Something Horribly Wrong
By Chuck Colson
4/19/2007

The Reality of Evil

Less than seventy-two hours have passed since the shootings that killed thirty-two innocent people and injured another thirty at Virginia Tech. Americans can relate to what Virginia Tech President William Steger said immediately after the killings: “I’m really at a loss for words to explain or to understand the carnage that has visited our campus . . .”

This is especially true as a frightening picture of the killer emerges: a young man, by all accounts a loner, who, according to the Washington Post, wrote poetry about death and “expletive-filled rants against the rich and privileged.” Clearly, on the dark side.

As we seek to understand what happened and why he did this, it is vital that we not exclude an important part of the equation: evil.

Faced with this kind of horror, we automatically assume that we are dealing with a madman—a word the media has already used to describe the killer. That’s because we can’t imagine ourselves or anyone we know doing anything remotely like this. Therefore, we conclude that something must have been “wrong” with the perpetrator. the rest