Reflections on Virginia Tech

A senseless massacre that teaches us nothing

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Readers' comments



SIR, the lesson/solution is obvious at least to most of the civilised world: ban fire arms ownership.

The lesson is not learnt in the US because you have a well entrenched, well connected gun lobby that spends fortunes telling Americans that guns don't kill people.

chet morrison

I could not disagree more with the thesis that the VT atrocity 'teaches us nothing'. When someone has a problem, often the first barrier to doing something about it is denial, and until that wall is breached, therapy goes nowhere. May I suggest that the event teaches us that we have a problem with guns in society? That levels of gun violence dwarf that of other western nations who practice gun control strictly? That, like a heroin addict, we barrel on blinded to events? That we learn nothing is like this heroin addict who gets blood poisoning from an infected needle and thus concludes he has to wipe his needles more vigorously.
I do not know the solution to this problem. I would suggest that getting a gun should at least prompt the same level of competence we ask of people to drive a car, but maybe there are better ways. I would however submit, that the first thing to solving a problem is at least admitting that you have one. I think the family and friends of the 11,000 dead people per year might even agree with that.


Countries with better gun control have these massacres too (Britain, Germany, Finland, Australia, Canada). If a sizable minority of the population on campus carried a gun, there would be no more mass killings, just many, many more individual shootings. The person most likely to shoot you is your spouse or significant other. America has the worst of all worlds now, with lots of guns, lots of people with guns, and lot of areas where no law-abiding person is allowed to carry one, including campuses. Given that many Americans view their gun as their guarantee of personal and collective freedom, and will not give them up, perhaps we should recruit a screened, trained, corp of volunteers allowed to carry guns everywhere. In a country full of guns, perhaps that's the most responsible view to take.

I know a girl who was there that day. That sort of experience leaves scars. I don't have an easy answer.

Doug Pascover

Excellent column. The likelihood of preventing terrible things from happening has to be balanced against the likelihood and consequence of false positives. In the case of school shootings, incarcerating, limiting or expelling every student who verbalizes dark thoughts would also be tragic.

Not me, bimasta. I don't recall that.


Shortly after the shootings at Virginia Tech, news accounts were published that the shooter had submitted a short story and a one-act play in his writing classes, both of which described the sexual abuse of an 11 or 12 year old boy, presumably himself, including forced sodomy, and this boy's anger and desire for revenge. The media dropped the story quickly, perhaps so as not even to hint that the mass-killer might be some kind of 'vicitim' himself. If those early accounts were true, then his teachers definitely, and inexcusably, "dropped the ball" -- or in this case, the Time Bomb. Do any other Economist readers have any light to shed on those early news accounts, which disappeared so quickly?

Anthony Probus

I don't see how anyone can NOT support gun control after an outburst of shootouts that are happening across America in the past few years. Are people really that blinded by ideology as to not see the obvious?


I just want to point out that Lexington carefully avoids mentioning the shooter's name for the entire article. I wonder if he/she gives some credence to that "blame the media for sensationalizing previous killers" thesis?



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