Another Gun Tragedy

The warm weather was a nice reprieve from the icy temps lately. i rolled down the car window breathing in fresh air, as I ran errands and picked up a bouquet of flowers for Valentine's Day. I'd surprise Ana, and later we'd stop off somehwere for dinner. I switched from a Radiohead CD to a local news station just as the announcer broke in with word of a shooting on the campus of Northern Illinois University. Shocked, I had to pull over so as not to miss any of the still frustratingly sketchy details. I new the campus well, had friends who went to college there. I'd been to parties and hung out at McCabe's tavern on a few nights back in the day. America would have to come to terms with another horrific crime, a terrible tragedy involving guns. It would have to suffer pundits blaming everything from Liberalism to video games, violence in movies and cultural narcissism.

The nation will suffer the cultural vomitous of talk radio and its sophmoric fantasies of what might have happened had evryone in that tragic classroom had a gun. What if we all carried guns everywhere we went, at every moment of the day. While you're taking a dump, keep that weapon locked and loaded in case that sound from the next room is an intruder and not the dog getting into the garbage again. As with Virginia Tech, and any crime involving guns, these kids were surprised in the normal course of their lives. That is the nature of violence, or random acts, is that perpetrators never announce that they'll gun down 18 in room 102 at 2pm on Saturday. We are standing in line for lunch with a coworker chatting about the kids. We are asleep, bending to tie a shoelace, digging for a pen or pouring over notes before class. In short, we are going about our lives.

There is  reality that must be maintain through all of this. That is, these kinds of events are rare or unheard of in most of our actual lives. Most people will live their lives without ever being a victim of gun crime. It speaks to the omnipresent power of the media that we fear-we fear that we might. This affects and touches most of us only through the breadth and immediacy of the media. Quite naturally, we superimpose ourselves upon those breathlessly emotional reports and chaotic video, or imagine our own reactions. It is natural thing, as we all imagine in all sorts of situations how we might react, or how we might solve a particular problem. And there are those, with that extra Neanderthal gene stuck in their DNA like a piece of meat in a tooth, that imagine joining in some OK Corrale type shootout with the gunman.

How perverse that after each gun tragedy we continue to suffer fools who cry for more guns in our society, for greater proliferation, and for more violence. The poor victims and their families are given to new recriminations about whether or not they should have had a gun, or if their loved ones had a gun it all might have turned out differently. It is a cruel and unrealistic fantasy. The fact is, proliferation does not make a safer society, but a more paranoid, more suspicious society. It is an acceptance of a false idea that we are all in mortal danger of crime every moment of every day. It is a lie. It is the construction of the NRA and the gun industry which, so addicted to huge profits with gun proliferation resists any restriction or controls whatsoever. They even fought phot IDs for guns owners with the argument that it would only affect law abiding gun owners and not criminals. By that logic, we shouldn't have Driver's licenses either, because it wouldn't stop car thieves!

Look, I'm not a gun grabber. I cherish the 2nd ammendment as much as the Ist, 14th...I have owned guns, hunted as a boy and young man. I was on the rifle team in the Marine Corps ROTC. Guns are a tool, and the Right to bear arms a Constitutional right that must be preserved, but not the perversion of that right. Just as libel laws, inciting violence or panic are acceptable restrictions on the First Ammendment, there must be restrictions on gun proliferation o we will continue to see the kind of violence that unfolded at Northern University yesterday. Though reports are still sketchy, the gunman was on the Dean's list and studied criminal science, and seems got the guns legally.

All of the victime yesterday described how quickly and unexpected the shooting began and concluded. Even police are trained that in every shooting situation the first course of action is not necessarily to immediately return fire, but to escape and put distance and objects between you and the shooter, and above all to be congniscent of hitting others. My brother's first day on the job with the Killeen police department, a gunman drove into a Luby's fastfood restaurant killing a number of people. Survivors described dust, darkness and mass confusion. The wounded often never saw gunman, and in the noise and confusion were not sure where the shots came from. In Sarajevo during the siege, gun battles erupted suddenly and without warning. Friends in Iraq have described for me, on combat patrols, coming under fire, but having no targets to return fire on. The idea of battling a gunman surprising you in the shopping mall is far less likely than winning the lottery, and is a mythology promoted by the gun industry for the perverse purpase of increased profits and political conservative agendas.

Gun nuts will call me a gun grabber, while nothing is further from the truth. Those who advocate unfettered proliferation are reactionary, decietful and truly  a menace to civil, rational society. I'm not calling for the abolition of guns, but only a reasoned, intelligent approach that stems the tidal wave of violence cause by too many damn guns!