Shootings Gun control and the Virginia Tech massacre By AdamGopnik The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students werestill ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. Asthe police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineeringbuilding, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ringtones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. Toimagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies andheard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of theparents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answerand the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But theparents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the rightmoment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why anobviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, wasable to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and whyit 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 butloathing for them. . . . At this point, what it’s about iscomforting family members . . . and helping this community heal.And so to those who want to try to make this into some littlecrusade, I say take that elsewhere.” If the facts weren’t sohorrible, there might be something touching in the Governor’sdeeply American belief that “healing” can take place magically,without the intervening practice called “treating.” The logic isunusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is thewrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death fromlung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobaccoindustry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time totalk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course,but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on thetreatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of“narcissism,” violence in the media and in popular culture, copycatkillings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question ofEvil. Some people, however—especially people outside America—wereeager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on alittle crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has moregun violence than other countries because we have more guns and arewilling to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Everynation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similarprofiles from one country and culture to the next. And everycountry has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on agun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteenworst mass shootings in Western democracies since thenineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just asimportant, no other country on the list has had a repeatperformance as severe as the first. In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996,a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school.Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, weretightened—it’s now against the law for any private citizen in theUnited Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used atVirginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since.In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen womenin 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement thatresulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far fromsufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple ofsubsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with farfewer dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killedeight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issuein the Presidential election that year, and there has been norepeat incident. So there is no American particularity aboutloners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth,complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularityabout guns. The arc is apparent. Forty years ago, a man killedfourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, aman killed thirty-two in Blacksburg, Virginia. Not enough was donebetween those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harderto obtain. In fact, while campus killings continued—Columbine beingthe most notorious, the shooting in the one-room Amish schoolhouseamong the most recent—weapons have got more lethal, and, in stateslike Virginia, where the N.R.A. is powerful, no harder to buy.Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neitherrelieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Makingit more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, arational way to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nationswith tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence;countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gunviolence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gunviolence. (If you work hard, you can find a statistical exceptionhiding in a corner, but exceptions are just that. Some people whosmoke their whole lives don’t get lung cancer, while some peoplewho never smoke do; still, the best way not to get lung cancer isnot to smoke.) It’s true that in renewing the expired ban onassault weapons we can’t guarantee that someone won’t shoot peoplewith a semi-automatic pistol, and that by controllingsemi-automatic pistols we can’t reduce the chances of someonekilling people with a rifle. But the point of lawmaking is not toact as precisely as possible, in order to punish the latest crime;it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order to preventthe next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho’s weapons,are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and it’s noteasy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loadedsemi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot asoften as they are.) Rural America is hunting country, and huntersneed rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we’ll live with therisk. There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracyshould own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth willregister. Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, andparents will be told not to ask why. Question: Can you help me towith possible outline for critical review essay on the aboveessay?