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KATE MILLERICK: Vigilance is needed to prevent future mass killings
by Kate Millerick
Columnists | 4/24/07
Posted online at 1:03 AM EST on 4/24/07
The tragedy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute has reawakened a fear in Americans that seemed to have dissipated in light of years of terrorist threats and the focus on international danger. While the horrors of the victims of the Columbine shooting will never be forgotten, the constant lurking fear of "weird" and "unpopular" kids carrying guns to school had ceased as the months and then years went by. Additionally, the high-school shootings failed to seem relevant to college life.
That is where we made our mistake. We stopped being vigilant as more and more kids who needed serious help slipped through the cracks. This tragedy should not have happened, period. But to blame the entire situation on the university or on Virginia's gun-control laws is too simple. A two-pronged solution involving both factors is the only way to reduce the very real risk of future mass killing sprees in our nation's universities.
The old National Rifle Association mantra "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is outdated and overused. Clearly, without guns, angry and disturbed people would still find ways to kill but they would do so far less effectively. While homemade bombs are quite successful, it isn't exactly easy for a 10-year-old to bring one to school-and yes this has actually happened. Gun-control laws are too lax as they stand and must be made more stringent if we are to get any grasp on this terrible trend.
Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer of 32 people, walked into a Virginia gun shop and bought one of the two weapons used in the attacks without any issues. While the owner did run a mandatory background check with the state police on Cho, it was not enough to prevent what has now become the largest massacre by a single gunman in United States history.
If Cho was such a seriously disturbed man with well-known behavioral oddities, why didn't something show up on the background check? If someone who stalked girls and wrote grotesquely violent plays and poetry can own a gun, then that should indicate that something is severely wrong with the system.
That is where we made our mistake. We stopped being vigilant as more and more kids who needed serious help slipped through the cracks. This tragedy should not have happened, period. But to blame the entire situation on the university or on Virginia's gun-control laws is too simple. A two-pronged solution involving both factors is the only way to reduce the very real risk of future mass killing sprees in our nation's universities.
The old National Rifle Association mantra "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is outdated and overused. Clearly, without guns, angry and disturbed people would still find ways to kill but they would do so far less effectively. While homemade bombs are quite successful, it isn't exactly easy for a 10-year-old to bring one to school-and yes this has actually happened. Gun-control laws are too lax as they stand and must be made more stringent if we are to get any grasp on this terrible trend.
Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer of 32 people, walked into a Virginia gun shop and bought one of the two weapons used in the attacks without any issues. While the owner did run a mandatory background check with the state police on Cho, it was not enough to prevent what has now become the largest massacre by a single gunman in United States history.
If Cho was such a seriously disturbed man with well-known behavioral oddities, why didn't something show up on the background check? If someone who stalked girls and wrote grotesquely violent plays and poetry can own a gun, then that should indicate that something is severely wrong with the system.
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