Where's the Disconnect?
I lost a friend last year who was my age, highly intelligent, and one of the nicest people I knew. I had heard from his friends and family that he had rage issues and would occasionally go ballistic. A few years ago, he got into an altercation with a police officer after acting erratic and ultimately cutting himself with a knife.
During the course of the year last year, he told his dad that he felt like he was going to hurt someone. His dad, for the safety of the rest of the family, kicked him out of the house - undoubtedly the toughest thing he ever had to do. They found my friend hanging from a self-made noose on a bike trail a few miles from home.
Last Thursday, some guy bought guns, drove a long way, burst into a class and started shooting at anyone and everyone before killing himself. I don't know his friends or family, but I'll bet they have a fairly similar story as mine above (with the addition of five murder counts).
Suicide is not new and neither is mass murder. This new hybrid is new and prevalent and I'm struggling to understand where it comes from. Is it food additives? The information age and detailed news coverage? Is it a diminishing of the idea of community and therefore accountability? Is it the effects of war? Bad medicines?
Is mental illness evolving?
On a different note, I heard someone on the radio touting concealed carry laws for Illinois. I think I'm pretty agnostic on the issue of gun control. I don't see a need for anyone to own an AK-47, but I can see why a farmer would need a shotgun. Put that argument aside for a minute and think about this particular case.
1. The shooter burst in and started firing. If you had a concealed weapon in that scenario and your first instinct was to unholster and unlock it, you would have been dead. Even if you got your weapon free, would you instantaneously be poised to take deadly aim? (What if you hit the teacher by accident?)
2. If you saw the pictures of the victims, you'd agree that unless concealed carry was mandatory, none of these students would have been carrying a gun by choice. Especially not to Geography class.
I guess I don't have any interest in owning a gun so I'd be fine with a ban on handguns. I wonder how many people really, truly protected themselves with a gun in the past year. Then, I wonder how many crimes were committed with guns last year.
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I'm still kind of dumbfounded by the whole thing.
A) My theory is that before the rash of school shootings in the 1990s, ideas of shooting up a school were in the daydreams of troubled kids, but it never seemed like a viable option.
Once these occurrences began to happen, it immediately became a viable option in the social conciseness.
I blame the existential nature of social thought. The problem with this is that it's impossible to get the genie back into the bottle.
B) On January 16, 2002 there was a shooting at the Appalachian School of Law. Two students retrieved firearms from their vehicles and subdued the shooter.
Concealed carry would have made a difference in the Luby's massacre of 1991, for certain.
I'm not saying that concealed carry laws are the answer, but I feel that in a all-out assault like that, they certainly couldn't make the situation any worse.
I'm not the type that would carry a gun to class, but I'm not going to say that it's a bad idea.
C) Hey, I own an AK-47. Jerk.
I use it for recreational shooting. Hell, YOU'VE used it for recreational shooting. C'mon give the boom-stick some love.
I like recreational shooting, for sure. I'm also fine without it. That's all I'm saying. I'm also not naive enough to think that banning guns would have stopped an attack like the one last week. The guy was smart, resourceful, and hell bent. If not a handgun, he might have made an explosive device instead. Point is, no matter what the law on guns, this was, essentially, a deadly sucker punch. There was no time to subdue him.
Also, "like it" and "need it" are two different things. :)
http://www.alternet.org/story/77226 is kind of an interesting article, arguing that the existential horror of going to NIU and living in DeKalb and Elk Grove are at least partially responsible ("The physical ugliness and intellectual mediocrity are a recurring theme"). Yesterday before I'd seen this article I was on the phone with an old DeKalb friend, and we commented on how we were a little surprised at how ugly and bleak NIU looked on CNN.
While the characterizations of NIU and DeKalb as mediocre and bleak are partially accurate (but still pretty far from the whole story), I think the conclusions of the article are kind of dumb.
I have always thought that there's something mediocre or not challenging about Elk Grove. Might cause someone to underachieve if they need an excuse (classic underachievement!) but not kill people out of the blue.
So, it's really all dependent on your personal definition of "recreational shooting" then, isn't it? Just like recreational drinking or recreational smoking, we each have a different tolerance and a different notion of recreation.
Of course, you always want your recreational shooting to be preserved, because guns are so freaking cool. You might need them to feel like a big man. You may love them because they make loud noises and help you destroy inanimate objects - objects which no doubt had it coming. You may consider them an insurance policy, with which you can threaten and intimidate other people who don't appear to have guns.
No matter what crimes are perpetrated with the assistance of guns, you desperately reserve your right to shoot them recreationally. For what? Well, preventing a gun ban means that you effectively make it easier for anyone to get a gun. That means, with any luck, some gun-toting psycho will knock on your front door one day, just waiting for you to recreationally shoot him dead. For sport. Not because you need to, just because you like to.
Nothing bad ever happens when guns are involved. Certainly not that time a gun that was pushed into my ribs while I was mid-piss at a urinal in the Greyhound Bus Station bathroom. That guy just wanted to borrow my wallet, probably to fund some recreational drug use. Who am I to deny him his recreation? Not even accidents, like the one that killed a kid I went to high school with in Indiana. Let's refer to that as a "recreational casualty".
My intention was not to start a fight about the veracity of the constitution, rather to point out that the slaughter at NIU would not have been prevented by open carry laws, mandatory gun carry laws or if guns were totally banned from the US altogether. Guns happened to be the most convenient mode of destruction for a guy clearly bent on doing damage.
[Pylb - I never heard this story before. Was it recently? Fuck!]
For the record, I own a bb gun and I enjoy target shooting with it. I would never own anything more lethal than that myself.
My dad used to be a hobbyist gun builder/shooter until he had a well-locked case of guns stolen out of the trunk of his car. (.22 rifle, muzzle-loader he built, and a .45 pistol) He was mortified and fully expected to find out that his registered and legal guns were used in a crime somewhere. (Never did, for the record.)
I guess my stance is the same as my stance on automobiles (thousands of pounds of steel and inertia piloted by idiots) - it should be much harder than it is for people to get them. Perhaps there should be less of them overall.
The hold-up? That was my sophomore year at NIU, xmas break. I'd taken the bus back to the city, to reluctantly visit family in Berwyn. On my return trip, I was held up at the urinal in the men's room at the station. Dude got $20 from me, then he took off in a hurry. I didn't spill a drop. By the time I zipped up and exited the men's room, he was long gone. First and last time I ever go Greyhound. That station is like Mos Eisley. You'd be safer hitch-hiking than you would be just waiting for a bus at that wretched place.
I actually had a gun drawn on me IN DEKALB! Well, dude said he had a gun and started to procure it, so I beat feet. There was another time where whiskey and a "protection" gun could have ended badly in Wouldpkr's driveway. Many moons ago.
I had a bad bathroom experience at a Bears game once, too. It was packed and one dude was trying to start a fight (probably to clear out the hordes) just as I was approaching my turn. Ironically, my wife was in and out of the women's restroom pretty quickly and was being verbally accosted by some dude when I finally got out. I figure I know what prison is like now.
There's no way someone coulda pulled a gun on you in that Greyhound washroom. Handguns are totally illegal in Chicago - It would be impossible for someone to get one into the city due to the ban.
Well, either that or bans don't work.
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