BOTH SIDES OF THE GUN

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Yet Another Campus Shooting

The carnage from guns comes at us so quickly in the news, it is easy to become numbed by it.

The past few days, we have seen a boy kill his parents and two siblings with his father's gun, several women shot and killed in a clothing store in suburban Chicago, a man with a grievance killing several city council members in Missouri, and now word of a fatal shooting on a Louisiana campus.

And this is just a sampling of the shooting deaths in the recent past. Remember that approximately 11,500 people are shot to death each year as a result of homicide.

Meanwhile, three students in Baton Rouge are the latest victims of our "gun culture."

According to a February 9th UPI report,

Three students died at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge Friday, where police said a woman shot two other females then turned the gun on herself.

The bodies of the women, all students, were found in a classroom on the vocational-technical training campus, Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Kelly said.

"Unfortunately and sadly, we have three young women who are deceased," Kelly said. "(It appears) she shot two other women and turned the gun on herself."

Police began interviewing witnesses and others to try to understand why the shootings occurred, he said. Police said about 20 people were in the classroom where the shootings occurred.

Police received a call just before 8:30 a.m. and responded within minutes, Kelly said.

After particularly gruesome shootings, the media generally asks how such killings could have been prevented. Public officials ask what laws might have stopped them. Certainly, these are questions that need to be pursued.

But we also need to explore the pathology of our gun culture, because the unrelenting use of guns to kill people in America is a disease that is a cancer on our democracy.

We need to address why we continue, as a society, to glorify guns as if they are sacred objects, and why our popular culture thrives on guns being used as a means for people to vent their grievances.

These are profound questions that are at the heart of the gun problem in American and the unrelenting toll that it has taken on lives needlessly lost.