Of Guns, American Campuses and Killing Fields

Fueled by an irrational sense of grievance and revenge, a student finds his campus easy picking. He knows the location of the classrooms and the class schedules. Once the doors are shut, he knows there is no escape for those trapped inside.

A partial list of campuses that turned into killing fields in recent years include Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, (1999, 13 killed), Virginia High Tech (2007, 32 killed), Oikos University in Oakland, CA (2012, 7 killed) and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT (2012, 20 killed).

Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, is the latest addition to this infamous list. On October 1^st, 26-year-old student Christopher Harper-Mercer went on a rampage in the pastoral campus, killing nine and wounding nine before killing himself. His victims included 18-year-old students and a 67-year-old English professor. He was carrying six guns and five ammunition magazines. Police found another eight guns and assault weapons in the apartment he shared with his creepily over-protective mother.

Apparently this disturbed person was legally able to buy 14 deadly weapons without any problem.

Can more security prevent such horrific campus killings? Budget constraints have forced many educational institutions, particularly community colleges, to cut back on security. But even if campuses bristled with round-the-clock police patrols, a psychopath bent on mayhem will find a way because the police cannot be everywhere at once.

The fundamental issue is not one of campus security or lack of mental treatment, as the National Rifles Association (NRA), its acolytes and political enablers (Senators, Congressmen, Governors and State Legislators) claim. After all, the mentally ill do not go about advertising their illnesses. Besides, those closest to them blame society for their illnesses, as happened with Harper-Mercer’s mother. Also, most killers look eerily normal, their inner demons hidden from view.

No, the real reason why campus killings occur with such sickening frequency in America is our absurdly easy access to guns.

In the college where I teach, the simplest algebraic equations students learn to solve are linear equations in one variable. All the data from countries similar to ours suggest that the solution to gun violence can be reduced to

Fewer guns = Fewer killings

Comparison with Australia is apt. Australians love their guns as much as we do but in 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people with a semiautomatic rifle at a tourist destination in Tasmania, the government responded by banning rifles and shotguns and imposing tough licensing requirements for gun owners. It also offered a buyback program that led to the destruction of more than a million firearms.

The result? In the 19 years since, there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia.

The NRA and its supporters will say that Australia doesn’t have a Second Amendment like the United States: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The argument about what exactly ‘a well regulated Militia’ constitutes, and what the intent of the Founding Fathers were when they phrased the Amendment thus, will never cease. We go through this ad nauseam until … nothing happens and then it is back to business as usual: more killings on our campuses, malls, theaters and other public places.

Here are a few (and only a few) statistics of what guns have done, and continue to do, to our nation:

• Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than dies in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.
• On the average, 92 Americans die every day due to gun violence.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost three times more preschoolers are shot dead each year than police officers in the line of duty.
• There are anywhere from 270 million to 300 million guns in circulation in the U.S. As President Obama said in his statement after the Roseburg killings: “There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America.”
• According to the gun violence archive, so far in 2015 there have already been more than 40,000 incidents of gun violence in America that has resulted in more than 10,000 deaths and 20,000 injuries. The dead include more than 2,000 youth between the ages of 12 and 17 and 560 children under 12. And we still have over two months left this year!

The grim toll relentlessly marches on. The truth is as clear as it is devastating: Far too many Americans regard their guns not just as culture but as religion, and the faithful are prepared to defend their religion to death, literally.

(In the days following the Roseburg shooting, for instance, gun sales in the area shot up dramatically. Within days, a freshman at Northern Arizona University killed a student and wounded three and at a student-housing complex at Texas Southern University, assailants killed a student and wounded another.)

How do we go about changing the status quo, even though it is impossible to rationally engage in a debate with the NRA and gun-activists?

First, we must believe that we are not helpless in the face of this continuing horror. The NRA is extremely powerful, no doubt, and has many politicians in its pocket, but it can be defeated. We have got to have this conviction.

Second, there must a concerted nationwide movement to hold elected officials accountable for their voting records on gun laws. If they are cowed by the NRA and hide behind a misreading of the Second Amendment despite the horrific toll on public health that unfettered access to guns take in America, we must work together at the local, state and national levels to defeat them at the polls. Politicians are driven by one overriding thought: How will we fare at the polls? Any prospect of a defeat can change a mind faster than, well, a speeding bullet.

Third, our government ought to consider offering a gun buyback program as was done in Australia, expensive though it will be. But we need a compelling demonstration from concerned citizens, particularly from responsible gun owners, to boldly say: “We have an unacceptable level of gun violence in America and therefore we renounce our gun ownership to save lives.” 

Many gun-owners are on record as saying that the NRA does not speak for them.

In his statement to the nation after the Roseburg massacre, President Obama said: “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

Inaction will inevitably lead to recurring tragedies. We Americans from all walks of life must recognize that we are being destroyed from within by the false religion of gun and so have to take on the NRA and the gun lobby. Given their power, it will be a long and drawn-out battle but if we endure, we will win.

Rage, Sorrow and Gun Control

“A Robin Redbreast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a Rage,” wrote William Blake. But there is something even more heinous that can put heaven, and all of us, in a greater rage.

It is the murder of children.

A gunman shot 26 people to death in an elementary school in rural Connecticut this morning. Twenty of them were children between the ages of 5 and 10. As gruesome details emerge, we ask: Where and how can we vent our rage against this unimaginable atrocity? What did these twenty children do to deserve this? One more week of school and, like millions of other schoolchildren, they would have been off for the holidays.

Instead, for these families, and for us, the coming holidays have been touched by evil. The little ones have left a vacuum that nothing on this earth is large enough to fill. At least that’s how it appears at this traumatic moment.

America has always been a gun society and is becoming more so every passing year. The tragic thing is that gun sales spike after the kind of violence that occurred this morning in Connecticut. Stores can barely meet demand for lethal firearms. Since government is not doing anything about gun control, many Americans feel that they are on their own against the psychopaths. A besieged mentality feeds on itself and gun sales rise exponentially.

It is impossible to detect human time bombs. Only two days ago, Jacob Tyler Roberts, 22, armed with a stolen AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, went on a rampage in a shopping mall in Oregon that left two people dead. "Jake was never the violent type," Roberts' ex-girlfriend, told the media. "His main goal was to make you laugh, smile, make you feel comfortable.” "Of everyone in my entire life, if I could put them on a list of how crazy they are, how likely they are to snap, I'd put him at the very bottom," said Jaime Eheler, 26, the gunman's close friend and roommate. "He'd be the very last person." Eheler added that her friend had a "weird look on his face" when he left their house.

But what alarm can a mere “weird look” set off?  After all, it is common for “unexpected” killers to mask their murderous rage with preternatural calm. Trying to stop human time bombs before they explode is, therefore, not a practical option.

But there is something we can and must do as a nation: Enforce gun control, damn the Second Amendment distortionists. This fruitless debate about rights has run its pathetic course. The government has got to step in and set things right, and make it difficult for anyone to purchase firearms. The NRA needs to be given the boot and right now, there is enough consensus in the country to make it happen. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” said President Obama after the shooting. “Meaningful action?” What does this mean? This type of euphemism will not wash any longer. The time for “meaningful action” is long past. What is needed is drastic action to put the leash on NRA and the gun lobby and ban firearms.

It is tempting to conclude that our schools, colleges and malls have turned into killing fields. They have not, but neither are they remotely as safe as we have the right to expect and demand. Without drastic gun control, they will attain that fatal distinction sooner than we may think. Can we afford that as a nation?