Digging Deeper

Guns, Politics, and the Virginia Tech Tragedy

By Joan Opyr, 4-18-07

I have been watching the mounting death toll at Virginia Tech with that mixture of horror and sadness that has become so familiar.  I have friends in Virginia, friends in and around Blacksburg, and I have known many graduates of Virginia Tech.  That this tragedy—a mass school shooting—has happened once again in this country is worse than shocking.  It’s a temptation to surrender to hopelessness and despair.  The fact is that a school shooting can happen anywhere in the United States at any time.

Columbine, Colorado.  Red Lake, Minnesota.  Bath, Michigan.  Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.  Santana High School.  Poe Elementary.  This is by no means an exhaustive list.  Where do we start?  With Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in 1966?  And where do we end?  Never.  Not in the foreseeable future if we continue to walk our present path. 

As a parent, I must constantly fight the desire to keep my children under glass, to keep them at home, protected, where I can watch over them.  At the same time, I don’t want to smother them.  I want them to live rich, full lives, and life entails risk.  I forget who first observed that to have children is to offer hostages to fate, but I know that’s right.  Having kids is like ripping your heart from your body and letting it go out walking.  It’s a terrifying thing, and what has happened this week in Blacksburg, Virginia has driven this fact home for every parent, every teacher, every friend, godparent or relative. 

I wish that I could believe Virginia Tech’s tragedy might mark the beginning of a serious, intentional, and action-oriented national conversation about what we can do to prevent this from happening again, but every shooting that has preceded this one has led only to hand-wringing.  There has been no discernible change in our culture, and I wonder, again, what it will take before we make the legal and social changes necessary to make our people safer and saner.

I don’t know what the solution is or how we can change our culture so that we value life more than we desire revenge.  One of the more salient points made in Bowling for Columbine is that per capita gun ownership in Canada is virtually the same as it is in the United States, and yet we don’t see Canadians killing one another on anything akin to the scale of gun murders in the United States.  One notable exception was the Montreal Massacre, when Marc Lepine killed 14 women at the Ecole Polytechinique.  Lepine separated the men from the women in an engineering classroom, sent the men outside, and shot the women while screaming “I hate feminists.” It was a horrible hate crime – the final stop on the end road of misogyny.

No one yet knows the motive or motives for Cho Seung-Hui’s attack on his fellow students at Virginia Tech.  Reports have surfaced that Cho harassed two female students, and that they reported his behavior to campus police.  Professor Lucinda Roy has also told various news outlets that she reported her concerns about Cho’s behavior and violent writings to the Virginia Tech administration, campus police, and the school’s counseling center back in 2005.  As Cho made no specific threats, not much could be done.

It is not too soon, however, for us to begin asking questions of ourselves.  One of the most important—and most basic—is who, exactly, is responsible for all of the school shootings in the United States?  People with guns is one answer, but it would be more accurate to say men with guns.  Before we can even begin to assess what’s wrong, we need to face this fact.  Who is responsible for most of the domestic violence in the United States?  Men.  And who comprise the majority of the victims?  Women and children.  This leads to a second question:  what are we doing wrong as we raise our male children?  Is it the sense of entitlement we instill in them?  Is it the pressure we place on them never to show any emotion except anger, to always be tough, to not be one of Ann Coulter’s faggots?  Is it a combination of all of the above?

Whatever the sources of this problem, they run deep, and we haven’t even begun to address them.  As we begin yet another conversation about the causes of school violence, it is my profound hope that the ensuing debate won’t devolve into another episode of he said, she said, with Jim Brady’s wife, Sarah, duking it out on cable news with Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.  We’ve been there and done that.  It’s time to dig deeper.

But will we?  The New York Times reports that John McCain has already come out with a statement reaffirming his support for an unfettered Second Amendment right to bear arms.  No surprises there.  McCain has been sucking hind tit on far right ever since he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination.  And, ever-sensitive, Idaho Senator Larry Craig observed on Tuesday that, “There are several [Democratic] gun control advocates who have behind their name today, r-e-t, retired . . . . [s]ome of it was voluntary. Some of it was involuntary.”

That’s our man in Washington:  making partisan hay while the sun is obscured by a hurricane.

I’ll admit it.  I am a gun owner.  In fact, I own a 9 mm semi-automatic much like the one used by Cho Seung-Hui.  As I’ve already said, I dread this discussion turning into another tired and tiresome argument over Second Amendment gun rights.  What has happened in all of these school shootings is about far more than that.  Many of us worry about the amount of televised and video game violence our kids are exposed to.  I also worry about the amount of pressure we place on our kids – high-stakes testing, ever tougher college admissions, too little free time and too much study. 

Yes, you read that last sentence correctly.  When I went to work for the YWCA at Washington State University, I was shocked to see some of the course loads my students were taking.  I often took 16 or more hours when I was in college, and I worked a motley assortment of part-time jobs, but the stress my students face today is far worse than anything I endured twenty years ago.  They’re expected to take more classes in fewer years, to pay more in tuition, to work more, and to rack up volunteer hours in organizations like mine.  The world is more competitive now, and it’s harder to get into college and graduate school.  I have students who despair that their four-point won’t be enough—and in some cases, it may not.

In our schools, teachers struggle to ensure that their classrooms remain rich and expansive learning environments while being obliged to teach to a high-stakes test.  In Idaho we have the ISATs; in Washington, it’s the WASL.  What do these tests actually measure? Like the SAT and the GRE, they measure the students ability to take the test—not his or her actual knowledge. 

We have no respect for teachers; we belittle, denigrate and under-fund public education; we put stress on our kids that we never experienced ourselves, and we wonder why the teen depression rate is so high.  Add to that a culture of bullying, and some students snap.  They go postal.  I’m not excusing violent kids, but I am suggesting that we take a long, hard look at ourselves.  What are we offering our kids?  Less one-on-one time with us, their parents.  Less quality time in school, reading, learning, and enjoying.  We’re putting college out of reach for too many kids, and those who do get in graduate with the kind of debt most of us associate with a house payment.  The Pell Grants I relied on have dwindled to bupkes.

More support for our kids; more support for our teachers; less selfishness on our part as spoiled-rotten baby boomers—maybe this would help.  This is a complex problem and there are no simple answers.  Why would a college kid turn into a version of William Calley and conduct his own My Lai Massacre on the Virginia Tech campus?  I don’t believe that a generation of “bad seeds” has sprung up out of nowhere or leapt unbidden from the pixels on a video screen.  We—the adults—have gone wrong, and we’ve dragged our kids down with us.  How do we right ourselves and save our kids?

Now, we mourn.  Soon, we’ll begin talking about this and what it means. Let us hope and pray that it’s not empty talk.

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