into a drearily predictable group. They're 95% male, and 98% are black or white--not a big surprise since more than 87% of the population is made up of those two races. Cho, a native of South Korea, is a rare exception. If the killers' profiles are all more or less the same, however, their crimes aren't. The best known--or at least most lurid--of the mass killers are the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers, the serial murderers whose crimes often play out over decades. In most cases, people who commit such murders are driven by a dark, even sexual pleasure, and while remorse is often associated with the acts--which accounts for the long lapses that can occur between them--those tuggings of conscience are quickly overcome by the impulse to kill again. "There is a charge and a thrill associated with the murders," says Samenow.
Q: 試翻 "In most cases, ... to kill again."

Note: In memorial of the victims in the Virginia Tech slaughter.