The first half hour of the radio news this morning was again on the shootings at Virginia Tech. From down here part of what we're trying to understand is how America accepts this level of gun violence in its national life. The extinguishing of thirty-two lives is an unspeakable tragedy. But thirty-two thousand people are killed by guns in America each year, and the number of guns just grows and grows. Something just doesn't make sense. Do we care about the victims or don't we? Is it a tragedy or just a fact of life?
Three things on the radio disturbed me. One was President Bush's remark, "Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time." The second was the observation of the killer's parents' postman who said "no parent deserves this." It's hardly fair to put the postman's off-the-cuff remark in the same category as the president speech (doubtless written by someone else), but it seemed to me that both say something that shouldn't need saying. Of course the students and professors at Virginia Tech didn't deserve to die; there's no right place or time to be murdered. And of course the parents didn't deserve for their son to shatter so many lives, including theirs.
I understand that mentioning "desert" in this way is a way of insisting on the innocence of the victims. But nobody has questioned their innocence! Nobody would. (Actually many will blame the killer's parents.) Even to suggest that one could deserve such a fate shows you think there are cases in which such fates are deserved.
The third upsetting thing on the radio was an interview with a Virginia pro-gun lobbyist, who argued that if students had been allowed to carry concealed guns on campus the tragedy wouldn't have happened. (Actually he never said even this, just that "one of those kids would have refused to let himself be murdered" - don't think about what's implied here about the rest.) When the interviewer mentioned the 32,000 the gun-runner said that was mostly "bad people killing bad people." Clearly many tens of thousands of people deserve to die every year. (And that's just in the US.)
So which is it: thoughtlessness (I can't believe this has happened, this never happens)? fatalism (sometimes people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, American culture's just violent for some reason)? or (perhaps also) blaming the victims (some people deserve it)? One of the achievements of a civilized society (if I may use such barbarous terms) is the presumption that people who suffer tragedies of various kinds don't deserve them - that's what makes them tragedies, and what gives us all a reason to respond and to do what we can to prevent them. American civilization (to take something Gandhi said when asked about "western civilization") would be a good idea.
Nobody deserves to live in a land of such thoughtlessness, fatalism and victim-blaming.
