Explanations perished with the shooter
We all know what will happen next. There will be a huge public outcry from parents and politicians alike. High emotions will rule the day as everyone pushes for answers in hopes of preventing a tragedy like this from happening again. But sadly, no recourse from the school or the state can ever bring back the 33 lives that were lost. No gun law or security measure can stop a determined shooter from doing such heinous acts. There will be a lot of finger pointing. Everything from Satan to rap music will be blamed for this tragedy and nothing will come of it. No one will ever know why the shooter did what he did. There are just some things we can’t predict. We are powerless. We can only know what happened. The bigger questions like why and what if are forever lost to us. Nothing made the shooter commit these acts. He made a choice and we all have to live with it. It’s only natural we would seek a fitting explanation.
Unfortunately, no major tragedy is that simple.
– Jacob Caporaletti in Virginia Tech’s Collegiate Times
A call to ban arms
The ready availability of handguns in America in general, and in Virginia in particular, is one obvious likely factor in the calamity at Virginia Tech on Monday. As a condition of owning and carrying a gun in Virginia, state law requires practically nothing but a relatively cursory background check – one that often takes just minutes – to ensure that a purchaser has no criminal record. The fact that Cho Seung-Hui, the killer at Virginia Tech, was able to walk into a Roanoke gun store and buy a 9mm Glock last month – despite reported concerns by some of his professors about his mental and emotional health – testifies both to the inadequacy of background checks and to the lunacy of this country’s romance with firearms.
– The Washington Post
Strengthen cultural taboos, not gun laws
The mass murder at Virginia Tech is the kind of traumatic event that unleashes a torrent of pop sociology and national psychoanalysis, so allow us to weigh in with a more fundamental explanation: There are evil and psychotic people in this world willing to do great harm to others if they aren’t stopped. The dilemma in a free society is how to stop them. How can a society that wants to maintain its own individual freedoms stop such a man? The reflexive answer in some quarters, especially overseas, is to blame any killing on America’s “”lax”” guns laws. Reading a summary of European editorials yesterday, we couldn’t help but wonder if they all got the same New York Times memo, so uniform was their cultural disdain and their demand for new gun restrictions. A better response than gun control would be to restore some of the cultural taboos that once served as restraints on antisocial behavior. Video games or other larger media influences don’t inspire mass murder when there are countervailing restraints and values instilled by families, teachers, coaches and pastors. However, even those benevolent influences – were it possible to restore them – might not have made a difference in the case of Cho Seung-Hui, whose madness can’t be explained by reason.
– The Wall Street Journal
