Of Two Minds

Everybody insists on making the Virginia Tech tragedy some sort of referendum on gun control. It's a completely insipid endeavor, and I'll tell you why.

It's one incident. It was horrible and tragic, but it was one killer (as far as we know), one set of motivations, and two handguns. You cannot lift from this series of events ANY clear answer about gun control or lack thereof.

Virginia Tech doesn't allow guns on campus. The right-wing nuts point out that this didn't stop the killer, and of course it didn't; Virginia allows guns practically anywhere. The on-campus gun ban is merely a policy, but it is impossible to enforce as a preventative matter. The same can be said for the D.C. gun ban, which has not eliminated gun deaths in the District. Sure, the police can tag you with an extra charge after they catch you, but it doesn't stop anybody from getting a gun in Virginia or Maryland and walking across the district line.

My point is not to argue gun control; it is simply to illuminate the utter stupidity of people who are arguing gun control in this situation. We don't know why, or how, he did what he did, and we don't know what would have stopped him.

The second popular argument is that if the students and/or professors had been armed, it wouldn't have been so bad. This is such a wild assumption it's barely worth mentioning. Who is to say that anyone would have been able to take this guy out? He killed 30 people with handguns; it may be that he was quite skilled as a marksman in that capacity. The odds that a student, barely awake in class, would have the ability to not only draw and fire before being shot, but to not miss and then not be immediately shot in return, seems impossible to accurately measure. The same could be said for a professor.

Not to mention the fact that, were it completely legal for all students and teachers to carry weapons on campus, many students and teachers would not do so. I sure wouldn't have when I was a student.

So that leaves us with a series of maybes; maybe the gunman wouldn't have been able to get guns if the laws were better, and maybe the students or teachers could have been carrying, and maybe some actually would be carrying, and maybe they would have had the speed and luck to shoot at the gunman first, and maybe they wouldn't have missed and been shot themselves.

All those maybes add up to jack squat, in my book. Arguing gun control--pro or con--by using specific, tragic examples is akin to arguing environmentalism by pointing out how often a friend of yours recycles. It's a silly, strawman debate tactic that stinks of exploitation. There is a real discussion to be had regarding guns in America, but Cho Seung Hui does not add a single useful piece of information to that discussion.