Opinion
Among the myriad distasteful soundbites that have emerged from Blacksburg, Virginia, since the catastrophic university shootings was that uttered by President Bush at the memorial service the day after a crazed gunman killed 33 people before shooting himself. "Laura and I have come to Blacksburg today with hearts
full of sorrow," he intoned. "This is a day of ... sadness for our entire nation."
The next day, car bombs and suicide bombers killed nearly 200 people in Baghdad - six for every life that was extinguished in Virginia. Some 140 died in a single explosion, the worst insurgent bomb attack since the US-led invasion more than four years ago promised to deliver peace and security to a country now riven with bloody sectarian strife.
The irony of that grisly coincidence would doubtless be lost on Bush. But the complexities of what has occurred elude him too. Like too many Americans in this dark week, he ignores the obvious. In all the handwringing that will occur over the next weeks and months, public discussion will seek to define Cho Seung-Hui as a deeply disturbed loner. As a result, two things will happen: the killer will become like the bogeyman who haunts children's bedrooms at night - a fantasy, not a reality; and the event will assume the status of "just one of those things". Nobody will examine the obvious: that the reason 34 people died is that it, in most states of the Union, it is as easy to buy a gun as to buy a car.
The gun lobby will trot out its tired mantra that "guns don't kill people; people kill people". The idea that people with guns kill more people than people with baseball bats or kitchen knives do, will gain no purchase.
Opponents of gun control routinely cite the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which asserts that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". They are less fond of mentioning the immediately preceding clause - "a well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State" - since, as many point out, that makes it plain that "the people" possessed that inalienable right collectively rather than individually.
Legal scholars and jurists have argued repeatedly over that matter of interpretation and will continue to do so. But it is unlikely that the men who framed the Constitution - to whom the barrel-loading flintlock musket was state of the art and who were reasserting a tradition of English common law that predated the invention of firearms - had in mind a country where a Montana farmer (who owns 27 weapons) found 13 guns in the home of his widowed mother when she died of old age. Nor did they envisage that a gun store that armed Cho, which sells a lethal weapon every 70 minutes, would be doing a brisk trade the day after the killings. "I don't know anything about him," the proprietor said this week. "I just sold him the gun."
Gun control is, of course, a horse that has well and truly bolted in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. No one should imagine that this week's events will prompt change, any more than was prompted by the killings at Columbine High School in 1999 or Richard Speck's bloody rampage in Chicago in 1966.
What could - and should - change is the way in which we live together. The real lesson of Blacksburg is in the horror stories emerging of how plainly Cho had signalled - both deliberately and involuntarily - his disturbed state of mind. Material he mailed to a television network during his rampage underlines the fact that he was not a bad man, but a tragically distressed one, left to cope - or rather to fail to cope - alone.
In this, the US is not the only society to blame. Close to home, our own mass killers, including David Gray in Aramoana, did not strike without warning. If there is a something we can learn from the distressing events in Virginia, it is that we should all be looking out for each other - not with fear and suspicion but, alert to when life is getting on top of those around us, in a spirit of community.
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