One day I was standing in line at the local post office, behind a guy whom I did not know but had seen around town. He wore a heavy belt that held a couple of knives, a big wallet on a chain, another chain to a bundle of keys and, as I noticed with this proximity, a small pistol.
Should I have been worried because he might pull the gun and start shooting? Or relieved because if someone else “went postal” that morning, he was ready to defend us by shooting back?
As our simmering handgun debate intensifies after the Virginia Tech rampage last week, that’s a question with no good answer. (As for the armed fellow at our post office, he got to the counter, picked up a package, and went about his business.)
Sure, it is possible to construct a plausible scenario wherein an armed student or teacher brought Seung-Hui Cho down early and saved a couple of dozen lives – although in that case, of course, we would not know how many lives were saved.
It is also easy to construct another plausible scenario: Half a dozen armed students and faculty, all shooting back at Cho, with lead flying every which way, causing plenty of “collateral damage” before the police show up and start shooting, too. The casualties number in the dozens.
So who can say which is the more likely scenario? I cannot. From the pro-gun side, I read that the shooter knew that Virginia Tech was a “gun-free zone,” so he could plan his rampage with the serene confidence that no one would be able to shoot back. But he could not have been sure that he would not encounter a campus cop somewhere along the way, or another student who figured rules were for other people.
The anti-gun side argues that it’s just too easy to buy handguns in America, and Cho’s mental-health problems should have been flagged to prevent his gun purchases. And the truth is, no matter what was on his record, he would have been able to procure weapons if he wanted them . After all, America has been conducting a “war on drugs” since about 1970, and just about any substance you can imagine is still being sold and consumed.
And if buying pistols had been too difficult, he could have rigged propane bombs, or gone after some nitrogen fertilizer and diesel fuel, and killed even more people.
The most intelligent response a public official ever made to these horrors came from Rep. Tom Tancredo after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, which occurred in his congressional district. Initially, he did not say that school prayer, or posting the Ten Commandments on classroom walls, or putting all illegal immigrants in concentration camps would prevent future mass murders at schools. He just said he had no idea what society could do to keep this from happening again.
One notion in circulation today is “blame the media.” It’s appealing. Often I’m embarrassed by my line of work when I see herds of journalists amid a forest of boom mikes with the satellite trucks in the background.
This time, the argument goes to NBC, which received a packet of material from the shooter and aired some of it. That’s just giving the shooter the notoriety and the platform that he wanted, isn’t it? So why accommodate the desires of evil people?
But our inner sense of narrative works something like this: There’s a serene place, and then the bad guy enters and the action starts. In other words, there wouldn’t be a story without the bad guy. The Bible would be only one chapter without the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Greek mythology would be much simpler if Pandora had not opened that box back in the Golden Age. Knights would have been superfluous without dragons and ogres to put damsels in distress.
I suspect that has something to do with how our minds are wired. If NBC had not aired the material, we would be speculating about motives and background and all the rest.
We’re fascinated by villains – but when we have a real one, why do people insist on looking for others, be they gunshop owners or television networks?
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
