When Will the Classroom Killings Stop?

Today a crazy gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech
residence hall and a little later in a classroom across campus, killing
some 30 people in what is being labeled “the deadliest shooting rampage
in U.S. history.” The gunman subsequently was killed, bringing the
death toll to 31. As I wrote this column, no one knew the murder’s
motive.
Virginia Tech’s president was quoted by the Associated Press as
saying, “Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we
consider of monumental proportions. The university is shocked and
indeed horrified."
In 21st century America we have almost come to accept these
horrible mass murders as natural disasters. This community has been
hit by a hurricane. That one has been torn up by a tornado. Oh, and
that one over there has been blasted by a madman with a gun. The Tech
student body no doubt will be afforded free access to “grief
counselors.”
We used to say, "Everybody talks about the weather, but no one
does anything about it." Should we now say, "Everybody talks about gun
violence, but no one does anything about it?" Living here in suburban
Philadelphia, I watched as the City of Brotherly Love averaged one
homicide per day in 2006. Philly passed the 100-homicide mark during
the first quarter of ’07, suggesting it well may be on its way to
breaking last year’s record. Here, too, students are, often as not,
counted among the innocent victims of gun violence gone out of control.
Yeh, I know… guns don't kill people, people kill people. But these
killers are better armed than ever before. When I was a Franklin and
Marshall College student a lifetime ago, I witnessed plenty of fights,
often of the town v. gown variety. A group of fraternity punks, such as
myself, might get a bit rowdy in a local tavern. The blue-collar crowd
at the opposite end of the bar might take umbrage. The upshot might
then be a quick exchange of fisticuffs. On a rare occasion a knife or a
broken bottle could come into play.
My point is: almost nobody carried a gun.
By contrast today, if you are confronted by a belligerent bar
fly, run for your car.
Odds are better than even the guy is packing.
No need to look for trouble in a local bar, however. Virginia
Tech is not the only school where guns have gotten into classrooms.
Just last year a local high school student entered one of my home county’s
Catholic high schools, discharged his father’s AK-47, then shot
himself. We could only be grateful that the troubled youth didn’t
first kill his classmates, making Delaware County [PA] the scene of a new
Columbine massacre.
The Canadian college professor, Marshall McLuhan - best known
during my college days for saying "The medium is the message" -
asserted that Americans live in "Bonanzaland," i.e., the Wild West of
the 1880s. Well, folks, that time is long past. Our K-12 schools have
rightly adopted zero-tolerance policies toward weapons in their halls
and classrooms. Colleges, too, have clamped down on violence --- even
the fisticuffs of my era.
Obviously, this isn’t enough.
Neither are grief counselors enough.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may give us all the
right to bear arms… though some judges and scholars have questioned the
Supreme Court’s reading of that bit of the Bill of Rights. Regardless
of what rights we want to read into the Second Amendment, I say our
daughters and sons have a higher right: to enjoy and benefit from their
educations without looking over their shoulders and wondering whether
today is the day their classroom is riddled with bullets.
I don’t have the answer, folks. I just know in my guts that,
until we dispense with the grief counselors and the platitudes, and get
mad as hell about travesties like this latest massacre at Virginia
Tech, the killing is just going to continue.