Shootings (2007)

Shootings (2007)

In this essay, Adam Gopnik discusses the cause of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, in which a single gunman killed 32 people before committing suicide. Before you begin reading, take a moment to think about mass shootings. Where do they most often take place? What do you think is the root cause of these shootings? How can they be prevented?

(1) The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. to imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling – dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief – is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened – specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people – and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said, “People who want to…make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them….At this point, what it’s about is comforting family members…and helping this community heal. And so those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”

(2) If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problems of “narcissism,” violence in the media and popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

(3) Some people, however – especially people outside America – were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties, the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

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