Virginia Tech tragedy

I remember when I heard about the shootings at Columbine High School. I was in high school myself at the time. I remember everyone being shell-shocked and talking about how our school, with its large dichotomy between rich kids and poor kids and its share of "weird" loners, might be next on "the list." I don't remember where the idea of this list came from though. All I know is that it caused this raised suspicion of anyone who wore a trenchcoat (several of my friends, who have never harbored murderous thoughts, for all I know) or tended to hang out by him/herself. And we had plenty of those kids in my school. But most of all, it caused a lot of us students to realize that we weren't safe in school. We weren't safe anywhere anymore. Anything could happen to anyone at any time.

The tragedy that happened yesterday at Virginia Tech brought all those paranoid feelings rushing back to me. Or maybe they're not so paranoid. After all, it makes as much sense to die in a random school shooting as it does to get run over by a drunk driver while crossing the street. You think, "Shouldn't someone have noticed that this guy was acting a little off? Shouldn't someone have done something about it?" Well, the answer to that is yes, if you notice you should try to do something about it. But the problem lies within the noticing. Sometimes you just can't.

When I was in college, a friend of a friend came to visit her for a weekend. He hung out with our group of friends, seemed to have a good time (although I do remember him being a little quiet), and then went home. A week later he committed suicide.

I didn't even know him, but this affected me deeply. I kept thinking, "Maybe if we had shown him a better time, maybe if we had paid more attention to him..." But I slowly came to realize that there was nothing I could have done. He was a deeply troubled individual who felt that this life no longer held anything for him. People who knew him much better than I didn't realize anything was wrong. He didn't reach out to anyone. It just happened.

It's terrible and sad that in the Virginia Tech case, the shooter felt the need to take out his rage on the innocent people around him. There hasn't been that much of a response out here in San Diego, and I feel kind of insulated from the events. But I grew up in Pennsylvania and knew people who went to Virginia Tech for undergrad. My little sister has friends who go there now. Fortunately, they're all physically fine. But how does one get over this? How does one deal with the fact that our nation seems to have it's unfair share of disgruntled youths that feel it necessary to release their anger on others? Other nations have even greater socio-economical gaps than we do, but you don't hear of school shootings there, do you?

Maybe part of the answer is better gun control. I saw several news programs this morning urging people not to use this issue as a platform for gun control. Why not, I ask? If this shooter had not had access to a gun, would he have been able to wreak so much havoc? I doubt it. And all the arguments for owning a gun (self-protection, to defend against people like this shooter, etc.) don't hold water here. But I don't doubt that Charleton Heston and the NRA will soon be staging a rally in Blacksburg, just like they did in Columbine too soon after the tragedy there. They'll argue that if someone did have a gun on them, less people would have been killed because the shooter would have been stopped earlier. They'll argue that every classroom should have at least one gun in it. Bullocks. If the world had less guns in it, more people would be alive today.