A few miles away from my place is a shooting range where hobbyists can go and practice their shooting skills. All you have to do to be enable to shoot is to have a valid license, go through a training video on gun safety, answer a ridiculously simple multiple choice exam, and you are set to go. The first time I went with a friend of mine, I went through the whole exercise and even cleared the exam, but when the moment arrived, I decided, I couldn’t pick up the gun. Something was just not right about the scenario, something about how easy it ultimately became to handle a gun made me feel anxious and depressed. Sure, the idea of handling a real gun and shooting in a range sounded like an adrenaline rushing fun, but was such a hobby worth it? I decided at that point, it was not. I never picked up the gun and lost any desire to visit the place again. We did go there once again with other friends, but this time I chose to be a spectator. And my feeling the second time didn’t change either.
I just did not want to touch a gun. And there is probably no way I am ever going to touch a gun in my life.
As you might have read it about by now, thirty three people were killed in a shooting incident at Virginia Tech campus. How? An Asian with 2 semi-automatic in his hand entered the engineering building, entered a classroom and started shooting to shocked students. More were injured in the ensuing carnage. A university where students study now reduced to a battleground.
What was the weapon used? A gun.
Something is seriously wrong with this country and its gun laws. Something about how easy it is to be armed in this country is wrong. I lived in a country for a good 23 years of my life, with four times more population, and yet not once, not once I have heard of something like this. In the last 6 years I have lived here, hearing a news about school shooting has become a normal routine. A moment of shock, despair and anger ensues, and then within a few days of the news, life returned to normalcy.
Just in the last few years: Red Lake School Massacre (2005), Dawson College Shooting (2006), Amish School Shooting (2006), Platte Canyon High School Shootings (2006) and now Virginia Tech.
In all these cases, one thing remains common. The shootings were not by mature old men who had lost their minds. They were all by young under age people who had lost their mind, and had a gun in their hand. Exactly how do such underage people get those guns? How do these underage people get their hands on a gun and are able to come to a school to shoot their schoolmates. How in the world do they get access to such dangerous weapons?
Sadly, instead of asking such questions, the news channels have relegated this piece of news to history and sensationalized it as “The worst shootings in US History”. The line “The worst shootings in US history” is repeated again and again, and again, as if to remind everyone seeing the news that something important and historical has happened, and we are to be a part of it. Something momentous has happened, something that has challenged the history, and the newsmakers must stress that fact upon us. The News media reports on and on how this was a time of “healing to begin”, “making sense of madness”, and a “time for introspection”, while Bush claims the “peace of a sanctuary is lost”.
Debates will follow this incident, for guns, against guns, and NRA will do its best that such debates keep out of reach of common public. Heck some morons will even pursue the idea that because others students were not armed, and this gunmen was, the shooter was able to do such a carnage. Examples will be given how crime rate in Australia went up by 300% once the government withdrew guns from the public, and remind people that though Sweden has higher per capita number of guns per person , one almost never hears of any such sort from the country [Source: Freakonomics]. (Thereby implying, its not guns that are the problem, its the people. And guns only increase safety not decrease it).
How foolish and stupid can it get? There is no freaking reason anybody should have any access to any sort of weapon at all. Not adults. Not in the least, underage kids. Nobody in a normal society should have anything to do with a gun. A normal society is built on foundation of trust and mutual respect, not on the basis of fear that someone is out to get them, hence they need to protect themselves at all costs.
I wish I could express myself more clearly, but I won’t. There is no freaking point.
But I can point you to Bowling for Columbine. If at the end of the documentary you do not ask yourself “Why haven’t we abolished guns in our society?“, then you probably don’t think of today’s shootings as a big deal either.
Sadly it is people like you who need to change first. Or we’ll keep hearing such news again, and again.