After reading this article off Digg I started to wonder about people's logic these days. The conservative U.S. talk radio hosts who suggested that if everyone carried a gun, they might have been able to kill the Virginia tech shooter before he had a chance to hurt anyone... really? So it's gonna be like that?
Ignoring for a minute the deep social, mental, and possibly economic problems that the shooter may have had and how this tragedy reflects a failure of the US society as a whole to foster an environment where at LEAST people don't go on suicide killing sprees to vent there anger; yeah lets ignore that and analyze the conservative U.S. talk radio hosts suggestion. Let all students bring guns to school to protect themselves from suicidal mass murderers. [sarcasm] Okay so we know that youth, in any part of the world, are ALL responsible, well educated and diligent people who will properly maintain their lethal weapons [end sarcasm]. How many kids do you think would die from someone forgetting to put on their safety and their gun going off when they toss their backpack in their locker? How about poor gun maintenance causing the gun to go off despite the safety being on? How about Dee Dee Dee Joe DarwinAward blowing his face off while looking down the barrel of a loaded weapon while cleaning it? What about kids who are struggling financially and can't afford a gun; who will protect them against all the gun toting bullies? You will have created a black market for gun sales to these poor kids who won't know the first thing about gun mechanics and whether or not they are getting a 'safe' gun. There are a whole lot of problems being introduced here to solve the relativity infrequent (for now anyway) incidents of suicidal mass shootings in the US.
But lets say you somehow waved your magic wand and solved all those problems. You still have an even bigger problem. The people doing these crimes are suicidal... for those not quite on board with what that means, we're talking about people ready, willing and looking for Death. Remember 9-11? According to the conservative U.S. talk radio hosts we should be putting stinger missiles on every building. Terrorists will be as happy to kill all the people on a plane and send burning shrapnel flying into an unsuspecting populace as they would be to actually hit a building. Both instill a sense of terror into people. Suicidal missions are funny that way, as long as you and a bunch of innocent people are dead, they're considered a success.
By the same token, just because you gave everyone a gun doesn't mean that the suicidal mass murderers will call it a day, go home and settle for hanging themselves. They want their departure to be an event. They still want to die, you just made it more of a challenge for them to pull it off. Now if you raise the stakes, so will they. Bullet resistant gear, home made pipe bombs, automatic weapons, poison gases, whatever it takes. They will still die but the carnage will just be that much more horrific.
Wouldn't it be better to start addressing the issues that caused the shooters to get to that point in the first place? I'm not going to start on the causes in this post because, like global warming, it's not a simple point-the-finger-at-a-scapegoat and solve the problem kind of issue. There is a web of interconnected problems in the US causing this phenomenon and it will take the communal acknowledgment of the US citizens as a whole to say "We screwed something up. We're sick of our children dieing and we need to figure out how to fix it.". But it's not as easy as blaming it on Violent Movies, Video Games, Drugs, Bad Parenting, Alcohol, Poverty, Poor Education, Social Isolation, Negativity in the Media, whatever. As you can see, off the top of my head I've come up with 9 issues, none of which (in isolation) are the cause of the Virginia Tech tragedy. However, if you stack all of those problems (combined with many others I haven't thought of) on a person and sprinkle in a little bit of psychosis... well who knows what can happen. You wanna fight a war on terror? How about starting with your own children.
