Another confrontation with ourselves

Virginia Tech.

A new name on the roster of senseless slaughter. We have seen so much of this.

We are violent.

In the past half-century we have witnessed the assassinations of a president, his presidential candidate brother and a civil rights leader, and attempted assassinations of other presidential candidates and presidents. We have witnessed the murders of civil rights workers and antiwar protesters, including the killing of four on the Kent State University campus.

There was Columbine, where 13 students were gunned down in 1999 before the shooters killed themselves. In 2006, in the quiet of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, 11 youngsters were shot and 5 killed, execution style, in an elementary school.

Twelve years ago this month, a truck bomb destroyed half a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring more than 800.

We’ve puzzled over snipers from university towers and killers who haunted Maryland and Virginia, and a highway sniper in the upper Midwest, picking off the unsuspecting, one at a time, from a distance.

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The concession one makes in these moments is that so much is beyond our control. We cannot, as Jesuit Fr. William Byron said, inure ourselves against or forever avoid malice, but we can rely on “faith and religion to ready the human spirit to withstand any assault.”

Relying on faith as the ultimate protection against life’s disruptions, however, should not leave us helpless. There are things we can do.

Two days after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, President Clinton declared: “We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”

That same day he ordered intense bombing of Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.

Anyone who’s raised a child knows that they don’t learn well when behavior contradicts teaching. One thing we can do is more deeply examine who we are and how accepting we are of state-sponsored violence. Does it square with who and what we say we are?

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The day of the shooting massacre on the Virginia Tech campus, President Bush said in a TV interview that he expected a debate on gun control policy, but argued that now is not the time.

We can’t think of a better time.

According to a 2007 Small Arms Survey, the United States ranks first in the world in gun ownership with 90 weapons per 100 people. By contrast, the rate in France, for instance is 32 per 100 people, and 31 per 100 in Canada, Sweden and Austria.

The numbers themselves would be insignificant, save for the fact that guns account for so much carnage among our children.

These statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are posted on the Web site of the National Education Association:

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Lax enforcement of existing gun control laws and consistent erosion of those laws have allowed the deadly gun culture to flourish. Even the 1994 ban on assault weapons, essentially battlefield grade weapons that have no use other than killing humans quickly, efficiently and in great numbers, was allowed to expire three years ago.

The gun lobby -- rich, unconscionable and unscrupulous in manipulating public fear -- has most politicians in a stranglehold. The stranglehold is maintained even as survey after survey, including gun owners and members of households where guns are available, show that a majority of Americans approve of reasonable controls.

We may not be able to hold off malice in the world, or predict the actions of the deranged among us. But we all can do something to foster a culture less accommodating of violence and less friendly toward those who make the violence possible.

Who are we, really, and what kind of culture do we want? How much state-sponsored violence are we willing to tolerate and pay for? How much will we allow the purveyors of arms to dictate our politics? What actions are we willing to place behind the instructions on nonviolence that we attempt to pass on to our children?

National Catholic Reporter, April 27, 2007