Following what happened at Virginia Tech today, there's a lot of attention obviously being paid to guns here. But this isn't about guns. Columbine wasn't about guns. These are stories about communtiies - ones that aren't functioning the way they should be.
Other countries have the same gun ownership rates as we do and don't have these problems. Why is that? The left and right are discussing entirely the wrong things. Neither more or fewer guns solves this problem. Neither more nor less regulation does either. They might result in larger hurtles to cover, or a little more time to identify a problem, but the guns aren't the problem and supply-side thinking won't do a thing to solve the problem.
The problem lies in our communities, and few things serve as nicely encapsulated communities as college campuses. They are largely self-contained. They have their own rules and rituals, their own sterotypes, codes of conduct, allies and enemies. Everyone knows everyone else. And if they don't, they at least know them to be part of this identified community. Colleges work hard to reinforce that feeling.
When this story broke, with the reports of bomb threats last week included, it became clear to me that this was a community issue. I can pretty much guarantee that there were concerned people before last Friday at VA Tech. They might not have know exactly what about, but they would have known that something was up. I work at just such a community and have been in this situation. They would have been sounding alarms that perhaps couldn't be acted on. In a free country, we put a lot of trust in our fellow community members. But there will always be members at risk. Those that have emotional problems, or are under stress, feel despair, anger, rage. These aren't offenses to the community. We don't arrest people we suspect may be dangerous, we don't shut down their speech, we don't throw them in a hospital. We trust them. That's a good thing.
Unfortunately, we often times don't help them. We're oblivious to their troubles, too busy with our own. We figure that some agency, or office, or designated official will somehow know about them. Or we deride them for not being strong enough to pick themselves up and move on. Too bad. So sad. My dog bit me once too and I didn't cry.
In a community, especially one that intentionally reinforces that notion of community, the expectations of the members of the community change. Remember back to the interviews following Columbine when so many expressed pride in their community. All the more shocking it would happen there. Yet, when you concentrate a community like that, like colleges do, the members of the community expect more from each other. In NYC people never say 'hello'. With 10 million people, it's a bit pointless to try and form relationships. Go into even a large office building there, and people do say 'hello'. With a few thousand people you can at least expect to recognize someone a second time, and 'hello' is a reasonable relationship to form. Go to a floor on that same office building, and everyone knows each other's name. Maybe know their interests, kids names, and so on. Smaller community, higher expectations.
Unfortunately, in this country, we keep losing sight of community and community support. We're afraid to ask "What's wrong?" to someone we don't know too well. We don't want to help for fear that we'll lose something in the transaction. What's more, we're afraid to include government as part of that community. So when people break down, when despair sets in, and there is nobody to pick them up, no formal organization to do it, nobody asking, nobody offering their hand, that despair deepens and turns to anger. As people become isolated, they start to turn against the community they thought would be there to help them. They start with the smallest circles in their community and work outward. You see people turn against their families, their friends, their neighbors, their community. They use the resources at their disposal - a gun, a car, a pipe bomb, whatever is at hand. The problem isn't with the instrument, but the neglect of our communities.
Ask yourself why these things don't happen as often in other countries as often. Why don't they happen in Canada, or Switzerland? They have guns there. Lots of guns. It's neither more guns nor less guns that provides the answer. It's the fact that around the world, people generally invest a lot more in their communities. They invest more personally, they invest more institutionally. That's not a message lost on most Kossacks, but its one to keep in clear focus right now. Forget the gun issues. They might fit into your larger philosophy on individual vs. social rights, but they really aren't at all relevant here and will only obscure the real issues.