February 15th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
CNN has allowed readers to respond to the campus shootings at Northern Illinois University yesterday. Of course, as with the Virginia Tech tragedy, the gun advocates are taking this opportunity to promote their cause. They say if the average citizen carried a gun, the shooter yesterday would have been shot long before he could fire so many rounds. They throw out the cliche ‘If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” What these advocates fail to see is that this shooter and the shooter at Virginia Tech did not obtain their guns illegally. In fact, it was so easy for them to attain their guns that no one even thought twice about these individuals wanting to have so many guns. In effect, the legalities that allowed these killers their weapons is actually part of the cause of both of these tragedies.
The next argument the advocates proliferate is that campus shootings are on the rise because they are known to be ‘gun free zones’ giving perpetrators a heads up on how much resistance will be faced. This may be true to an extent. And increased security in every public place is infeasible and in my xpinion not desirable. Still, allowing everyone to carry guns would only escalate violence. Consider the number of assaults that occur on a daily basis, in bars, schools, wherever. Now imagine those assaults occurring with citizens with guns. Instead of a fistfight and a night in jail, you’ve got wounded people, including bystanders (unless we’re assuming that once every citizen carries a gun, their aim will be dead on accurate), property damage and a feeling exactly the opposite of security. I wouldn’t feel safe knowing that everybody around me had a gun.
What about the predicament our police officers would be put in? They already have to take great precaution to ensure that a simple traffic stop of a driver is not a violent situation. Imagine that same incident knowing that 90% of the population is strapped.
Then there are those that say it’s not guns, it’s our society. Our society of “CSI”, “Law and Order”, and violent video games has propagated a culture of violence. This is just a cop out. These media outlets are not watched solely by serial killers. We all watch these programs. As such, if these media outlets exert such control over us all, why haven’t we all gone the route of mass killings? That’s akin to saying that the kid that played the robber during a game of cops and robbers grew up to be larcenous. Silly. Indeed, there is something deeper to this recent outbreak.
I think these killers have been around since the beginning of time. Some never kill, never act on their violent thoughts. Others dwell on them but don’t erupt until the opportunity presents itself. I think the main reason we hear and see it more often now is twofold. One side is that weapons are easier to obtain, whether legally or illegally, and generally much more powerful and sweeping. Automatic handguns, rifles, and machine guns whose output would have been unheard of outside the military forty years ago are now commonplace in gun shops or the black market. It’s time we make some weapons ‘for government and military use only’ by restricting the gun’s manufacturers from sourcing gun shops with these tools. Secondly, today’s media is much quicker in getting information to the masses. No longer will a report on the East coast ‘make it’s way’ to the west coast; information exchange is now immediate. I think there have been tragedies such as throughout civilized (and uncivilized) history. Try reading the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers if you need proof of man’s ability to kill (and many of the killers listed did their dirt long before guns and CNN). We feel like more people are dying because more people are dying AND we know about it.