The shooter has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui — a senior English student and permanent resident alien — read he’d lived most of his life in America — originally from Korea. I wonder where the Sun Times got their Chinese suspect. Damn, China has been given none of the kudos it deserves and many of the allegations it doesn’t. It was robbed of the Infernal Affairs credit (Japanese), and accused of needlessly beefing up its defense budget (still not even slightly equivocal to that of the US) and producing this maniacal killer.
Now, let’s suppose, and there’s a very good chance, that if handguns were made illegal there were a black market where people, if they wanted them badly enough, could buy them. Would this student have gone into the American underbelly to find his gun? Or was there merely a pop-up in his e-mail one day about how guns were on sale at Wal-Mart or did he see on a billboard notice about a gun show passing through?
In college, my friend Matt was admitted to a mental hospital after he tried to kill himself. Two weeks after his release, he was free to pick up all his guns again. He shot himself the next day. I showed up to his house at the wrong time. In my distress, I picked his skull off the wall of his bathroom. I was 22 years old. Matt wasn’t violent towards others, but he had clearly proved himself mentally instable. Yet, in the state of Missouri, it was his god given right to get those guns back. What if he had intended harm against others, not just himself?
Conservatives will argue, for example, that drugs need to remain illegal so as to prevent people from doing them. Drugs make people do depraved things, they say. Well, I think putting a gun in an angry young man’s hands instigates a greater, more dangerous depravity. It gets them high on the power they can wield through fear. So what’s the difference between drugs and guns? An archaic constitutional amendment? As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Well how long are we going to turn the other cheek and let our noses get bashed bloody in the name of a few hobbyists?
I come from Nebraska — a gun-happy state if there ever was one. My father owns guns, my brothers own guns. My uncles (and aunts!) on both sides of my family own guns. They hunt deer and fowl and they eat everything they kill. I have less of a problem with what they do because I know no matter how conservative they are about their rights to keep their guns, their hearts believe they’re acting as natural predators and helping the ecosystem. And without them, it’s true that many deer would starve to death and what not, but they do this with rifles. Let’s start gun control with the handguns. Then let’s evaluate how it’s gone.
Some might argue that if you start to chisel away at the second amendment, you might as well just throw out the first and all the rest. But freedom of speech allows people to live full and expressive lives and allows the truth to find its path. Tell me, what good comes out of this freedom to bear arms? Are we so blindly bound by our principles?
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