I knew it wouldn't be long before I heard one of my acquaintances mutter, "Maybe Michael Moore was right all along." A sad thought, given that Bowling For Columbine is such a a woefully confused and deceitful piece of film-making. But if conservatives of the calibre of David Frum can't come up with a better response to the Virginia killings than this, then Moore is going to be enjoying a surge in his royalties. It's just not good enough to write about the campus deaths as if they were some baffling act of God:
There is no escaping the hardest lesson: that death lies waiting around the corner for us all. No public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact - or the equally fearful obligation to walk with courage under the burden of the reality of evil.
Although I suppose it's a shade better than Michelle Malkin's call to let students stroll around with a gun in their lunch-box. Nobody should be gloating about America's gun problem - as Simon Jenkins notes, we in Britain have a knife culture that's seemingly second to none - but to simply make pious noises about "evil" seems a cop-out, to say the least.
As for whether everyone should maintain a dignified silence, as some bloggers (not including Matthew Yglesias) have suggested, all I can say is that if I were one of the parents of the dead students, I'd feel people had a duty to debate the rights and wrongs of gun control. I'd be much offended by the drooling 24-hour news coverage.
BTW, I've never been a rabid opponent of the kind of hunting that Rod Dreher describes so vividly. The first time I ever went to the States, I spent quite an amount of time in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, staying in a friend's house in a hamlet not far from Amish territory. I enjoyed looking at all the photos of dead deer and proud riflemen on the walls of the restaurants. One afternoon, the mild-mannered fellow living across the street from us proudly showed me his sprawling collection of rifles and revolvers (including a Magnum, as I recall). He had a fearsome set of razor-tipped bows and arrows, too. Much as I liked him, I did wonder what would happen if he ever had a nasty argument with his wife. As in so many townships, the locals never bothered to lock their doors at night. We didn't either. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure our front door even had a lock.) But if I'd been living there permanently, I would have made sure I had a good set of bolts at my disposal.
Putting the pro and anti gun stances aside, since there doesn't seem to be a solution to the problem of mad people getting weapons they can carry out their fantasies with (machetes, trucks, poison, flamethrowers, are all possibilities), there are two aspects to consider: security and prevention. After the Columbine killings and some other less well known incidents, American elementary and high schools simply locked down and put guards at the entries. That is more difficult to do on a university campus where students are constantly en route from one building to another, but if people are frightened enough they will eventually find ways to hunker down. On the prevention side, I don't see any likelihood that we will figure out how to make homicidal maniacs any less homicidal or any less mad, but we should make it easier for dangerous persons to be put away somewhere safe where they can do no harm to themselves or others. The mass emptying of the mental institutions and the legal barriers that have been placed in the way of committing dangerous people led, naturally, to lots more dangerous, insane people wandering around loose while their neighbors and potential victims dithered and worried about what to do next.
Posted by: gail | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 11:55 PM
"The mass emptying of the mental institutions..": most comments on that phenomenon that I see attribute it to Thatcher, but it surely started in the 60s, didn't it? Just another "progressive" reform.
Posted by: dearieme | Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 04:19 PM
But if I'd been living there permanently, I would have made sure I had a good set of bolts at my disposal.
As I understand your argument, the people who did live there permanently did not feel this necessary.
I think this is exactly the time NOT to have a debate about gun control. Everyone is far too busy saying that events have proven whatever they already belived correct, to have any useful debate about anything.
Posted by: pseudonymous | Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 07:53 PM
Dearime, I was thinking of the sixties (since I'm in America, I don't have anti-Thatcherism to fall back on)
Posted by: gail | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 12:58 PM
I have an experience as a former violent mental patient. A post is here. But I will tell all of you that short of doing brain scans on every person in America every five years, people like this guy will be around us.
Posted by: Duke | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 01:41 PM
Gail, I was musing: sorry if you felt that I'd accused you.
Posted by: dearieme | Friday, April 20, 2007 at 07:05 PM
You guys are playing right into the hands of the vested interests responsible for this-- the "mental health" industry and Big Pharma. The most common thread in all of the recent school shootings was antidepressats. These drugs have a black box warning on them of increased suicide and violence. It's logic 101. To then give the above industries the power to incarcerate anyone they deem as "unfit" is to take a giant step towards an Orwellian nightmare. This "solution" plays right into their hand. Psychiatry has always been the main tool of oppressive governments, whether it's Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or modern China. Modern psychiatry was molded in Nazi Germany. It was never intended to help people, only to control them. As history bears out, it didn't even accomplish that.
The solution is to gradually remove these drugs from the market and not allow anyone on them access to firearms. Columbine, Minnesota, the Amish school shootings and now, Virginia Tech,just to name a few all have antidepressants in common! If these drugs are not removed from the market, these shootings will only become a more and more common occurance.
Posted by: markertoo | Monday, April 30, 2007 at 11:57 PM