I don't know what it was like in those classrooms at Virginia Tech. Perhaps there was no opportunity to jump the shooter and put a stop to the slaughter. Perhaps the victims were frozen in shock, unable to act (I suspect that might have been my reaction.) But our society is getting meaner. Yes, mass killings are rare, but they are always a possibility (especially when our media gives so much coverage to a killer like the one at VT - copycats see their opportunity for immortality.) More common are average assaults, where more often than it used to be, the assailant just kills the victim, even if he or she cooperates. Our children need to know it is ok to fight back.
This is a hard read in light of what has happened this week, but we parents need to hear it:
A Culture of Passivity
"Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.
By Mark Steyn
I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”
Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.
Click on the title to read the rest...if you can.
---Katie
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Tennessee gets it.
TN moves to allow guns in public buildings
By News Sentinel staff April 18, 2007
NASHVILLE — In a surprise move, a House panel voted today to repeal a state law that forbids the carrying of handguns on property and buildings owned by state, county and city governments — including parks and playgrounds.
"I think the recent Virginia disaster — or catastrophe or nightmare or whatever you want to call it — has woken up a lot of people to the need for having guns available to law-abiding citizens," said Rep. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains. "I hope that is what this vote reflects."
---Katie
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Gun control is not the answer.
We already have gun control. Guns were banned on the Virginia Tech campus. That guaranteed that the good guys were unarmed and that the bad guy could kill people. Lots of people. Here is an excellent article - from a Canadian, no less!
What is obvious, though, is at least one factor they don’t have in common: the liberty to keep and bear arms. We have to look at the phenomenon with some time perspective. Mass killings were rare when guns were easily available, while they have been increasing as guns have become more controlled. In the early 20th century, guns were easily available to common people in all civilized countries; in many cases, individuals could freely carry them concealed. These countries included England, Canada, many parts of the U.S., and France. In fact, before the 60s, mass killings were rare.
Dunblane occurred in a society where, after seven decades on increasing gun controls, it was very difficult for a simple citizen to own guns, especially handguns, and illegal to carry them virtually anywhere. Similarly, Dawson occurred after 15 years of galloping gun control, to the point where, in Canada, it is even illegal to bear arms on your own property. Even in the U.S., which has been leading the way in the horror stories, federal gun controls have increased nearly continuously since the 1960s, and none of the massacres was committed by people who were legally allowed to have guns where there. In fact, these killings typically occur in gun-free zones.
In Blacksburg today, the tragic spectacle of tens, if not hundreds, of heavily armed policemen, with at least one armoured vehicle, all powerless to prevent a single gunman from killing and maiming more than 30 people reminds us of a dire fact: it is impossible to be totally protected against madmen, except by turning society into a convent or a jail.
One question needs to be asked, though. What if a student or a professor had been armed today at Virginia Tech? This possibility was very remote since guns are illegal on the Virginia Tech campus, and non-criminals usually try not to become criminals. At Dawson, what if the security guard who, we are told, helped some students flee and was not far from the killer had been armed? In all these tragic events, how many students wished, before dying, that they had a gun?
I am not claiming that the freedom of non-criminals to carry guns would be a panacea. Obviously, when you live in a society where madmen are intent on massacring defenceless students, including young women, there is no panacea. Yet, there must a reason why these madmen don’t go to, say, the University of Utah, where people licensed to carry guns can freely bring them on campus and in university buildings. There might be a reason why the Dawson killer, who had a car and apparently no special reason to target that specific college, did not go instead to the National Police School, about 150 kilometres from Montreal. I was there once: all students are armed.
Given this momentous phenomenon of senseless mass killings of young people, something other than the low probability of being stopped before doing much damage must be at play.
Economists don’t like to think in terms of changes in preferences: after all, there is no reason to believe that mankind is intrinsically different today than it was fifty years ago. However, economists know that choices, for good or evil, are made not only on the basis of individual preferences, but also given the constraints imposed on these preferences by the social environment.
Some decades ago, most people, including unruly youths and, I would guess, even some criminals, were under certain moral constraints that they were ashamed to break. Although this is banal to say, it remains true that these moral constraints have crumbled, to be replaced by the naked force of the state. Individuals have become entitled dependents of a state that defines morality for them, besides providing for their happiness.
Another, perhaps related, hypothesis is the demise of culture. By culture, I simply mean what Marc Fumaroli (in L’État culturel, Paris, 1991) called “la culture cultivée” (learned culture): the knowledge of, and the joy of learning through, the intellectual and artistic adventure of mankind. With culture generally comes the love of life and the good things in life: wine, fine food, sex, smoking... The young illiterates who now come out of public schools seem just ripe for a nasty, brutish, and short life.
There have always been madmen who, in order to leave the only mark they could leave on history, waged destruction. Erostrates, who, in the 6th century B.C., and precisely for this reason, burned the temple of Artemis in Grece comes to mind. I wonder, though, if he would have killed schoolchildren or young women even if he had had the power to.
If I try to avoid wishful thinking and ignore what I have been fighting against for decades (and still am), my prediction is not very optimistic. Gun control and people control will grow. Individuals will become more and more infantilized. But except if the state grows from soft to hard totalitarianism, uncultured madmen will proliferate. (If hard totalitarianism comes, these uncultured madmen will man the state.) Senseless mass killings will become a permanent fixture and, after guns are outlawed, they will be committed with cars, light planes, bombs, fire, etc. And each time, the clamour will mount for more control, perhaps focused on scapegoat minorities.
-------
Click on the title!
----Katie
Virginia Tech by Pierre Lemieux
Polytechnique (Québec), Dunblane (United Kingdom), Jonesboro (Arkansas), Columbine (Colorado), Nickel Mines (Pennsylvania), Dawson College (Québec), Virginia Tech (Blacksburg) today – what do these and several other mass killings of students and children have in common? The answer is not obvious.What is obvious, though, is at least one factor they don’t have in common: the liberty to keep and bear arms. We have to look at the phenomenon with some time perspective. Mass killings were rare when guns were easily available, while they have been increasing as guns have become more controlled. In the early 20th century, guns were easily available to common people in all civilized countries; in many cases, individuals could freely carry them concealed. These countries included England, Canada, many parts of the U.S., and France. In fact, before the 60s, mass killings were rare.
Dunblane occurred in a society where, after seven decades on increasing gun controls, it was very difficult for a simple citizen to own guns, especially handguns, and illegal to carry them virtually anywhere. Similarly, Dawson occurred after 15 years of galloping gun control, to the point where, in Canada, it is even illegal to bear arms on your own property. Even in the U.S., which has been leading the way in the horror stories, federal gun controls have increased nearly continuously since the 1960s, and none of the massacres was committed by people who were legally allowed to have guns where there. In fact, these killings typically occur in gun-free zones.
In Blacksburg today, the tragic spectacle of tens, if not hundreds, of heavily armed policemen, with at least one armoured vehicle, all powerless to prevent a single gunman from killing and maiming more than 30 people reminds us of a dire fact: it is impossible to be totally protected against madmen, except by turning society into a convent or a jail.
One question needs to be asked, though. What if a student or a professor had been armed today at Virginia Tech? This possibility was very remote since guns are illegal on the Virginia Tech campus, and non-criminals usually try not to become criminals. At Dawson, what if the security guard who, we are told, helped some students flee and was not far from the killer had been armed? In all these tragic events, how many students wished, before dying, that they had a gun?
I am not claiming that the freedom of non-criminals to carry guns would be a panacea. Obviously, when you live in a society where madmen are intent on massacring defenceless students, including young women, there is no panacea. Yet, there must a reason why these madmen don’t go to, say, the University of Utah, where people licensed to carry guns can freely bring them on campus and in university buildings. There might be a reason why the Dawson killer, who had a car and apparently no special reason to target that specific college, did not go instead to the National Police School, about 150 kilometres from Montreal. I was there once: all students are armed.
Given this momentous phenomenon of senseless mass killings of young people, something other than the low probability of being stopped before doing much damage must be at play.
Economists don’t like to think in terms of changes in preferences: after all, there is no reason to believe that mankind is intrinsically different today than it was fifty years ago. However, economists know that choices, for good or evil, are made not only on the basis of individual preferences, but also given the constraints imposed on these preferences by the social environment.
Some decades ago, most people, including unruly youths and, I would guess, even some criminals, were under certain moral constraints that they were ashamed to break. Although this is banal to say, it remains true that these moral constraints have crumbled, to be replaced by the naked force of the state. Individuals have become entitled dependents of a state that defines morality for them, besides providing for their happiness.
Another, perhaps related, hypothesis is the demise of culture. By culture, I simply mean what Marc Fumaroli (in L’État culturel, Paris, 1991) called “la culture cultivée” (learned culture): the knowledge of, and the joy of learning through, the intellectual and artistic adventure of mankind. With culture generally comes the love of life and the good things in life: wine, fine food, sex, smoking... The young illiterates who now come out of public schools seem just ripe for a nasty, brutish, and short life.
There have always been madmen who, in order to leave the only mark they could leave on history, waged destruction. Erostrates, who, in the 6th century B.C., and precisely for this reason, burned the temple of Artemis in Grece comes to mind. I wonder, though, if he would have killed schoolchildren or young women even if he had had the power to.
If I try to avoid wishful thinking and ignore what I have been fighting against for decades (and still am), my prediction is not very optimistic. Gun control and people control will grow. Individuals will become more and more infantilized. But except if the state grows from soft to hard totalitarianism, uncultured madmen will proliferate. (If hard totalitarianism comes, these uncultured madmen will man the state.) Senseless mass killings will become a permanent fixture and, after guns are outlawed, they will be committed with cars, light planes, bombs, fire, etc. And each time, the clamour will mount for more control, perhaps focused on scapegoat minorities.
-------
Click on the title!
----Katie
Monday, April 16, 2007
I can't talk about this yet.
A prayer for those affected by the school massacre today. (Thanks, lightman. It really spoke to my heart.)
“Watch, dear Lord,
with those who wake, or watch, or weep,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Keep the sick,
rest the weary,bless the dying,
soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted,
shield the joyous,
and all for your love’s sake.”
I'll complain tomorrow about making schools, particularly those attended by responsible adults, victim disarmament zones.
---Katie
“Watch, dear Lord,
with those who wake, or watch, or weep,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Keep the sick,
rest the weary,bless the dying,
soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted,
shield the joyous,
and all for your love’s sake.”
I'll complain tomorrow about making schools, particularly those attended by responsible adults, victim disarmament zones.
---Katie
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)