Explaining the Inexplicable
I had a whole entry planned out yesterday on Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales' (A.G. A.G., as I like to call him) upcoming testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I had read Gonzales 25-page written statement (read it yourself), in which he spends five pages saying the U.S. Attorney firings were essentially the doing of his underling, former chief-of-staff Kyle Sampson, and then spends 20 pages saying, "But look at all the good things the Justice Department does!"
Yeah, I had a whole response set up in my head, ready to go, a round chambered ready to fire. And then, a thousand miles north of here, 23-year-old South Korean Virginia Tech student Cho Seung-Hui grabbed a 9mm automatic handgun, walked down a dormitory hall, opened a door, and stepped into infamy as the deadliest spree shooter in our nation's history.
The unassuming face of banal evil
What has followed has been 24 hours of trying to explain. We should have more guns. We should have less. We should watch out for these immigrants. We're amazed it wasn't an American. We should ban violent video games. We think you'd have to be a moron to pin this on video games. And so on.
I was just in a diner, having some breakfast while waiting for the public notary next door to open (long story). Fox News was on, and Bill Hemmer, after saying that the president would be on campus during the memorial, referred to Bush as "the consoler-in-chief." Two old men, each with a newspaper, yelled at each other from across the room.
"Watch for the copycats now."
"This never happened before Columbine."
What do you say to such people? Do you point out that Columbine didn't cause copycats — at least not right away? Do you point out that, contrary to the Columbine statement, the worst school shooting incident up until yesterday occurred in 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas' observation tower with a sniper rifle and opened up? Do you point out that the worst massacre of students in our nation's history actually occurred in 1927, when a schoolboard member, irate over school taxes, blew up a school, killing 44 people, mostly children?
There have always been crazies. And the one horrible truth, the one no one on the news wants to admit — certainly the one truth I have heard no one on the news say — is that these things will happen, these things have always happened, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. You could walk out to your car tomorrow, be fumbling through your pockets for your keys, and look up only to see a broken, once-human monster pointing a gun at your head, and then your life is over.
If someone is both suicidal and homicidal, they are going to kill. And there is nothing anyone can do about it. We could turn universities into mini-police states, with metal detectors, flak jackets for students, plain-clothes police detectives everywhere, lockdown every night, and it would not matter. No one is allowed weapons in prison, and yet prisoners are killed all the time.
The truth of the matter is, there are a little over 300 million people in this country, and every so often, with a population that huge, one of the people is going to go haywire. Maybe they'll just snap a little, and throw themselves off a bridge. Or maybe they'll snap a lot, stock up on guns and ammo, and take a walk around campus. Given how often these things happen, it's a safe bet that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than being the victim of a spree killer. But it does happen. It will happen again. And, especially when the killer does not mind being killed, there is nothing anyone can do about it.