I hope I’m not late to comment on the terrible events that transpired at Virginia Tech this week. I first learned of the situation in a La Quinta over breakfast, and have been digesting ever since.
Let me begin by saying that I have not lost my faith in the Second Amendment. While it is true that it would have been more difficult for this clearly troubled young man to kill that many people without guns, it is also true that the law already should have prevented him from having guns. Funny how gun control laws work on the faulty premise that people with criminal intent will surely follow the law. It is also true that in the absence of guns, he could easily have killed many, many people with a homemade bomb. Blaming guns for one man’s insanity is itself insanity.
It is also worth pointing out that a few dozen innocent people killed in a day is not unusual in Iraq. Today, for example, “Men in the northern city of Mosul shot and killed 23 people from a minority sect Sunday after pulling them off a bus in an apparent revenge attack, the police said. The attack came on a violent day in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighborhood.” Look how much safer the Americans have made things, eh? Ted Rall points out how good we have it: “Only 32? Living in such safety must be sweet!”
Nor is it reasonable to blame liberals, violent video games, violent popular music, or overprescribed psychiatric drugs. Those 32 people might be alive today if the shooter had actually taken psychiatric drugs! Gavin DeBecker’s insight that sane people do not resort to violence except under certain circumstances does not apply, because this man was not sane.
I would also like to dispute the idea that this sort of thing is new. Maybe we have better news coverage, but school shootings are nothing new. And the same thing causes them now as caused them over 20 years ago.
By sheer coincidence, we have this item on the trial of one of last year’s crop of school shooters. Glossing over the fact that the young man says he “freaked out” when the Principal “tackled” him (surely he was already out of control, or why would anybody feel “tackling” him was an appropriate response), I would like to bring your attention to this:
Hainstock told detectives he was upset with school officials because they didn’t stop other students in this southwestern Wisconsin town from picking on him and calling him names. Going to school with guns occurred to him just that morning, he said, and he just wanted officials to listen to him.
He wanted to be left alone, and he wanted the authority figures to listen to him. Isn’t that what most of us want? Really?
We can tie all these threads together with this rather lengthy item called “Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?” The Reader’s Digest condensed version is “Schoolyard massacres are rebellions against oppressive and bullying environments by students who can’t take it anymore.” Truer words were never written, and they apply even to students who are insane. The author goes on to observe that school shooters don’t fit a profile, but strangely enough the schools where such things take place do (from page 5):
- complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;
- antiseptic corridors and overhead fluorescent lights reminiscent of mid-sized city airport;
- rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and
- maximally stressed parents who push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.
To put things in another context, we cannot control other human beings, but we can control the environment in which they interact. When the same thing happens in the same sort of place over and over again, we must seriously begin to examine the environment in which the problem exists.
In closing: Go, Speed Racer, Go!; a couple items on terror watchlists; climate change may make the world less politically stable, and storms are already adversely effecting the American economy; another state decides they don’t want to pay to implement Real ID, it’s a shame it comes down to nothing more than a money issue, but it’s better than rolling over; I guess the Sears Tower just isn’t tall enough any more; an interesting if somewhat rant-prone commentary called “For Millions of Americans, Being Insured is a Cruel Hoax; Alternet brings us Conservative Policies Are Ruining Your Health; someone helpfully opines that the SEC is unlikely to indict Steve Jobs, so all you Macheads can continue to enjoy your Kool-Aid; profound quote of the week, “It’s strange to us, so we don’t like it.”; and last but not least, the latest on Gonzales. I am proud to say I was one of the first to call for the Senate to demand Gonzales’s resignation, and I stand by that not because of these firings, but because he has no respect for the Constitution and the Law.
If anyone cares, we have arrived in Las Vegas and are getting unpacked. I will change my “about” page to reflect reality soon. Closing on this house was more of a grand adventure than I would have liked, and I am exploring my legal options.