the enemy within

yes, allowing everyone to have a gun is one solution to this issue…maybe.  Being as we have no data to suggest that it would work, we can only hypothesize that it would be an effective deterent to school slayings.   I’m not entirely sure how it would have worked in this situation though….student with a gun enters a dorm and kills two students – most people don’t wear their gun at home (which is what a dorm is) and therefore he would have killed these people and left while someone went to get their gun…or been killed there…so still some students killed.

Unfortunately the police and the school dropped the ball by not locking down the school until he was found.  Hypothetically, if everyone was allowed to carry a gun in schools then potentially he would have killed less students once he started shooting in the classes….but, not everyone would WANT to carry a gun, so he might have encountered a few who were not interested in carrying and he would have still killed students before being killed himself…..granted perhaps he would have killed less students if someone had stopped him.  Perhaps someone did attempt to stop him …reports of an elder blocking him from getting through a door to more students…no gun, just his body.

So one solution may be gun carrying by everyone everywhere…maybe even mandate that everyone must carry a gun.

But surely, since this is a complex issue, there are other solutions.  Only through a thorough examination of the process that led up to the kills can we, as a culture, ever hope to understand how it happens and ever hope to find solutions.  No one wakes up one day and decides…"hey!  Beautiful morning, I think I will kill everyone I see!"   There is a long series of hurtful, painful events that leads someone to kill themselves this way.

I don’t think our culture is willing to examine it’s dirty underside and look hard and long at how it has created an environment where children kill children.  I don’t think our culture is willing or able to look at how these things happen and what can be done to prevent them from happening again.  There are too many icons who would have to change what they do, do many businesses who perpetuate the ideology that when you are offended you are within your rights to lash out horribly.

We are no different than the moderate Islamics who create a culture that allows terrorism to exists.  We have met the enemy and he is us.