“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
– Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The campus massacre at Virginia Tech catapulted me directly back to Columbine, 1999, when I was pregnant with my first and only child. Although I had prayed for pregnancy, the news from Littleton, reaching me over the radio in Portland, Ore., sent me spiraling down deep into depression – a certainty that the world was too horrible a place in which new life could thrive. A close friend lived down the street from the school, a campus her children would eventually attend.
Eight years later, I revisit that horror and wonder – repetitively and boringly – why we allow access to multiple-magazine handguns and semi-automatic machine guns. The fusillade from such guns mandates mass death. The death toll from a magazine-less handgun or a knife will by necessity be lower because time intervenes to allow resistance.
With automatic gunfire, no such intervention is possible.
Back in 1991, in Killeen, Texas – ironically or correctly named – a gunman in Luby’s Cafeteria started firing. Twenty-four people died. Today’s updated website on American mass killing will inform the reader that Virginia Tech’s carnage surpasses Killeen’s.
Just after the cafeteria massacre, Killeen’s congressional representative planned to vote “no” on a time-limited ban on semi-automatic weapons. Then, the killing happened in his backyard, so he voted for the ban. The ban failed.
At that time, before I was thinking about the future of my and everyone else’s children, I recognized the exasperating futility of relying on one’s personal experience to make law or meaning. Does every congressperson need a mass murder in his or her district to vote to stop the carnage?
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush, in an executive order, introduced a temporary ban on the import of five types of assault weapons. Domestic demand and manufacture then increased dramatically.
Between 1989 and 1992, six attempts failed to pass an assault weapons ban. Finally, in 1994, it passed narrowly, 216-to-214, prohibiting for 10 years the sale, manufacture and possession of 19 types of semi-automatic weapons but specifically exempting 650 types of sporting rifles. Lobbying by the National Rifle Association led to concessions in the form of the removal of registration requirements and the inclusion of the provision that the ban automatically expire in 2004.
Sixteen years after Killeen, eight years post-Columbine, three years after the end of the ban, would a new ban be effective? (It didn’t prevent Columbine due to its multiple concessions to Second Amendment purists.)
People will always want to kill one another. I accept this truth as I near 50, so let’s examine how technology facilitates killing. We regulate the way we drive; we say who can and cannot drink alcohol, who can and cannot vote. We can’t legislate out of existence the desire to kill, but we can legislate, limit, ban and regulate the machinery of death by bullet.
The “slippery slope” argument affixes itself to any argument connecting the two following words: “gun” and “control.” A dear friend’s only child was murdered by a stranger with a handgun. She ended up working with James Brady, who had himself been shot at and disabled by a handgun. Even so, the gun lobbyists targeted her as they targeted – metaphor wholly intended – Brady, a Reagan appointee, as anti-American, unpatriotic, and various unprintable insults.
For 16 years, I taught at a college, and thus the scene of dormitories and classrooms punctuated by staccato gunfire is easily accessible to my imagination. Virginia Tech could have been my campus, my alma mater – the University of Denver – or anywhere in this country where it’s easier to buy a gun than it is to acquire health insurance, find affordable day care, or locate an adequately funded urban public school.
Does the Second Amendment entitle you or me to buy a weapon of mass destruction? How does such a weapon link any one citizen to a “well-regulated militia”? Ask the families of Columbine victims, or of our latest Columbine- and Killeen-style massacre, now available at your local higher ed campus.
Annie Dawid (annie@anniedawid.com), author of “Lily in the Desert: Stories,” will publish “Fathoming Jonestown” next year.
