Virginia Tech Shootings

This is my debut as a blogger, something I have refrained from doing since the dawn (for me) of the internet in 1995. I like to think of myself as an aspiring writer, one who has published a modest number of things over the years, but one who would like to write much more and publish more. Perhaps this space will be an incubator for ideas that can be developed further and shared with a wider audience.

This week was dominated by news of the Virginia Tech shootings and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee. The massacre is being viewed through a number of lenses. This week's Economist has a cover story with a handgun adorned with an American flag, entitled America's Tragedy. It notes that the shootings have provoked a discussion about campus security, not gun control. This is surely how the gun lobby would prefer to frame the debate, that is, asking how campuses can be better protected, or what particular shortcomings in Virginia Tech's response to Cho contributed to the end result. The larger issue of gun violence, of deaths caused in bulk or serially, is like the elephant in the room. It appears that the political system is not prepared to deal with it.

Democrats, who have traditionally been sympathetic to gun control measures, have come out this week to say no, they're not pushing any legislation unless the President signals his support. Otherwise, it was said, the Democrats would suffer poltical damage for a bill that has no chance of becoming law. One Texas Democrat, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, described as a "gun control advocate," said, "[u]nless we get some leadership from the White House, we're not going to take this kind of political damage bringing up something that would never become law." The Republicans have been foursquare against gun control since 2001, engineering the lapse in the assault weapon ban in 2004. So, it is pretty safe to say that the President won't be signalling his support any time soon, and the Democrats won't do anything.

What is important is the agreement. In other words, for both political parties, gun control is not an issue to be debated. There won't be competing plans for gun control, no House bill, no Senate bill, no conference committee to work out the differences, no veto threat. The Presidential candidates haven't touched the issue, except for a couple of Republicans (McCain and Giuliani), who have said they're against gun control.

This tells us a lot. Politicians react to the news of the day, the issues that appear in the media, the problems the prospective voters are paying attention to. Crises spur action on difficult issues. The terrorist strikes of 9/11 prompted sweeping change in homeland security, airline travel, immigration policy, among other areas. From Hurricane Katrina emerged a consensus that (at least) the immediate needs of the victims had to be provided for, homes needed to be rebuilt, and New Orleans infrastructure needed to be repaired. Typically, the slower-moving threats, like the structural deficit caused by demographic shifts and the escalating costs of Social Security, or our underperforming education system, those are the problems politicians don't touch because there is no galvanising event to force them to.

So here is a genuine crisis, a bottomless tragedy. And there is no call to action. No politician to propose a solution that his or her constituents want. If this continues, there is a vacuum in the national discourse, a gap in leadership, one that must be filled. This cannot be ignored because the deaths of numerous innocent people will not be forgotten. Politicians and lobbyists may ride out the storm. The media will eventually run out of things to say, and it will leave the Virginia Tech campus. But friends and families of the victims will never forget the hole that was created in their lives. The thoughts of how a 19 year old daughter's life might have unfolded, the memory of a 35 year old vivacious German teacher, will occupy daytime and nighttime thoughts for a lifetime.

That circle of those who remember is bigger than one might think. The circle includes not just the spouses, the parents, or the close friends of those who were killed. They include the wounded, the almost victims, the witnesses. They include all of the students on the campus of a huge state university. They include the readers of newspapers and the viewers of TV who were touched by tales of heroic attempts to bar the door to the gunman, those who cried even a little bit for the lives snuffed out so early and so unceremoniously.

The circle of those who remember becomes almost all-encompassing if you include those touched by the thousands of gun deaths which occur every year, as if by routine. Think of the homicides that rack the inner-city neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Boston. Mostly, they get little attention by the general public, but each death touches and diminishes the lives of those who knew the deceased. When I lived in Washington, D.C., I had occasion to regularly interview victims of violent crime. Violent crimes, and especially homicides, leave holes that cannot be filled and will not be forgotten.

The logic of gun control is inescapable. I cannot pretend to know what the legislation should look like exactly, but there are plenty who have researched the subject. What I know, and what anybody who wants to look can know, is that our society does not have to be this way. In European countries and Japan, gun violence, and homicides generally, are much less. We are not battling a force of nature, like cancer. This is simply a matter of ordering our society in a different way, of humans changing the man-made rules we live by.

The politicians may doddle. Doing nothing, ignoring the issue, may be smart politics for the moment, but not forever. The media may divert its attention to the next Anna Nicole smith, but the memories of all the lost souls taken by gun violence will not diminish for a long time. The anguish of people who have lost loved ones because guns are so readily available, for reasons that cannot be easily defended, those feelings are a gathering force in American politics. That force must express itself eventually, and woe betide the politicians and lobbyists who do nothing or stand in its way.