In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, conservative arguments were everything you would expect them to be. Some commentators incredibly argued that there should have been more guns on the campus. Pat Buchanan weighed in with the notion that tolerance was at fault. And Michelle Malkin blamed the unarmed victims for not rushing the armed psychotic who took their lives.
But the answer to the situation could not be found in any of those predictable right-wing solutions.
Let's suppose for a moment that more students or faculty had been armed Monday when Cho Seung-Hui began his rampage. With early unsubstantiated reports that the suspect was a middle-eastern Islamic student, there is every possibility that an innocent person could have been shot in the atmosphere of hysteria. Even if other armed students on campus correctly identified the shooter, there is no guarantee that they might not have shot one another. But those concerns were not enough for individuals who want to possess enough fire power for a battle zone in order to exterminate Bambi's kith and kin. Somebody made the observation that all of these mass shootings have occurred in gun-free zones.
"That means that only the criminals have guns," a commentator solemnly intoned.
The argument that criminalizing guns ensures that criminals will possess them begins to fall apart when you try to apply that logic to other crimes. Suppose one argued that one shouldn't outlaw child abuse because only people who were not inclined to abuse children would obey it. The same goes for selling illegal drugs.
In truth a nation's laws are not simply about creating rules which are easily enforceable. They are also an indicator of that nation's loftier aspirations. The civil rights legislation passed in the 1960's did not end racial inequality overnight. It did, however, point the way for a nation that prided itself on equality for all men to take steps to bring that ideal closer to reality.
The less said about the idea of unarmed students rushing an armed attacker the better.
And when did tolerance become a vice instead of a virtue? It wasn't that Cho was tolerated by those around him; it was that Cho wasn't known by those around him.
There is a tragic irony about living in an age which affords us unparalleled opportunities for instantaneous communication and still making talking to each other a daunting proposition. Far too many of us go through life insulated from our fellow man by IPods or satellite radio. Far too many of us see our worlds contained within the confines of a glowing computer monitor. In virtual reality, we can be any place on the globe in a matter of seconds. But this freedom has come at the expense of peripheral vision that allows us to see what's going on right next to us.
The villain is not tolerance but rather indifference. The experts have already said that those in authority should have taken a greater interest in Cho. That assertion is correct. But there were also countless opportunities for Cho's peers to engage him, to show him some small act of kindness that might have quelled the rage inside him. There were many chances for someone to not only suggest that Cho receive counseling, but to take enough of an interest to see that he actually obtained it.
And that may be the greatest tragedy of the Virginia Tech massacre: that it could have been avoided if more people had taken the time to care.