For What It's Worth

It's been one of those weeks.

When something like Virginia Tech happens, it's hard to really focus on anything else. It's one of those all-encompassing events--the kind of tragedy that forces us to forget the b.s. and come together in a spirit of national unity and shared grief.

That is, until the shock begins to wear off and it's time for recrimination and the parsing out of blame. Fault has to lie somewhere, right? Is it the university's, for failing to shut down the campus in time? The mental health system's for not locking the shooter away before he went completely nuts? The media's for rewarding psychotic killers with instant celebrity?

The one thing that plenty of people--including our president--are quick to point out is that it's certainly not the fault of our nation's gun laws. After all, guns don't kill people. People kill people. Some have even suggested that the tragedy could have been avoided if the school had been more lenient in allowing students and faculty to cart guns around campus for their protection. (I myself find the idea of arming thousands of college kids who spend half their lives inebriated less than reassuring. Although, it certainly would make pledge week more interesting.)

Even Democrats have backed off from calling for stricter gun laws because, apparently, you can't even run for president in this country until you've established your hunting prowess and posed for your obligatory photo op dressed as Elmer Fudd. Some political analysts speculate that Al Gore's tough stance on gun control was part of what cost him the 2000 election, and who wants to relive THAT national tragedy?

So, it's up to the rest of the world to hold us accountable for our sins. The day after the shooting, the Associated Press ran a story summarizing the international outcry against our open-gun policy:

"While some focused blame only on the gunman, world opinion over U.S. gun laws was almost unanimous: Access to weapons increases the probability of shootings. "

When a gunman killed 35 people in a Tasmanian tourist resort 11 years ago, the Australian government responded by changing the laws to prohibit automatic weapons and handguns. Last year the U.K.--a nation of about 50 million where handguns are banned--had 46 gun-related homicides. By comparison, New York--a city of about eight million--had 590. And that was in a good year.

Yes, we have a Bill of Rights in this country and it's a sacred document, but it's also a living document. If we suddenly discovered that--like the characters in "Harry Potter"--we all had the ability to kill each other with a word, I'd understand the need to revisit our concept of freedom of speech. When the founding fathers drafted the Second Amendment "Glock" wasn't exactly a term on their radar.

Maybe it's unrealistic to think we can magically make 200 million guns disappear from this country (we being only mere Muggles, after all). But we should at least be talking about how we're going to crack down on their availability.

After all, it's pretty difficult to imagine the shooter at Virginia Tech (or at Columbine or Nickel Mines, Pa.) wreaking the same amount of destruction with a tire iron. Maybe people do kill people, but guns certainly drive up the body count.