April 24, 2007

I subscribe to Webster's a daily dose of online "word of the day" where  a chosen word's  definition and connotations are stated. The word "imminent" came up recently and it reminded me of the latest case of the mass murder in Virginia. News reports show that sixteen months ago, Cho Seung-hui, who was to carry out last week's Virginia Tech massacre, had an encounter with Virginia's mental-health system. After Cho spent a night in "temporary detention," a psychiatrist evaluated him, finding that he was "mentally ill" but "did not present "an imminent threat" to himself or others. Are we now to blame the psychiatrist for his misdiagnosis? While it is always a subjective decision on which a psychiatrist determines as last recourse involuntary confinement of potentially dangerous people, but it flies in the face of common sense. Merriam-Webster defines imminent as "ready to take place; especially : hanging threateningly over one's head." A threat can be "ready to take place" and never actually take place. If someone holds a gun to your head, that is an imminent threat even if he never pulls the trigger.
If a threat can be imminent without ever being realized, surely it can be imminent even if takes place after a delay. Imagine a bomb set to explode at a random time during the next two years. The likelihood of its going off in the next week is quite small, less than 1%. There's a 75% chance it won't blow anytime in the next six months. But it is "ready to take place" at any time, and thus is an imminent threat.

It would be facile to make too much of this analogy--to say that Cho was a bomb waiting to go off, and the psychiatrist should have defused it. It is possible that Cho's mental state was healthier 16 months ago than last week, But it is also fatuous to say that the threat was not imminent merely because it took months, rather than days or weeks, to turn deadly.