- We need more gun control.
- We need more guns.
- They should have fought back.
- It's a cultural problem.
- It's an immigration problem.
- etc.
- As far as we know, the guns were all bought legally.
- After the initial attack, there was enough confusion that even the guns of the police were ineffective.
- We don't know that people didn't fight back. We also don't know what made him shoot himself.
- His Korean-American background complicates the red state/blue state culture war divide rendering it meaningless. Also his writings and other behavior seem to hint that he may have been mentally ill.
- He came to America as a child.
But instead of hashing out these points, I think it's more important to see them within the larger context. And I think each reaction, no matter how disagreeable, is perfectly understandable in the context of the Kubler-Ross model (a.k.a. the stages of grief). As with any sorrowful or violent event, our natural response is to try to work our way backwards to where we felt more in control, when the world was not in turmoil.
We want to rewrite the story in our minds so that everything fits together and makes sense. We want to know that there were signs so that everything that happened was for a reason, that it had a source and a motive. But we also want to know that it was not inevitable, that with a change here or there, it might not have happened at all.
In addition to these thoughts and reflections, we want to take action (or think that in that situation we would have taken action). We want to to make changes to the world so that these incidents can't happen again. We want to arm ourselves and disarm our foes. We want to make the violence of others more difficult to achieve, and the protection of our loved ones easier. We want to assure ourselves that something like this wouldn't happen to us.
But for me, this is just bargaining with a dash of anger or denial thrown in for good measure (depending on the person). These are easy reactions, and you can see that they are easy because no one is afraid to say these things. They are words that have already been rehearsed and thought out before hand. We know them by heart because of Columbine and because of 9/11 and because of every roadside bomb and Shuttle disaster. There is no real shock here because otherwise there wouldn't be so many words. The president wouldn't have found it so easy to go down there and speak and go through the ritual of grieving if there wasn't something in this event that we hadn't already rationalized and accepted within our larger mental landscape.
Tragedy, that misused word of grief, has become a reflex in American life.
Every year thousands of people die needlessly in traffic accidents. I don't know the exact statistics but we do know it's more dangerous to drive than to fly. It's certainly more dangerous to drive than to go to school. And every time you get in the car you are risking your life, the lives of your family, and the lives of other travellers. But you won't stay home. You won't sell your car. Why? Because it is an acceptable risk. You've worked it out (the pros and cons), and come to the conclusion that it is worth it to go out and live your life.
I think in America we have also said, yes, guns are dangerous, our culture is violent, but these are the risks we have to take to preserve a free and open society. Most of the time things work fine. In rare circumstances, things go off the rails. We can't account for every outcome, nor can we control individual behavior.
So America, what we have here is a fatal traffic accident on a mass scale. It is a sad time, but we must not be surprised. The massacre at Virginia Tech is the bargain we have made with the devil of modern life. People kill people. Guns kill people. Motivations are dark, perverse, guarded, and mysterious. We can't hope to understand why things like this happen. Nor can we say that this incident is the necessary outcome of a chain of events. It is nothing you could have predicted and certainly no one is to blame. It didn't happen last month, it probably won't happen next month.
But, and this is the important part, it is and will continue to be a very real possibility.
And based on the way we have structured our gun laws, arranged our cultural freedoms, and established our social norms, we have at some level already accepted this possibility. We have unconsciously decided that horrible things like this are a risk we as a people are willing to take in order to have the benefits that go along with them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit. At some level, if you embrace the 2nd amendment, you are saying this is acceptable and freedom isn't free.
From denial, anger, and bargaining, we move to depression and acceptance.
Now that I've gotten out my two cents worth of stupidity, I will retreat into silence. The realities of this situation, the true pain and reckoning do not belong to me. They belong to the Virginia Tech community. Everyone else should just shut up.
