ez_mo

I remember Blacksburg as being a sleepy little one-stoplight burg nestled in the foothills of southwestern Virginia. Traffic at 3am on a back road of my current hill-town was considered congestion in Blacksburg. It's nearly beyond comprehension how this happened in such a small, quiet village.

I am reminded at this time of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA several years ago. Three people, if I recall correctly, were killed. The madman was stopped from completing his spree by several students who had guns and were thus, able to subdue the guy. One of those rare occurances where armed citizens were in a position to save lives. (Which also reminds me of the Texas bell-tower sniper in the '60s: you can still see the pockmarks of returning fire from citizens who were sniping the sniper!)

With this shooting, the whole gun-control argument has flared up again. In my youth, I was very much in favor of gun control. As I get older -- and watch the disinegration of our Bill of Rights -- I am increasingly inclined towards favoring gun ownership. The key, however, is to ensure that gun owners are properly trained in gun safety and operation.
My 5-year old has a BB gun that is treated with the same care as if it were a "real" handgun. Ammo (plastic pellets) is stored in one place, the clip in another, and the gun in yet another inaccessale place. (Were it a real gun for home protection, we'd be long dead before we rounded up all the components for actual use.) We are training him in proper safety techniques so that one day, if we ever have a gun, he'll already know how to use it, or rather, NOT use it. (#1 rule: you're not allowed to handle a gun unless you are with a smart adult who knows proper gun safety. Rule #2: if there is not a responsible adult with you, then do not touch the gun; leave it alone and get away from the gun as fast as possible.) When daddy takes boy out for target practice, boy had better stick to the rules or gun gets taken away ASAP and no target practice for a long time. Boy learnt quickly that one never points the gun at people or animals. Now will I give my kid a gun for his 7th birthday? Hell, no! Will I buy a gun next year? Probably not. The point is that one should know gun safety if one lives in a world the co-exists with guns. It prevents us from doing stupid shit and it prevents us from being overly afraid of a tool.

"But a gun isn't a tool...it's a weapon," you might argue. One could say the same of a car. Let John Gatto ("The Underground history of American Education") explain:

What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You’d have to be an idiot to agree with my plan—at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.

And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.

The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven’t even considered the battering ram aspect of cars—why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?

Hmmm. I think -- as a society -- we're afraid of guns because we don't have familiarity with them as we do with say...cars. The more familiar we are with the item in question - be it vehicles, software, or circular saws - the less we fear it because we know what it can and what it cannot do. We know the strengths as well as the dangers of  the item and can, therefore, make better decisions when confronted with that item in a frightening context.

I won't go so far as to insist that everyone should be made to learn how to use a gun, but as individuals it behooves us to know gun safety and famialiarize ourselves with such tools for just-in-case.

I pray that were I in such a situation as that at VA Tech, I would have had  the balls to attack the gunman. If the guy was intent on killing me anyway, then I'd have nothing to lose in attacking him. I'd probably lose my life one way or the other, but maybe someone else would have a chance to live.

More than that, I pray that we don't see such evil again.

My heart goes out to the families of those slain, to the survivors, and to the parents of the gunman. Our mountain towns will not  be the same. Our peace shattered. Our lives forever changed. Lord, help us.