January 27: Missing the Mark

We are a little over a month past the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary School. It has been 6 weeks since a madman tore apart dozens of families, leaving a trail of pain and questioning in his wake. Yet it doesn’t appear as though humanity is any closer to an answer to solving our egregious problem.

In the weeks following this tragedy, the American public started calling for better gun control laws. It appeared as though two very different ideas stemmed from the same issue.

The first idea was to create significantly tougher gun control laws. The defendants argued that it would make attaining a gun much harder for a would-be shooter, and thus lower the risk of such a tragedy occurring. Unfortunately, I am not under the impression that it is that simple. Most shootings occur in situations that would be incredibly hard to control. The popular saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is uncomfortably true. The problem isn’t the ability to use guns. The problem is with the people who are doing the killing.

Another proposed solution is actually to legalize the ability for college students to bring guns to school with them. The idea is that, if it isn’t possible to control the killers, you might as well arm the potential victims. To say the least, this is a ridiculous idea. As a college student myself, I would say that my judgment is suspect at best at times, and I would live in constant fear if I knew that my peers, who I trust far less than I trust myself, have the ability to carry concealed weapons on their person. There is no good reason that we, as students, should have to live in fear of having guns in our college classrooms. This goes for the legal ones as well as the illegal.

I am, in essence, on two seemingly oppositional sides of the same debate. I am not in favor of restricting second amendment rights, because I do not believe it is the government’s job to tell me how I am to protect my household. At the same time, I also believe that making guns more accessible is not the solution either, because more guns would not scare people straight. It would lead to conflicts where individuals would be far more likely to come out guns blazing. Literally.

The issue truly comes down to a need for further education. I am going to stop short of calling for schools to teach gun safety, but I do say that there is a need for students in public schools to learn what it means to wield a weapon, the ramifications of violence, and what it means to kill someone. While death is an uncomfortable topic of conversation, I believe it is one that must be spoken of more frequently in schools. The assumption at this point is that an initial conversation about death, what it means, and how it impacts people will occur at home. This conversation must stretch into the classrooms, so that a more thorough appreciation of life can stem from it.

The true root of the issue is the valuing of human life. A gunman intent on killing a classroom full of children demonstrates not only a mental illness, but also a lack of appreciation for the act of living. This is also one of the reasons, I believe, that murder-suicide is so common amongst high school shootings. A killer doesn’t have an appreciation for life, including their own. They don’t understand the power of their actions, and the finality of death. Which is why, with a better education on death, I believe the desire for killing would decrease.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, we have seen several smaller scale shooting incidents, which lead me to believe that this tragedy served less of an awakening as it should have. We as an American society owe it to the victims and their families to find a way to live together, and a way to cease from killing one another.