Reading the news on Monday, April 16 caused palpable shock and horror. A young and demented man has killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. If this can happen there, it can happen anywhere, where you work, go to class, shop, meet, and you feel vulnerable and threatened. And you feel terrible for those who died and were injured. It feels as if the tragedy of Columbine is being played out again, but this time with even more victims.
This is the deadliest shooting incident in American history. There have been several such terrible incidents since the 1960s. Something needs to change, some policy measures taken, and legislation passed to prevent such incidents from recurring. A debate needs to begin concerning hand gun ownership and purchase. Michael Moore's documentary film "Bowling for Columbine" was a critique of an American obsession with guns and a usually unreasonable fear that fuels their desire for self-protection. Strangely, this insistence on insuring one's own self-protection overlooks the fact that the right to bear arms, handguns, also allows a a few angry individuals to wreak murderous havoc.
My position is that handguns should be banned, as they are in other advanced nations, like Japan and the United Kingdom. These nations don't suffer from the bane of handguns--an annual loss of thousands, tens of thousands of innocent victims, which America suffers. The only exceptions I would make for people who can own and possess handguns in the United States are for police and military personnel.
Is this a fair or just policy to ban handguns? No, by no means, for it punishes the vast majority of law abiding and peaceful registered gun owners who are not murderers, nor who will ever become murderers. But this policy will make our society safer, making it more difficult and less likely for handguns to be obtained by potential murderers, thus reducing innocent lives lost to handgun murderers. A handgun ban will make it less likely individuals such as the young man at Virginia Technical, will carry out their deadly plans. Imagine, it took him only 15 minutes to buy his first gun.
But given the great number of handguns already owned legally or illegally in United States, I am under no illusion that this policy will show significant and immediate results. Doubtless, for the right price, for example, an individual intent on murder, will likely and unfortunately still be able to manage to illegally purchase a handgun from an unscrupulous seller. Still, this will make acquiring a handgun much more difficult to obtain. It will take more than a simple and convenient visit to a gun shop.
Are there really any viable alternatives?! Advocates of the right to bear arms and the gun lobby are the chief opponents of a ban on handguns will argue there are. But it seems to me that no matter what efforts are taken to detect someone planning to carry out murder, there will be someone who eludes detection. And no matter how much security we provide, not every institution and building can be made into a secure place such as a court house or restricted airport area, where you are searched and need to pass through a metal detector before entering.
Unless this step of banning handguns in United States is taken, there will only be more such terrible incidents of senseless murder in the future. My hope is for far fewer, and dream, is for none to occur. Let's learn from and emulate nations like Japan and United Kingdom--and ban handguns in United States.
For a link on this issue, see "Gun politics in the United Kingdom":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom
And I came across a comment in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnick that puts the gun issue in comparative perspective--see the Comment for the text.
2 comments:
Using a comparative perspective, Adam Gopnick in the New Yorker magazine wrote:
The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said, “People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it’s about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”
If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of “narcissism,” violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.
Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.
In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, were tightened—it’s now against the law for any private citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since. In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far from sufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple of subsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with far fewer dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeat incident.
So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularity about guns. The arc is apparent. Forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blacksburg, Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harder to obtain. In fact, while campus killings continued—Columbine being the most notorious, the shooting in the one-room Amish schoolhouse among the most recent—weapons have got more lethal, and, in states like Virginia, where the N.R.A. is powerful, no harder to buy.
Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neither relieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Making it more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, a rational way to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nations with tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gun violence. (If you work hard, you can find a statistical exception hiding in a corner, but exceptions are just that. Some people who smoke their whole lives don’t get lung cancer, while some people who never smoke do; still, the best way not to get lung cancer is not to smoke.)
It’s true that in renewing the expired ban on assault weapons we can’t guarantee that someone won’t shoot people with a semi-automatic pistol, and that by controlling semi-automatic pistols we can’t reduce the chances of someone killing people with a rifle. But the point of lawmaking is not to act as precisely as possible, in order to punish the latest crime; it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order to prevent the next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho’s weapons, are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and it’s not easy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.)
Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we’ll live with the risk. There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register. Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why. ♦
In the New York Times on Thursday, April 26, 2007, the following editorial was published, which was critical of the gun lobby, identifying it as the chief obstacle to passing more restrictive gun control legislation in United States:
Editorial: Guns and More Guns
By now, the logic is almost automatic. A shooter takes innocent lives, and someone says that if the victims had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened. The only solution to a gun in the wrong hands, it seems, is a gun in the hands of everyone.
That’s the state of the debate over gun control today. The National Rifle Association and the gun lobby have silenced every legislature in this country. Instead of stricter laws, tighter controls and better background checks, the gun lobby proposes more guns. And what the gun lobby proposes, lawmakers deliver.
Seung-Hui Cho bought his guns illegally, though with the appearance of legality. He slipped through a loophole, through a disconnect between the way Virginia defines a disqualifying mental incapacity and the way the federal government does. After the fact, the loophole is self-evident, and it’s tempting to believe that now political leaders will work harder to keep people who are dangers to themselves from becoming dangers to others by buying guns. But the laws are as fragile and imperfect as they are because that is how the gun lobby wants them — and it is paying good money to keep them that way.
Those gun advocates who believe that the Second Amendment confers the right to carry a gun in public are quick to point out that they are law-abiding, decent citizens trying to protect themselves and their families in a world gone mad. But, of course, the guns can’t tell the difference. Arming more people would be a recipe for disaster.
True safety lies in the civility of society, in laws that publicly protect all of our rights and in having law-enforcement officers who are trained in the use of deadly force, then authorized to apply it in rationally defined situations. It is the gun lobby’s incessant efforts to weaken the gun laws that makes a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech possible.
Post a Comment