In response to the Virginia Tech massacre
So what to make of the grim killings at Virginia Tech?
The Washington Post's leader, in typical stately fashion, asks all the right questions:
Would the university have suffered the same tragedy if Virginia law did not prohibit the carrying of guns on campus? Should metal detectors be ubiquitous in American classrooms and dormitories? And why are gunmen so apt to carry out their lethal rampages at American schools?
The New York Times is tougher:
Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.
James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, uses a column in the LA Times to give a brief history of mass murder by gun-wielding lunatics. He examines the social changes that have increased the incidence of such massacres.
So what has changed? For one thing, the United States has become much more dog-eat-dog, more competitive in recent years. We admire those who achieve at any cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail. (Just look at how eager we are to vote people off the island or to reject them in singing competitions.) This certainly increases frustration on the part of losers.
Then there's the eclipse of traditional community: higher rates of divorce, the decline of church-going and the fact that more people live in urban areas, where they may not even know their neighbours. If mass murderers are isolated people who lack support, these trends only exacerbate the situation. Many mass murderers, for example, are people who have picked up roots and moved.
He concludes by saying this:
It should give us some degree of consolation to know that these events are exceedingly rare. But they still occur, and they are among the sad and tragic prices we pay for the kind of open, modern, democratic society we live in.
A graduate student from Virginia Tech wrote this article last year, complaining about the ban that stops students from carrying concealed weapons (hat tip Samizdata):
Now consider the situation of this past Monday. A violent criminal who clearly has no respect for other people’s lives is running loose on campus, his precise whereabouts unknown. And while the police did an excellent job of patrolling campus, they simply cannot be everywhere at once. Is it not obvious that all students, faculty and staff would have been safer if CHP holders were not banned from carrying their weapons on campus?
What the Board of Visitors has effectively done by banning CHP-holding students, faculty and staff from carrying their weapons is creating a “Safe Zone” for criminals who do not care about the rules anyway. Disarming law-abiding citizens has never made the general populace more secure.
To British ears, the idea that ordinary people carrying guns makes the population safer sounds mad. But we forget our own lost history of gun ownership. Richard Munday wrote this article a couple of years ago. It's a fascinating read:
A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.
Robbie Millen
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