I’m agnostic on gun control — I see the merits of both points of view. So, I don’t necessarily embrace the point of view of Pierre LeMieux with the Independent Institute, but I find it worthy of discussion. In an essay published yesterday, he argues:
Contrast the horrific Virginia Tech shootings with the January 2002 killings at Virginia’s Appalachian Law School. Within minutes of shooting three people in the dean’s office, disgruntled student Peter Odighizuwa was stopped by two students who had retrieved handguns from their cars. They disarmed the killer and turned him over to the police.
In other words, in society of armed citizens, a crazed killer might manage to kill two or three people, but somebody would take him out before the body count reached 32. I’m not sure if that scenario would have worked at Virginia Tech — Cho had shrewdly chained the doors to Norris Hall shut. Students would not have been able to run out to their cars. But Lemieux’s larger point is worth contemplating.
In a similar vein of the guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people argument, it has been noted that the male citizens of Switzerland are required to serve in the military and required to keep weapons stored in their houses, but the Swiss have a low homicide rate. Which leads me to ask, is the high homicide rate in the United States due to our easy access to guns, or is it due to something perverse about our culture — perhaps the increasingly pervasive attitude that everyone should display or vent their emotions rather than rein them in… or the cult of victimization that encourages people to lash out at others rather than look within… or, as noted by Norm Leahy yesterday (“Cockburn’s Chemicals“), the ubiquitious prescription of anti-depressant drugs?
Finally, I would ask, if misfits like Cho Seung-Hui had been cut off from access to guns, would that have stopped them from killing people? All we have to do is look to the Middle East to find an alternative model for committing mass murder: car bombs and suicide bombs. Bomb-making instructions can be found on the Internet. How long will it be before some whack job decides to exact his vengeance with a bomb? Timothy McVeigh pulled it off and the death toll was far higher than in Blacksburg.
Again, I’m not arguing a particular point of view here. I’m just asking questions. My suspicion is that there simply are no easy answers.