Rights co-opted by tragedy

By Olivia Biagi
Collegian Editor
April 25, 2007

In light of the recent and horrifying events at Virginia Tech, society will do as it normally does in the face of tragedy: turn it into something political. What Americans will see for the next few months is an all-out war over the Second Amendment. Only 24 hours after the massacre, the media asked Congress what its plans were to pass new legislation regarding gun laws, according to an April 17 article on MSNBC.com. “The country and Congress will have additional discussions, as is always the case after an incident,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said. “I don’t want to get into a debate with reference to what we need to do.” It seems that soon America will be inundated with commentary on firearms and how they should be illegal in the United States as they are in England. But will banning guns entirely actually reduce crime?

What happened at Virginia Tech was terrible, and my intention is not to undermine that, or react insensitively. My intention is, however, to pose a rational commentary on the irrational reactions: you cannot blame guns and the gun industry alone for what happened. Seung-Hui Cho is responsible for his actions, and while I strongly believe that Virginia’s gun laws are too lax, the dealer also is not at fault. He performed the necessary federal background check before selling the pistol and because Cho had never committed a crime, he was cleared. Unfortunately, this background check only asked if he had been committed to a mental institution, excluding an evaluation detention, which Cho underwent in 2005.

While I do believe that gun laws need to be strengthened, and the background check should be more in-depth and a waiting period endured before purchasing firearms, I also think that the real problem we need to address at this time is how unaware Americans are of mental health issues. Plenty of normal people own guns for normal reasons—hunting, or home protection, for example. Obtaining a gun does not cause a student to go on a killing spree, since there are other ways for those desperate people to kill besides shooting. Mental health issues, however, do cause these tragic events, and I believe that if we educate both students and administrators at all levels, from grade school on up, student shootings could be prevented. Students should be educated at an early age how detrimental bullying is to a person. Also, every school should have a mental health counselor, someone who is aware of all of the students’ behaviors, talks to the students if something is wrong and is able to notify the proper authorities or parents if something seems off. Perhaps if more people had paid attention to Cho in middle school, he could have received the help he needed earlier in life. So before you protest the right to bear arms, maybe you should be more active in mental health education.

biagio1@lasalle.edu