Told Ya So

On Monday, gunman Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, plus himself. On Wednesday, bombs killed 178 people in Baghdad. In 1993, some guy killed 8 people in San Francisco. More children die in swimming pools each year than die from guns. How do we talk about tragedies? And what do we say when we do?

On Tuesday, there was a vigil for the fallen 32 at Virginia Tech, which politicians tripped over themselves to appear at. President Bush was there, within one day of the event itself. On a side note, it took him 4 days to even show up in New Orleans after Katrina, which killed over 1,300.

So where was the vigil for the 178 killed in Baghdad yesterday? Or the 650,000 needlessly killed there since the ill-conceived invasion began? That question is obviously rhetorical, since there are some pretty big differences in the two situations. (a) It's different having a tragedy in your own community instead of half way around the world, and (b) it's not like 650,000 have to die before you can call something a tragedy.

But another difference between Iraq and Tech is how we talk about them. On Iraq, we are told that anything we say or do that contradicts the Administration is hurting the troops. It's a pretty ridiculous claim, not unlike Walter's claim that little Larry is killing his father:

Even worse is the claim by conservatives that we shouldn't say anything about how our every endeavor in Iraq is a failure (it is), since this would make the families of fallen soldiers feel bad for having lost their loved one in vain. I'm sorry, but this is a classic instance of the blame the messenger mentality, and it doesn't hold up. Eventually these families are going to have to face the fact that indeed they did lose their loved one for George W. Bush's vanity war.

To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest and counterproductive. It's like knowing your friend's boyfriend cheated on her and not telling her about it. When she finds out, it's going to really suck for her, and she's going to be really mad. But she's going to figure it out eventually, and whatever you say about it doesn't change what it actually was. It may seem like something that's not very respectful to say, but it has to be said. (Note to all my attached female friends: this example is purely hypothetical.)

Fortunately, we haven't seen the same kind of timidity from gun control advocates in the wake of Monday's shootings. The right wingers usually love to trash anyone who disagrees with them on anything. But Bush merely used the vigil to talk about something near and dear to him (but irrelevant to public policy): prayer. The usual conservative hit men don't seem to be stepping in to call the gun control advocates any names this time. However, gun control has more or less disappeared from the Democratic agenda since 1994, the last time meaningful legislation was enacted.

In 1993, Gian Luigi Ferri went to the 34th floor of the 101 California Street office building in San Francisco and opened fire with a pair of TEC-9 handguns. Then he took the elevator down to the 33rd floor and opened fire there. It is extremely fortunate that in the end only 8 people died. But it's also fortunate that the specter of anonymous gunmen spraying bullets around office buildings provided enough legislative momentum for a ten year ban on assault weapons, which Democrats forced through Congress in 1994.

Democrats went on to be routed in historic fashion in the 1994 midterms, and gun control has basically been regarded as a politically untouchable bogey man ever since. I was a little young, but I remember when 101 California happened. I remember more clearly gazing out at the 101 California building from the windows of the downtown San Francisco firm where I worked in 2004, thinking about the Republican Congress letting the assault weapons ban expire on September 13th of that year.

The shooter at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, reportedly used a couple of basic sidearms, rather than the powerful killing machines favored by Ferri and the Columbine shooters. Nonetheless, unlike that other notorious killer--swimming pools--all guns are designed for one purpose only: killing things. You just can't say that about swimming pools or really anything else. I'm not taking a position at this point on swimming pool policy, but it seems fairly clear that we don't have anything to lose by restricting gun sales.

Conservatives are fond of making the argument that if only more people had guns, we could just shoot everyone who tried to start something, and then he wouldn't be able to kill 32 people. They call it "self defense". Some conservatives are even saying that if only all those Tech students hadn't been so cowardly, things would have turned out better. This canard is easily disposed of, since tales are emerging of the brave and heroic things many of the victims and would-be victims actually did do.

No one likes to politicize tragedy, but the fact is that politics is designed to respond to tragedy. I'm sure no one at the vigil on Tuesday wanted to hear every politician using the occasion to grind whatever political ax he's always had. And no one wants the sacrifices our nation's families have made in Iraq to be cynically exploited for votes. But we need to talk about gun control, and we need to be honest about the situation in Iraq. To do otherwise won't help anyone in the long run.