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I’ve waited as long as I can, not wanting to leap into discussion of the Littleton horror until I knew enough to make some definitive statement. I still don’t know enough and probably never will. Neither does anyone else, although that hasn’t stopped many people from trumpeting their versions of what caused the massacre and what we could have done to prevent it. The gun control cult piled into pulpits before the sun had set on that tragic scene to preach for more laws and more control, as if existing thousands of such laws had done any good, as if thousands more would make a difference. Others were quick to blame video games and the Internet. There may be something to the idea that violent video games desensitize players and blur the line between play killing and real killing, but that may be reflection of my bias against TV and other imitation realities. The problem may lie partly in our present day lack of community. In our rootless comings and goings from one place to another, we seem to have lost the connections with our neighbors that permanent residents of small towns and big-city neighborhoods traditionally enjoy. When every adult knows everyone’s children, it’s difficult for those children to get away with preparations for murder. We have become individuals, doing our own things. If we know of something bad going on, we tend to turn away. Live and let live has become live and let die. A quick-lipped governor regretted aloud that no one but the killers was armed, but there was an armed guard in the school, a sheriff’s deputy and not a civilian security guard. The fact that there was a man with a gun who “exchanged fire,” as the saying goes, with the killers intrigues me. I want to know more about what he saw, what he did, and why what he did was not effective. (I also want to know why the only armed defender responsible for protecting hundreds of young people did not either kill the killers or die trying. I don’t know enough about his circumstances to ask that question aloud.) The killers slipped through cracks——cracks in their families, cracks in their neighborhoods, cracks in youthful society, and cracks in the justice system. Killers succeed because they are not detected before they kill. What amazes me about such bizarre behavior is that there is not more of it. We take for granted that each human being born will be, with minor variations, identical to the rest of us. When we consider how many variables there are from conception to birth that must all go right for one human being to come into the world, its brain wired much like all the other billions of human brains, it boggles the mind. Sometimes variations, whether from genetic aberration or environmental distortion, create monsters. There are things we can do to reduce the number of these monsters——to the extent that we create them after they are born——and to detect their insanity before they turn on us and kill. But no amount of love, no amount of care, no amount of supervision, and no amount of gun control can prevent all such things from happening. I’ve have an e-mail dialog on Littleton with an acquaintance who tends to favor gun control. She wrote that she thought of Israel where, she says, every schoolteacher is required by law to carry a gun and know how to use it. That was in response to the danger of terrorist attacks on Israeli schools. What happened in Littleton was a terrorist attack. It matters not at all whether a terrorist sneaks over the border at night or walks in the front door when the bell rings. After all the analysis and introspection, after all the arguing about new laws, new procedures, and individual freedom versus social responsibility, what it ultimately comes down to is this: The best defense against a crazy person with a gun is a sane person with a gun. |