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April 27, 2007
Another
confrontation with ourselves
Virginia Tech.
A new name on the roster
of senseless slaughter. We have seen so much of this.
We are violent.
In the past half-century
we have witnessed the assassinations of a president, his presidential
candidate brother and a civil rights leader, and attempted
assassinations of other presidential candidates and presidents. We have
witnessed the murders of civil rights workers and antiwar protesters,
including the killing of four on the Kent State University campus.
There was Columbine,
where 13 students were gunned down in 1999 before the shooters killed
themselves. In 2006, in the quiet of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, 11
youngsters were shot and 5 killed, execution style, in an elementary
school.
Twelve years ago this
month, a truck bomb destroyed half a federal office building in Oklahoma
City, killing 168 and injuring more than 800.
We’ve puzzled over
snipers from university towers and killers who haunted Maryland and
Virginia, and a highway sniper in the upper Midwest, picking off the
unsuspecting, one at a time, from a distance.
The concession one makes
in these moments is that so much is beyond our control. We cannot, as
Jesuit Fr. William Byron said, inure ourselves against or forever avoid
malice, but we can rely on “faith and religion to ready the human spirit
to withstand any assault.”
Relying on faith as the
ultimate protection against life’s disruptions, however, should not
leave us helpless. There are things we can do.
Two days after the
massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, President Clinton
declared: “We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them
to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not
weapons.”
That same day he ordered
intense bombing of Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.
Anyone who’s raised a
child knows that they don’t learn well when behavior contradicts
teaching. One thing we can do is more deeply examine who we are and how
accepting we are of state-sponsored violence. Does it square with who
and what we say we are?
The day of the shooting
massacre on the Virginia Tech campus, President Bush said in a TV
interview that he expected a debate on gun control policy, but argued
that now is not the time.
We can’t think of a
better time.
According to a 2007
Small Arms Survey, the United States ranks first in the world in gun
ownership with 90 weapons per 100 people. By contrast, the rate in
France, for instance is 32 per 100 people, and 31 per 100 in Canada,
Sweden and Austria.
The numbers themselves
would be insignificant, save for the fact that guns account for so much
carnage among our children.
These statistics from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are posted on the Web
site of the National Education Association:
The rate of firearm
deaths among kids under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United
States than in 25 other industrialized countries combined. The number of
U.S. kids killed by gunfire in 2002 was 3,012.
American children are
16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to
commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a
firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries
combined.
Lax enforcement of
existing gun control laws and consistent erosion of those laws have
allowed the deadly gun culture to flourish. Even the 1994 ban on assault
weapons, essentially battlefield grade weapons that have no use other
than killing humans quickly, efficiently and in great numbers, was
allowed to expire three years ago.
The gun lobby -- rich,
unconscionable and unscrupulous in manipulating public fear -- has most
politicians in a stranglehold. The stranglehold is maintained even as
survey after survey, including gun owners and members of households
where guns are available, show that a majority of Americans approve of
reasonable controls.
We may not be able to
hold off malice in the world, or predict the actions of the deranged
among us. But we all can do something to foster a culture less
accommodating of violence and less friendly toward those who make the
violence possible.
Who are we, really, and
what kind of culture do we want? How much state-sponsored violence are
we willing to tolerate and pay for? How much will we allow the purveyors
of arms to dictate our politics? What actions are we willing to place
behind the instructions on nonviolence that we attempt to pass on to our
children?
National
Catholic Reporter, April 27, 2007
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