A Virginia Tech student goes off the deep end and starts methodically killing an entire building of people… no apparent triggering event, motive, or cause.
Your first thoughts should include one or both of the following:
1) “There are some sick people out their, something had to be seriously wrong with that guy." This thought can continue onto wishing ill will upon the person, wondering why nobody saw this coming, and if you continue to follow this path of thought, speculation on how we as a society in general could better intercede and prevent or even predict this kind of incident.
2) The second typical reaction to this sort of tragedy is usually feelings of empathy (hopefully not sympathy) for the victims. These emotions usually become stronger a day or two after the event. This is due to the outpouring of stories from all the victims who survived and the families of those victims who did not. It’s the ability to relate with someone, thinking; that could have just as easily have been me, or my child, or my friend who died, that makes us both mourn for others we don’t know as well as feel insecure ourselves.
After these almost “knee-jerk" reactions take place, people come together and share their feelings. Thoughts and opinions begin to surface, and people begin to speculate on how to prevent similar future tragedies.
One of the first and most popular suggestions is to beef-up gun control laws. Reducing the number of rounds that a clip can hold, more strict background checks, and longer waiting periods top the list. While I have no real issue with these proposals, they are really a waste of time.
This man, as well as any other imbalanced hell-bent individual, will acquire what they need to carry out their will. We could even go as far as making all firearms illegal for any citizen. But, he’d either obtain a gun through what would surely be one of the most vast black markets the US has ever seen (rivaling only the prohibition), or use something even worse, like pipe-bombs.
Evil will always exist on a small scale in the world we live in. Once you get to the heart of the matter, the real question becomes; how well prepared will the rest of us be to intervene? Can we do anything to stop, to curb, to mitigate the terrible actions of the few? In a building of hundreds, if even one person owned a gun and had a license to carry it in public, I bet they would have done something to stop the killer.
In an attempt to make their environment safer, universities pass laws that deny any person the right to possess a weapon anywhere on their premises. However, they do nothing to keep guns off their campus. No pat-downs, no metal detectors, no random property searches, and thank-goodness. That would be ridiculous, and ridiculously expensive. But, because of these two things – 1)removing the right for those with concealed carry permits to arm themselves and 2)not keeping tight security on buildings - universities (and many other public arenas) have shaped entire bodies of people into a row of shooting ducks. Virginia Tech students were like fish in a barrel to Cho.
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