32 Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus

You know, when I read stuff like this:

Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 injured in two shooting attacks at Virginia Polytechnic Institute on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.

The police and witnesses said some victims were executed with handguns while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.

It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.

My first reaction is the reaction of any human being, which is to say I simply feel numb.

And then I feel anger that the American right wing refuse to see any connection between the availability of hand guns in the US and this kind of incident.

I understand their claim that "guns don't kill, people do" , but surely even they must admit that people who want to kill will find their task infinitely easier if they have access to guns?

Incidents like this are incredibly rare here in the UK and, on the few occasions that incidents like this do occur, they tend to take place involving people who are members of rifle associations or have access to licensed guns.

The most famous of these was the massacre at Dunblane and the other was the massacre at Hungerford.

At Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton walked into a school with two 9 mm Browning HP pistols and two Smith and Wesson .357 revolvers and opened fire on a class of five and six year olds. Sixteen children and a teacher were killed.

At Hungerford, Michael Robert Ryan, armed with several weapons including an AK-47 rifle and a Beretta pistol, shot and killed sixteen people including his mother, and wounded fifteen others, then fatally shot himself.

The immediate reaction of the British public was that action needed to be taken to keep guns out of the hands of the general population. Indeed, as I write this, possession of a hand gun will get you an instant five year jail sentence in the UK.

Now I know that American right wingers demand that the right to bear arms be respected, and it is respected in no high or upper middle income country as much as it is in the United States where 4% of the world's population possess 50% of the planet's privately owned firearms.

But there appears to be a considerable price paid in human terms for the upholding of that right. The Forty-Ninth World Health Assembly recently compiled some statistics:

RESULTS: During the one-year study period, 88,649 firearm deaths were reported. Overall firearm mortality rates are five to six times higher in High Income and Upper Middle-class Income countries in the Americas (12.72) than in Europe (2.17), or Oceania (2.57) and 95 times higher than in Asia (0.13). The rate of firearm deaths in the United States (14.24 per 100,000) exceeds that of its economic counterparts (1.76) eightfold.

How long are we going to pretend that there isn't a link between ease of access to firearms in the United States and occurrences like this?

People will say now is not the moment to have conversations like this, but I disagree. This is the very moment when the right wing idiotic mantra that "guns don't kill, people do" should be exposed as the nonsense that it is.

Every society in the world has malcontents and people angry at the way they perceive they have been treated by society at large. This is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

However, surely in any society where the general population has a right to bear arms, the chances of that malcontent carrying out serious damage is proportionately increased?

Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said.

Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.

“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.”

Incidents like this leave a sick feeling in one's stomach. But, if our outrage and shock is to serve any real purpose, it should surely be spent in focusing on how to make such incidents harder to happen in the future. And, with the correlation between gun possession and such incidents so easily provable, when is any American politician going to tackle this problem by redefining exactly what constitutes the "arms" that one is permitted to carry?

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Tags: Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 32 shot dead on campus, American gun laws, deadliest shooting in American history