Elephant

George Bush is quagmired in low ratings, as the public wonders if he can handle anything right in his presidency. The firing of 8 US attorneys for political reasons has Alberto Gonzales under a firestorm. Paul Wolfowitz, head of the World Bank, appears to have given his girlfriend a cushy job at the State Department. Iraq casualties continue to mount.

But where did it all begin? It began, of course, on 9/11, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were attacked. What was the reaction? Initially, confusion, terror. How could such a thing happen on US soil? Then, as Americans are wont to do, we needed to assign blame. Who was at fault? At the time, I had thought of Al Qaeda. After all, how many terrorists groups did you know? And it was them.

And then the US had to do something, for it seemed far worse to take inaction, to show you had no control over the situation. We had weapons. We wanted to use it. Even as some preferred caution, and actually advised us to do nothing, it was considered very Jimmy Carter to be ineffectual. The US had to attack, had to send a message, had to show that it could "protect" its people by attacking others. It was initially Afghanistan, then inexplicably, Iraq, and the war against terror become a national policy to replace a meandering policy. It became a way to define a presidency.

The tragedy at Virginia Tech also engenders similar feelings of confusion and terror, but there's no easy enemy to pick at. Almost always, incidents such as this are due to actions of someone very distressed with their own lives, and willing to do great harm before invariably, they lose their own lives either by their own hand, or the hands of police who try to stop him.

In this day and age of instant messaging, people were already positing a solution to the problem, and of course, it doesn't take long before the gun nuts trot out their theory.

It wouldn't have happened if the students had guns.

It's a vision of the Wild West, where everyone had a gun (did they really?), and they could protect themselves.

Of course, the gun nut theory is built on a few tenuous assumptions. First, if guns are outlawed then only outlaws will have guns. Hmm, many countries seem to work pretty well with guns outlawed, having murder rates far underneath the US. But of course, they're weird. The US is far crazier, and such a strategy would only harm God-fearing citizens who need a few weekends killing deer with semi-automatic assault rifles.

But I digress.

Second, everyone else who had guns would be honest and law-abiding, and furthermore, be able to have their gun conveniently with them so they can take the law into their own hands making decisions that are more sound than trained police. There would, of course, be no accidents, no acts of rage. And if someone did get killed, well, it's the Wild West, and this is the price we pay for each person to have a gun, and of course, bring it into a classroom, which most universities would say "of course, bring in a gun, don't worry about the assignment that prof. is going to assign you that will ruin a weekend you had planned with the girlfriend for a few weeks, because your integrity will prevent you from doing anything, and besides the prof. would just as soon pop you for even looking the wrong direction".

Ultimately, the answer is going to, as usual, be neither extreme. There's far more likelihood that guns would get banned than we go to the Wild West, and yet, for every clamor to ban guns, powerful lobbyists will look the other way, present their theory of why our freedoms our being taken away, yadda, yadda, yadda. And in the end, we'll be where we are today, so parents can become even more paranoid.

The response to 9/11, to visit violence upon those we suspected caused the terror, even as those most directly responsible are no longer around to go to trial, was considered a necessary act, a very masculine act that suggests an eye for an eye, lest ye be considered a coward.

And yet there is no luxury, perhaps thankfully, for such a response. What do you do in this case? A reasonable response, one that most countries except ours would embrace, would be to respond with peace, to make it difficult for anyone to get a gun, a tactic that seems to work well with many countries, but which would take something that makes a guy like Bobby Knight or Dick Cheney happy. Owning their own guns. Going out hunting.

The voices that clamored for Imus to get fired are, unfortunately, not likely to be strong enough. While the less progressive among us might grumble about what happened to Imus, we, as a country, aren't ready, at least, publicly, to undo what the civil rights fought so hard for, namely, a bit of dignity for all of us. But people are still willing to fight for their guns, and as incidents like these occur, they'll be some explanation that claims that more guns would have prevented this, and would have conveniently ignored how more guns would cause more random killings, as they would somehow be the justifications of law-abiding folk.

It will be interesting to see if the response to this tragedy results in more than simple lamenting of youth (and adults) whose lives were given needlessly, while the rest of the country wanted answers, wanted to know who was killed and why the person did it, and by the way, could you consent to an interview, did you know anyone killed, did you see anything? The morbid curiosity, the sight of a shocked student body, and the usual response to an unusual problem.