Mass murder at a university (Virginia Tech)
April 17th, 2007 by ashish
In one of the deadliest scenes of mass murder in the United States, a student of South Korean descent killed 30 people at Virginia Tech university. This is a tragedy that shakes people up all over, essentially because of the randomness of the incident and the fact that this happened in a college campus, not normally associated with deadly violence.
The discussion about this incident has already moved to whether this tragedy was unavoidable. Already the US gun control vs. right to carry arms debate has started. The whole history of the Second Amendment is a convulted history, read the Wikipedia entry for a detailed history along with legal judgements and precedents.
It is typically at times when there is a major outrage such as the one in Virginia Tech that public opinion solidifies against the easy availability of guns and hence making it more easier for such incidents to happen. Previous outrages such as the Columbine massacre also catalyse public opinion. This is counter-balanced by the basic fact that gun owning (via the second amendment) is seen as a civil liberty and attempts to curtail it seen as curtailing of a civil liberty.
This is a flawed argument. There are numerous civil liberties, and ownership of a deadly weapon is a civil liberty. Those are the ones guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The free ownership of guns gives deranged people the ability to easily procure a gun and use them for these sort of atrocities.
Just some statistics show what guns is doing to the country. There are on an average 10,000 people killed every year by guns, including some horrid ones in which teenagers use guns on each other. Is this really what the citizens of the country want. It is a habit to disparage European countries, but those countries do have strict gun controls, which make it much more difficult to procure guns, and reduce the chance of such atrocities happening.
However, the gun ownership lobby in the form of the NRA is extremely strong, contributes to and influences several members of the legislature, and gun-control is anathema to the current president, George Bush. It is difficult to visualise some sort of stricter gun control happening unless there is a major public push to bring in such controls.
