I started hearing about the Virginia Tech shooting at work today, almost immediately after it happened. A friend attended the school a few days later, and he was shell-shocked for most of the afternoon.
As it turns out, the campus is actually in a sleepy little town where “nothing interesting ever happened.” So far, there’s no word as to the identity of the shooter or his motive. What we do know is that he killed three people, then left and returned a few hours later to finish his rampage. Somebody want to tell me why they didn’t shut down campus after the first round or killings?
In any case, political shrapnel is already flying. If you’ve read around this site, you know my opinions on gun control (I find it to be morally wrong, dangerous, and unconstitutional). The response from most folks on my side of the fence is to point out that guns are banned from university campuses, which resulted in a crowd of disarmed victims, while the gunman chose to ignore the law and hunt at will.
But let’s stop for a second and take a breath. At least 33 innocent people are dead. This isn’t the time for polemics or grandstanding. This is a time for grieving. Those are 33 fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and children.
Given the death toll, it’s safe to assume that handguns were not the primary weapons here. Most likely, a rifle with a large magazine was used. Could a professor or student armed with a small handgun have posed much of a chance against a well-armed and obviously determined murderer? I’d have to say it’s unlikely. Even someone with a great deal of training and the will to fight would be at a disadvantage in a situation like this.
So, banning guns doesn’t help (they’re already banned from schools by Federal law) and it’s unlikely that an armed civilian would have stopped something like this.
Then what do we do? I just don’t know.
There’s something very wrong with our society that we keep producing monsters like this. We’re the wealthiest, most comfortable nation on earth, and yet we seem to be a breeding-ground for people who are filled with rage and simply defective on some level as human beings. Sure, spree-shootings, mass murder and serial killers happen elsewhere, but not to the extent they do here.
Find the cause of that, and we stand a better chance of stopping things like this in the future. “Arm the teachers!” isn’t the answer, nor is “Ban all the guns!” I’ll say it: both extremes are nothing more than short-sighted political hot air. The real answers aren’t likely to make good soundbites on the the evening news because they won’t be easy and they won’t be concise.
We need to look at how we’re raising our children. We need to start diagnosing and treating mental illness as a disease, not as a source of ridicule or shame. We need to look at the things that supposedly “entertain” us. (I’m not suggesting censorship, just a realignment of the priorities on the side of the consumer.)
The last 150 years have been confusing, violent, turbulent and scarring to the human psyche as a whole. We’ve had the complete restructuring of commerce, two World Wars, the development of weapons that can incinerate all life on earth, and we’ve seen entire races of people nearly wiped out on the whims of evil men in power.
All of this is brought to us in blaring Technicolor over the airwaves and cables without any real interpretive filters. It’s fired straight into our corneas at the speed of light, sliced up and jump-cut into such small snippets that the average attention-span of grammar-school students continues to drop with each passing year. The mind and soul can’t take that barrage for long before something gives.
Ursula LeGuin once asked, “what sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?” The question is just as valid today as it’s ever been.
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Slight aside: The VPC has already jumped on with a press release, which I’m ripping here to prove a tangential point. Notice that every major public shooting they quote took place in areas which the law-abiding are prevented by law from having weapons:
24 dead, 20 wounded, Luby's Cafeteria Killeen, Texas, October 16, 1991
(Civilian carry was illegal in Texas at the time, though this has changed.)
22 dead, 19 wounded, McDonald's Restaurant, San Ysidro, California, July 18, 1984
17 dead, 31 wounded, University of Texas Tower, Austin, Texas, August 1, 1966
15 dead, 23 wounded, Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado,April 20, 1999
15 dead, 6 wounded, Edmond Post Office, Edmond, Oklahoma, August 20, 1986