A potentially dangerous student on campus does have rights,
but we must be careful not to overstate those rights. He or she does not have
the right to kill.
The actions so far in dealing with gun violence, especially
school shootings, expose hesitancy on the part of people in authority. Public
and elected officials appear only willing to take half-measures. Time and time
again there is a desire to avoid offending powerful interests. Protecting the
careers of prominent politicians, law enforcement officials, and school leaders
appears to be the motivation for this inaction. The net result is an unholy
trinity of lies, deceit, and cover-ups.
Returning to Douglas Kellner’s book, he has a poignant quote
from the highly reputable British news magazine, The Economist. “It (The
Economist) indicated that while disturbed people exist in every society,
the difference, ‘as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this
week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of
terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a
Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to
police in virtually every other country, but which can be legally be bought
over the counter in thousands of gun shops in America. There are estimated to
be 240 million guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and
around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns
not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and
perhaps none at all.’”
As I have written earlier, there is no silver bullet to
ending the gun violence. So when do we begin a meaningful dialog to find ways
to curb gun violence? It is only a matter of time before another Virginia Tech,
another Appalachian School of Law, or another Aurora theater shooting because
we do next to nothing to prevent gun violence. (To be continued)
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