To be honest, I’ve been trying to avoid coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, although I have caught some of it. I don’t care about the video messages or past of the killer. I don’t want to know about the time-line of the killings or see a 3D mock-up of the killer’s route on that day. I don’t care how messed up the killer’s roommate thought he might have been. And I don’t particularly enjoy or find it helpful to read the biographies of the victims. I’m not blaming anyone for lapping up the news coverage, and I’m not blaming the media for showing it. I’d rather live in a world where information is available than one where it isn’t, and if that information helps someone mourn or understand what happened, then that’s a great thing. It’s just not for me.
That being said, whenever a tragedy like this happens, there is a stock list of things that gets blamed:
- Guns, or Access to Guns
- Violent images or lyrics in one of the following:
- Music
- Video Games
- Movies
- Childhood Abuse
- Bullying and/or Unhealthy Social Structures (e.g. cliques, frats, etc.)
- Untreated Psychological Problems
- The Police (or Campus Security, in this case)
- Unresponsive Administration
- The General Moral Degradation of America
- The Chaos Predicted Before the End Times
Now, because I haven’t been following the coverage real well, I’m not sure which of those is bearing the brunt of the blame-game. And while maybe playing that game makes us feel better (after all, isn’t it satisfying to identify the bad-guy, especially one who isn’t dead?), it doesn’t really make a difference. Because, to a certain extent, any or all of those may have played a role in this tragedy, and any or all of them may play a role in future tragedies.
But here’s the thing. We are all capable of making choices about our own behavior. And even the most learned psychologists and social sciences cannot predict what individuals will do in real-world circumstances. Certainly violence in movies can make us more prone to acting out violently in our everyday lives, but that’s a long way off from saying that violence in movies causes us to kill each other. After all, hot weather can also make us more prone to violence, and yet living in Houston did not make me a murderer. In the same way, easy access to cheap guns most certainly allows for bad situations to be all that much more worse, but gun control laws wouldn’t have necessarily prevented any particular killer from getting access to firearms, and most gun owners are perfectly law abiding citizens.
It is both right and appropriate for us to find meaning in great tragedy, and the killings at Virginia Tech are no different. But we also need to be honest with ourselves. Sometimes bad things just happen, and there is no way of knowing how preventable this crime really was. If we really want to make the world a better place, we need to not focus on the details or cause or prevention of any individual tragedy, and instead we need to look at the big picture. This tragedy is not the fault of the NRA, or Hollywood, or the Virginia Tech administration. It’s the fault of one extremely messed up young man. It does all of us a disservice to try to make it more than that.
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