I believe there is an intrinsic conflict between these two conceptions and one of the crux's of the issue is free will, i.e, is the will free? Who is responsible for the deranged psyche of Cho?
I would dare say that the fracturing of a persons psyche cannot be summarized in simple terms. I doubt there is any one thing, but rather a conglomeration of multiple problems, as one thing compounds the other.
Can anyone really be blamed for this senseless act? What does it mean to say Cho was evil? Was there some "other" normal Cho inside this deranged psyche who was a sufferer of mental illness, or is the mental illness simply who Cho was?
Its easy to go both ways on a subject like this. Its easy to just cast him aside and deride the man, branding him as an evil man who needs to die. At the same time, its also easy to try and coddle him, claiming that his mind was not his own and trying to shift the blame any where other than squarely on him.
I think you are right to say that it is a crux, because people like Cho probably had some traumatic experiences in early life, slowly waning on him. Couple that with a genetic predisposition with acute mental illness and there is a powder keg waiting to explode. But at the same time Cho was his own man. He knew right and wrong. Its not like he was incapable of understanding his actions. We know that by his actions. His act was methodical. His every action was deliberate and planned in advance.
So the way I see it, we need to understand that Cho had a personal responsibility, however, there were some extenuating circumstances in Cho's life that only exacerbated the overall problem of his final disposition. Therefore, simply calling him evil and washing our hands of him isn't the solution. Nor is turning the victimizer into the victim ever going to get us anywhere. There needs to be some balance there.
"Somewhere at the back of my father's mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depth of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God and he never found anything else to put in it... At the centre of me is always an eternally terrible pain - a curious wild pain - a searching for something beyond what the world contains." -Bertrand Russell
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