The news is numbing: one student, armed with pistols easily purchased anywhere in gun-happy Virginia, killed and injured more people, mostly young, on the Virginia Tech campus than a typical car-bomber in Iraq.
Our hearts go out to the victims' families and friends in this awful tragedy. We hope for comfort and healing to the injured who managed to survive. We await with trepidation for the names of the dead from our region, wondering if anyone we know will be touched by the loss of a loved one.
We now know that the killer was a Virginia Tech student, a senior in the English department. What motivated him to go on such a rampage? Why is it in our violent culture that people who are affronted--perhaps by a lover's jilt, or a worker's snub--feel compelled to take their revenge on randomly selected innocent victims?
Imagine if this happened every day. What a horror--and yet that is precisely the case in Iraq, a country with one-twelfth the population of the U.S.
What of the enablers--the gun fanatics who insist that there should be no regulation of firearms. The VPI killer was armed with a 9 mm pistol. At one time, federal law limited the size of the ammunition clip one could use with a 9 mm, but that law expired with the Bush/Cheney regime. Yet, the Enabler in Chief plans to attend the memorial service today at VPI. Will he evince a change of heart? Will he say this incident has forced him to look into his soul, to summon the willpower to stand up to the heartless lobbyists of the NRA, who insist that hunters need the leeway to shoot prairie dogs with automatic weapons?
There is no use for a 9 mm pistol other than to kill people. This is a large caliber weapon, and it shows in the Tech tragedy, where doctors have described as "horrific" the wounds they treated on those fortunate enough to survive the shootings.
It wasn't that long ago that Virginia was in the national eye for another shooting tragedy, when a mentally unstable young man in Fairfax County used semi-automatic weapons to outgun police officers, killing two.
Will this latest incident prompt any reconsideration in the Virginia legislature, any thought that maybe Virginia shouldn't be one of the easiest places in the U.S. to purchase just about any kind of firearm one pleases? Firearms that have nothing to do with legitimate hunting and everything to do with murder?
The tragedies pile up; the politicians mouth their hollow condolences. But nothing changes.
For the grieving families, their is no comfort. The lost children could've been ours. We shed our tears with you.
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