Here Genie Genie, Come see the nice bottle

This will be serious, not sarcastic.

Yesterday, yet another gunman shot up another campus, this time a geology class at Northern Illinois University. I was once a geology major. I visited NIU when I was looking at grad schools for Communication. Last night someone shot up some cars at a local high school basketball game. There have been several shootings at institutions of higher learning since last year. My sister teaches at one. This shooting business obviously has to stop.

Many people locally will advocate that gun control is the answer but it is not. At least as far a VA tech, the guns used were already illegal. When people argue to get rid of guns, they don’t actually mean that. Usually, what they mean is to get rid of guns in the hands of people that shouldn’t be trusted with them or get rid of guns for everyone but the authorities. I don’t think that the “get rid of” advocates have really thought out their position; I think it is largely an emotional reaction. If only the authorities (government) had guns, we would suddenly have a society where the state could impose its will on the people. That scares the hell out of me. It is just as bad if we magically made all firearms/gunpowder technology disappear. That would throw us back to largely muscle powered technology, and being skilled with that takes quite a bit of time and practice. We had a society like that once, from Biblical times to the Feudal lords of Europe. It was a time when the warrior elite (who had weapons and knew how to use them) got to lord it over the peasants. Do we really want to go back to that? What the “get rid of” folks really want to do is get rid of people who break down in violent episodes, but good luck with that.

So what is my answer? I don’t have one, at least not a good one. I don’t think it is reasonable to put metal detectors in all college buildings or to turn them into walled compounds. While some students might like it, we also can’t force a college environment to be a nudist colony where no one can conceal a weapon (nor would that solve the problem; it would just change the point where shooting starts). Moral issues aside (and there are a TON of them for this one), we can’t set up a TV program where disturbed young people can get their moment of fame by shooting up each other and then themselves on camera and not in school because that’s a stupid idea that doesn’t address the anger issue. I doubt very much we can identify the societal ill that is causing this because there probably is not a uniform one nor could we agree on it.

Do we just live with it *shudder*? How do we put the genie back in the bottle?