A Horror in Virginia

Yesterday, a man killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, apparently with two handguns, before killing himself. This is a horrible crime and my sympathies go out those who were injured, and to the families and friends of the injured and the dead. My sympathies also go out to the family of the shooter. It must be horrible to lose a son or brother in such a manner, knowing that they had done such a repugnant thing. I totally condemn this crime, and it makes me think of a few different things.

First, and as Juan Cole points out, Iraq suffers the equivalent of two Virginia Tech slaughters every day, be it deaths inflicted by occupation soldiers, insurgents or Sufist terrorists (and yes, there is a distinction between them). The people of Iraq must suffer through this kind of horror twice per day. And the violence there is just as random. Whether the people are killed by American use of weapons of mass destruction (e.g. white phosphorus in Falujah), or are near an American patrol attacked by the insurgency or are in a market that is blown up by a suicide car-bomber, they die randomly and meaninglessly. We in the west need to think about this. Western nations are inflicting dozens of deaths every day. No wonder populations around the world are saying "if this is 'freedom,' we don't want any thank you." Can we blame them for rejecting something that has become associated with chaos and meaningless, random, death? The situation in Afghanistan is only quantitatively better, in that less people are dying random, meaningless, deaths every day, but Canadian troops are inflicting random death on people who have done nothing to deserve the harsh occupation that has been imposed on them by an imperialistic NATO.

The second thing the Virginia Tech slaughter has made me think of is the importance of gun control. Throughout the day, I had to listen to idiotic pro-gun activists say that if only, if only, Virginia Tech had not prohibited students from carrying concealed handguns on campus, most of the deaths would have been prevented. This is idiotic on so many levels. Firstly, if the killer had not been able to obtain a gun at all, he would not have been able to kill nearly the number of people that he did. It is simply much, much harder to inflict lethal wounds on a large number people in a short period of time with a knife than it is with a gun. Second, picture this. A number of students were armed with concealed handguns on campus. They hear the shooting start in the lecture hall and draw their weapons to try to hunt down the killer. The police then enter the building, after the shooting is reported, and see one of these students walking around with a drawn handgun looking for the shooter. They are going to assume that the student with the gun is the shooter, in all likelihood, and that student may quite likely then be shot, before the mistake can be sorted out. Third, unless someone is well trained with a handgun, it is easy to miss one's target. In a crowed environment like the lecture hall, they could just as easily hit other students as the shooter.

Gun control is necessary. This is because homicidal maniac control is always going to be harder than gun control. On the street, one can see a handgun and realize, "gee, that's a handgun." What one cannot do is look at a homicidal maniac just walking down the street and realize, "gee, that's a homicidal maniac." It just doesn't work like that.

Furthermore, handguns should be entirely illegal. The only purpose they have is shooting people. Sure, you can do some kinds of recreational shooting with them, but the benefits of making them entirely illegal (i.e. less dead people) would be much greater than the negative impacts on sport shooting.

Horrors like what happened at Virginia Tech make me so sad, because of the number of lives lost that could so easily have been saved.

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