Life carries risks; dealing with them makes us human

Life carries risks; dealing with them makes us human
EDITOR:
Last Monday, 32 people were murdered, apparently by a maniac whose motives may never be fully known. Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims of this senseless crime, their families, and their friends. As I write this, many details of this tragic event are unknown, or at least have not being released to the press.
Yet even while critical questions remain unanswered, I have already heard two trial attorneys telling us that the people in charge at Virginia Tech were recklessly irresponsible. They should have closed the campus immediately after the first killing. The tone of these attorneys clearly suggested that they believed that major lawsuits should be filed and that this is a slam dunk case of negligence. I have also heard a dozen or more commentators and journalists raise the same issue. I know that many of these questions came from the heart, but I would like to suggest that they reflect a very serious condition in our country -- a condition that is far more dangerous than the occasional lunatic who decides to start shooting people randomly.
In this country, we have come to believe that there should be no risks, and therefore if anything bad does occur, someone must be responsible and that someone must pay. This premise is simply not true, although trial lawyers have done their very best to try to convince us that it is. Risks are a fact of life. We may be able to reduce them, we may be able to minimize their impact, but we can never eliminate them. Furthermore, there are costs associated with reducing risks, and those costs are often greater than the potential losses.
You are probably rightly asking how I can think about costs when more than 30 people were just murdered. I am not trying to minimize the loss or offend those who are grieving. Rather, I am saying that we must accept the reality of risk and we should never let our fear or the claims of attorneys and journalists convince us otherwise. Ask yourself the following questions. How often do you suppose a murder occurs in this country? In 2005, there were roughly 17,000 murders. How often was a murder followed three hours later by a massacre? Perhaps I missed it, but I think the answer is zero. Yet if you listen to the lawyers or journalists I heard, you would think that the massacre was predictable, that any reasonable person would have predicted it, and that more than 30 people are needlessly dead because of the irresponsible people who did not lock down the campus immediately.
By that logic, every time there is a murder in your city, city officials should shut down the entire city to prevent the infinitesimally small risk that the murderer was really deranged and would follow his or her murder with a massacre of helpless citizens. In three hours, the murderer could drive nearly 200 miles to continue the rampage. Maybe we should close down every city within 200 miles to keep us safe. Where does that logic end? We cannot prevent every tragedy, and we cannot delude ourselves into believing that every tragedy is someone's fault.
We should grieve and support those people who have lost a loved one. We should ask questions and see if we can learn useful lessons. But we should not let our fear, or the shrill voices calling for "accountability," drive us to abandon all reason. There is nothing that makes us more human than our ability to reason, and there is nothing that demands reason more than events like we witnessed last Monday.
MIKE RAULIN
Canfield