Why would the VT killer file off the serial numbers?

[BB93YJ]

There is no logical answer to an illogical act.

Good quote I heard many years ago, seems to fit here.

 

[AJ Dual]

Looking at his posing like the characters in the Korean action/art flic "Oldboy", in his multi-media CD-ROM "manifesto", the tactical vest, backwards ball-cap, Harris and Klebold-like mode of dress, I think he did it just because he thought it was "bad".

As if he felt it was just a small extra way he could thumb his nose at authority, or he read a bad book where the hit-man protagonist did that first thing with any new firearm he acquired.

 

[skeeter1]

Short answer: Cho was a nut-job.

 

[RNB65]

Why would the VT killer file off the serial numbers?

A criminal profiler looked at the pics/vids he sent to NBC and remarked that they were nothing but an attempt by this meek, insignificant nobody to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character. I suspect this is why he filed the SN's off -- in the movies, it's cool to do stuff like that.

p.s. Plus, he was a nut-job.

 

[Ala Dan]

Come on now, you know he filed the serial numbers off too try to avoid
detection; and quite possibly make an attempt to get away with his crimes~!

Its too bad, that some of us in law enforcement were educated in the
recovery of filed serial numbers by using super glue and acid. So the
weapons in question would have been eventually traced back to him.

 

[ConfuseUs]

Its too bad, that some of us in law enforcement were educated in the
recovery of filed serial numbers by using super glue and acid.

OK, I know that stamped serial numbers make the metal underneath denser and so acid corrodes the softer metal around the stamping and creates a relief image of the SN, but how does Super glue help with SN recovery?

 

[SniperStraz]

PLUS he chose a .22 handgun as one of his weapons, I find that equally or more flawed detail with filing off serial numbers in a horribly flawed plan in the first place

Good point. I can understand if you're getting a street gun and the only thing you can get your hands on is a .22. but why anyone would choose it as one of their primary assault weapons is beyond me.

 

[Durruti]

Well, it's very easy and comforting to simply dismiss people like him as crazy. Clearly he had some mental problems, but I don't think we can say he was totally irrational. His actions showed definite signs of careful planning (chaining the doors, stopping to make a video, etc.). Had he lived though it, I think his planning would show that was sane enough to be responsible for his actions and should stand trial.

So why file off the serial numbers? Obviously I have no idea what was going on in his head, but I guess there are a number of possibilities. In weeks past he may have had several different scenarios he was considering. If he had been thinking about something a bit more low key, then filing off the serial numbers might have made more sense (assuming he didn't know they could be recovered).

It's speculation, of course, but it could help to explain it.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

For those of you looking for logical reasons as to why he filed off the numbers, my guess is that he did it to mess with folks much in the same way he felt folks were messing with him. He probably did know that there would be an investigation and that eventually the numbers could be recovered, but that it would take effort to make that happen. He also probably knew that his every action would be questioned.

There is an old Steve Martin routine where he claims to have hostages, a nice family that he has is a bag at the top of a flag pole and if his demands are met, he will set them free. He wants a million dollars, a jet to take him to a foreign country with no extradition agreement, and the letter W stricken from the alphabet. He makes the last request just in case he is caught so that he can claim to be crazy. Maybe Cho was crazy and trying to look normal by doing what other criminals often do.

 

[Gerald in Ga]

Tha fadaral Goobermint did it!!!

 

[johndoe1027]

Bi-Polar have periods where they can be as normal as anyone and many times the meds do work. But honest Doctors admit that the brain is still unchartered area and the meds are still in a trial period, and each drug and it's dosage have different results with both different and the same individual. My cousin has had his dosage and medications changed a dozen times that I know of in the last two three years. Some medication and sometimes the dosage actually worsen the situation.

I agree, I've seen meds transform two different people instantly into someone else. I also have had many dealings with an extremly bi-polar person. Very tough condition to deal with. He was "insane" but he wasn't on another planet altogether. I haven't seen the video or anything but the reports I've read mention his hatred for rich college kids and their unhappiness. He wasn't always talking about imaginary alien girlfriends.
As to the S/N's. :shrug: No idea.

 

[Deanimator]

Good F'ing luck figuring out why this guy did ANYTHING. Crazy is crazy because it makes no sense.

Did you torture yourself by listening to any of his "manifesto"?

Back in the '80s there was this entertainment software called "Racter". What it did was respond to things you typed in a simulated conversation. Racter had 1000 times the personality of Cho, and 100,000,000 times the insight.

The secret to "getting" Cho is that what he said and wrote had NO meaning, AT ALL. Nothing he said ever rose to the level of monkeys in a zoo flinging their feces.

 

[justashooter]

magnetism can also be used to recover filed numbers. the process of steel stamping chnages the material property (permeability) of steel. a number stamped peice of steel has property variation which can be detected with magnetism and iron powder. this is tricky stuff, but can be done with reasonable reliability if the tech doing the work has the right equipment and technique.

this is why i only bother to file the numbers off of guns marked with electropencil.

 

[qdemn7]

Good piece by Stephen Hunter at Washington Post

Link

I agree with the writer "he was shooting a John Woo movie in his head." BTW, this is written by Stephen Hunter, not your typical WP or NYT reporter, he knows both guns and film criticism.

Many of Cho's pictures -- 11 out of 43 -- featured guns. And when I looked at them, another name struck me as far more relevant than Park Chan Wook. That's John Woo.

Woo, the Hong Kong director now working in the United States ("Face/Off" was one of his most successful films), almost redefined the action genre with a series of Hong Kong gangster movies made in the late '80s and early '90s, starring the Chinese actor Chow Yun-Fat and virtually every Beretta ever shipped to the Far East. As with the Park movie, it is not certain that Cho saw Woo's films, though any kid taken by violent popular culture in the past 15 or 20 years almost certainly would have, on DVD, alone in the dark, in his bedroom or downstairs after the family's gone to bed. They're not family fare; they're dreamy, angry adolescent fare. They were gun-crazed ballets, full of whirling imagery, grace, masculine power and a strange but perhaps not irrelevant religiosity. They were close to outlaw works of art: They celebrated violence even as they aesthetized it, streamlined it and made it seem fabulous fun. Their possible influence on Cho can be clearly seen in 11 of the photos that feature handguns.

Woo pioneered postures with guns not seen in movies until that time (discounting cornball pre-World War II westerns). He was the first modern filmmaker (though there was Don Siegel's "Madigan" of 1968) to embrace the stylistic advantages of putting a gun in both hands of his hero, which became almost his signature. So when you see any of the famous photos of Cho with his arms outstretched and a gun in each hand, you cannot help but think, if you've seen any of them, of the Hong Kong gangster movies and the super-cool Chow.

But it goes even further than the resemblance between the photos of the blasphemy and the movies of the '80s. In at least three regards, Cho's activities so closely reflect the Woo oeuvre that it seems somewhat fair to conclude that in his last moments, before he blew his brains out, he was shooting a John Woo movie in his head.

First is the peculiar nature of the gun violence. Cho, it seems, wasn't a sniper, a marksman. He wasn't shooting carefully, at a distance. He wasn't, one can assume, aiming. He was shooting very much like Chow in the Woo pictures, with a gun in each hand, as witnesses state, up close, very fast. Woo saw gunfights in musical terms: His primary conceit was the shootout as dance number, with great attention paid to choreography, the movement of both actors within the frame. He loved to send his shooters flying through the air in surprising ways, far more poetically than in any real-life scenario. He frequently diverted to slow motion and he specialized in shooting not merely to kill, but to riddle -- his shooters often blast their opponents five and six times. Perhaps all that was at play in Cho's mind as well.

But it gets stranger: The first gunfight in Woo's most famous movie, "The Killer," is an almost eerie anticipation of the Cho attack. Chow's professional assassin moves stealthily down a corridor, approaches a door, knocks. Once it is opened, he dispatches the opener, then steps in to confront seated human figures. He darts among them, a gun in each hand, blazing away as they rise and flee. They're playing cards, not sitting in a classroom, and the setting is a nightclub backroom, not a school. But the kinetics of the remarkable encounter are strikingly similar to what must have happened Monday.

Second is the nature of the guns themselves. Cho's choice of weapons may well have been based on movie influences. The first and most famous was the Glock 19. This is the mid-size Glock, not the smallest for deep concealment (in pockets or under shirts), not the largest for maximum firepower, but basically a service automatic for undercover men who can carry guns comfortably in holsters, with a 15-shot magazine. The Glock, of course, is ubiquitous in popular culture as the firearm of choice of both the police and the bad guys, but it doesn't figure much, if at all, in the works of Woo, which were made before the Glock really took over. But the Beretta is about $200 more expensive than a Glock, and when Cho went to the Roanoke gun store, he may well have found it beyond his budget. Both guns fire 9mm cartridges; at the receiving end, the impact is the same.

His second gun is clearly another budget choice, a .22-caliber pistol that sells for about $300 and most closely replicates the plasticized aesthetic of the modern service pistol, the Glock, the Beretta or the Sig Sauer. It's a Walther P22 -- its design derived from a larger Walther 9mm service pistol, called a P99 -- a gun that looks more powerful than it is (it's still extremely lethal). Perhaps he chose it to resemble Chow in the photos he knew he would be taking of himself.

There are other weird handgun concordances in the work of Woo and the frenzy of Cho. For example, many have noted the peculiarity of the young man's careful removal of the serial numbers from the two pistols. What was the point of that? The point may be found in "The Killer," Woo's greatest movie, where the hero Jeffrey Chow (Chow Yun-Fat) is handed guns by his best friend before going off on a terrible job that will result in tragedy for all: "They're clean guns. No serial numbers. Untraceable." When he ground off the serial numbers, Cho may have been turning himself into Jeffrey Chow.

Then there's the issue of the two guns, one for each hand. Cho could certainly have done as much damage with the single Glock, given how quickly one can learn (and you strongly suspect he practiced) to reload them proficiently. That answer comes from Woo's 1992 "Hard-Boiled," or rather it is codified there, while evident in all the gangster pictures: "Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God."

The third weird Woo vibration echoing through the Cho madness is thematic. "The Killer," for example, is almost lush with religious themes, as it tells a story of redemption through sacrifice. In the film, Jeffrey Chow has accidentally blinded a singer in an assassination. Consumed with guilt, he becomes her guardian and sets out to raise money to get her a restorative operation, which compels him to take on yet crazier and less survivable jobs. In a wild finish, he and a police officer, who's become his only ally, engage in a massive gunfight against evil gangsters in a church, through which, like symbols of Christian grace, doves flap majestically. Jeffrey Chow dies, saving the singer's life, and the money he's secured restores her vision. Many critics noted Jeffrey Chow's initials -- J.C. -- and that he is frequently seen in Christlike postures of the sort Cho later affected in at least one of his photos.

"The Killer" also features an intellectual posture that might have been extremely attractive to Cho's mental state. In it, the killer is presented as both hero and victim, rather than villain. His difference from other men, his moral nature, is repeatedly stressed. "He's no ordinary assassin," a cop says almost lovingly about him. "Fate controls everything," the killer muses, seeing himself as a puppet reacting to the larger forces beyond his control. "I always save the last bullet either for myself or my enemy."

 

[NRA UR2]

Cho mentality

First, you have to determine whether he was 50% nuts or just half crazy...or both. After that its easy! After the politicos finish their Monday Morning Quarterbacking they'll come to the same conclusion and Mr. Shumer can get back to doing business as usual.

 

[hceptj]

well as said above many times, he wasn't sane, but maybe he planned on getting away with it and leaving the country or just hiding...since he bought the gun it would be listed as belonging to him...by removing the s/n's if it was found after being ditched somewhere, it would be less likely to be traced back to him...

...i think it was like 98c5 said, he probably figured out he'd dug a deep hole after the first 2 murders and decided to go back, murder more people and then kill himself...probably why he left to go to mail that stuff instead of just dropping it off that morning...

...guess we'll never know for sure...

 

[terry264]

If you're going to file off the s/n's, why carry the receipt with you? =NUT

 

[Black Butte]

When the serial number gets stamped into the metal, the metal underneath is compressed. Even if the numbers are filed off, they can still be read by mapping the compression pattern (looking to see where the density is highest).

 

[Titan6]

Black Butte Welcome Aboard. This is possible, but not always.


I hate Zombie Threads.

"brains... uuhh brains....

 

[McCall911]

IMO as a layman (okay, a patient), this bipolar thing doesn't completely explain Cho's behavior. Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder, meaning that you waver between highs (mania) and lows (depression.) Sometimes bipolar disorder involves psychosis, but IMO in Cho's case there was another component: Not knowing right from wrong. That's a whole different ballgame. I think that part is referred to as being a psychopath/sociopath, but I just call it the way I see it. I call it evil.

About the only reason I could see for filing off numbers is the generally false supposition that the numbers could somehow be traced back to the buyer. They could, in theory, but the guns would first have to be registered in a central database. (And we don't want to go there...)

 

[TexasRifleman]

1. He was nuts.

2. Too much television.

I always wonder if one causes the other?

 

[Dumpster Baby]

I have an outlaw streak my own bad self. I can't wait to get home with new pillows and cut the tags off. I started out cutting mattress tags off, but how many chances do you get to do that?

 

[quatin]

I have an outlaw streak my own bad self. I can't wait to get home with new pillows and cut the tags off. I started out cutting mattress tags off, but how many chances do you get to do that?

Oooooo...you committed a felony...

 

[ZombieHunter]

Tacticool mall-ninja + insanity = WTH was he thinking?

 

[brickeyee]

Luckily some methods to obliterate the numbers in a non-recoverable way are not generally known.

Drilling them out is rather well known though.