When I read the “Derby” from our President of the Union, I was expecting a tirade against the evils of guns and a call for tighter regulation or an outright ban. I was relieved and impressed when I saw that his position took the correct view in attacking not the guns, but the motives of the people that use them for crime or, as was the case recently, a destructive rampage.
Sadly, Swanson’s approach to the issue is, for the most part, nowhere to be found in Congress nor the media, especially in the wake of the events on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University a few short weeks ago. The day after the shooting, The New York Times ran an opinion piece lambasting politicians on Capitol Hill over the “woeful” state of gun control. The sponsor of H.R. 1022, a bill to re-authorize the Assault Weapon Ban, made political hay of the shootings. And gun control advocates, among them the Brady Campaign and the Million Mom March, were quick to translate the shootings at Virginia Tech into hard, irrefutable evidence that guns are at the source of society’s ills.
This is almost assuredly not the case. The reason why Seung-Hui Cho was compelled to kill so many people had to do with his festering loneliness and dissatisfaction with a society that he felt was oppressing and shunning him. The same can be said of other famous mass-murderers, such as the young men who perpetrated the massacre at Columbine High School 10 years ago last Friday. Availability of weapons was not the issue; the operator was at fault.
Then, as now, there are many theories that attempt to explain the rationale behind these seemingly bizarre outbreaks of violent rage. Some have attributed it to stress, angst, or a death wish. Others, such as journalist Mark Ames, allege that those that go on shooting sprees are modern-day Nat Turners rebelling against an enslaving society. And others, such as musician Marilyn Manson (himself a target of criticism in the wake of Columbine), simply attribute it to a society that doesn’t listen until it’s too late. He was asked, shortly after Columbine, what he would have said to the students that were motivated to take their own lives and the lives of their fellow students. He said, “I wouldn’t say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.”
Weapons seem almost trivial in comparison to the deep psychological issues that roil in the minds of the troubled individuals who do these sorts of things. So why is it a continuing issue? The answer is no more complicated than simple human emotion. In situations filled with anxiety, confusion, and gut-wrenching tragedy, such as Columbine and Virginia Tech, our baser instincts draw us toward the simple solution. Banning guns, the immediate cause of the 32 deaths at Virginia Tech, is the simple solution. And for the vast majority of politicians and even normal citizens of this country, that’s as far as the analysis penetrates. I’m calling on politicians, as well as my fellow students, to examine the tragedy with a more reasoned eye, and to prevent shootings not by banning guns, but by working to cure the ills that infect people and drive them to use guns in such a horrendous fashion.
