The Zong

The Virginia Tech shootings yesterday will inevitably lead to another long, national discussion of gun control and the pointing of fingers as good people try to make sense of the tragedy by placing blame, and morbidly opportunistic politicians exploit the anger and grief for their own gain. It’s almost a ritual now; the aftermath of the Columbine tragedy and the murder of five Amish girls last October are just two earlier examples of this heartbreaking process. In the end, none of these kids’ lives seems to matter enough to the powers that be, to the cultural and political leaders that claim to pray for them, and so nothing really changes, and every so often we continue to see the bloody bodies of American children being carried out of their schools. It’s a lot harder for people to ignore than the bodies being shipped home from the Middle East.

So less than 24 hours after the VT shootings occurred, with 32 dead and counting, the debate has begun in earnest yet again, and in place of mourning we have blog postings and news stories advocating political solutions to what is increasingly being proven to be a cultural problem.

Among the blognoise sits a post by Michelle Malkin, who is only a little harder to look at than Ann Coulter and who takes a passive aggressive stance by quoting a conservative blog posting that states:

“Just imagine if students were armed. We no longer need to imagine what will happen when they are not armed.”

Now, I don’t really think gun control laws (in a practical, real sense) would have prevented this tragedy any more than arming a few professors would have, but behind the words above there is a psychosis that pervades our entire nation, and if you look closely you can see why our kids feel the need to shoot each other and themselves all the time. The mentality required to suggest that undergraduate students at a university would be better off carrying firearms around, and that’s why so many of them got killed in the first place is a repellent and ugly manifestation of our country’s obsession with macho bullshit. There’s a big difference between encouraging responsible gun ownership and calling for schoolkids to carry a lethal fucking weapon to class, and these criminally insane dickheads are crossing that line with this argument, big time.

The horrible sickness infecting the minds of the 9/11 hijackers, the Columbine shooters and 23-year old Cho Seung-Hui is one and the same. It passes as patriotism for some and as faith in the divine for others, but it’s all part of the same sociopathic sickness; it’s a lot easier to kill someone than to try and understand why they’re different, and Americans have proved time and time again that we’re really good at shooting first and asking questions later.

I don’t know what the solution to all this violence is, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve more goddamn guns.

- M.G.