Virginia Tech and gun control

Ever since the horrific events at Virginia Tech I have been thinking about the question of gun control.

I should say that I don't like guns, I don't think hunting defenseless animals is a sport and I think that most hunters substitute guns for penises. But none of this leads me to the conclusion that stricter gun controls would have prevented Cho Seung-Hui from gunning down 31 people and himself.

According to press reports it's not clear if any existing gun laws were broken. According to The coalition to Stop Gun Violence

"In December 2005 a Virginia district court ruled that Cho was 'an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness' and ordered that he be evaluated at a psychiatric facility. He was released the next day. Throughout this period, local police had at least three contacts with Cho.

"Although he passed a background check on two occasions, it is unclear whether Cho's handgun purchases were legal under federal law. Federal law prohibits individuals who have been 'adjudicated as a mental defective' or 'committed to any mental institution' from purchasing firearms. Virginia State Police maintain the sale was legal under state law and the Virginia attorney general's office has yet to comment on the case."

Of course, there have been commissions set up to study what happened and investigations are under way. But I don't think they will solve the problem of whether the massacre could have been prevented by stricter gun laws. In this society if someone wants something there will always be someone to sell it to him/her. If we haven't learned this from Prohibition and from the failure of anti-drug laws to effect their availability, we just don't want to acknowledge the limitations of passing laws to change human behavior.

One more word about Virginia Tech. Those people who argue that arming all (or most of) the students and faculty would have prevented some or all of the deaths of April 16 are promulgating very dangerous ideas.

But all this said, I think that if we wait to intervene until someone has reached the point of picking up a gun to solve their problems, we have totally failed as a society.

The availability of guns isn't the problem. It's that so many people from the President on down seem to believe that violence is the way to solve problems.

It takes a community to save a life, in this case 32 lives.

Cho was a part of a community at Virginia Tech and that community failed him in so many ways. Although some people realized from his writing how disturbed he was and tried to bring these problems to the attention of others who were professionally charged with dealing with them. But the professionals simply failed.

If we come across a wounded four-legged animal we are very likely to find a home for it or give it one ourselves. But with the two-legged variety we seem incapable of bringing outsiders into our midst. And until we can do that, there will always be another "deviant" who will pick up a gun to solve problems.