After VT: Gun Control Doesn't Bark

After the horror of the shootings at Virginia Tech and the innocent lives cut down, two thoughts.

First of all, has nobody thought about just what a cruel place the modern university is?  It is perhaps the epicenter of privilege and injustice in the modern world.  You cannot just walk into a university like a Wal-Mart and say, here’s my $50; I’d like to take a course.  Oh no.  First of all, you put on your knee pads.  And that’s just the beginning of humiliation.

OK, so we learn that dozens of people knew about the killer Seung Cho.  And they had told the administration and the campus police about him.  And the powers-that-be did nothing.

This is where conservatives have something to say.  About the mediating institutions between the megastructures—like government and big research universities—and the individual.  Healthy societes have a vibrant space for the mediating institutions.  Welfare states and the like are constantly attacking the mediating institutions because they believe in top-down control by the educated elite ensconced in government.

We conservatives mourn, deeply mourn, that we haven’t done enough to get this message through.  Why not?  It’s so obvious, so self-evident.  People are social beings, they need to be embedded in social networks.  And social networks mean mediating, voluntary institutions free of the dead hand of government.

Second, did you notice the dog that didn’t bark?  Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid are saying: Gun control?  What gun control?

What is going on here?

Democrats are soft-pedaling gun control because, as Roger Simon writes, Democrats believe they lost the 2000 election because of gun owners.

Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas or the Democratic state of West Virginia, he would not have needed to win Florida in order to gain the presidency. But he lost them all. And guns had a lot to do with it.

We conservatives believe that the gun control issue is an epiphenomenon.  It stands for something much bigger, that people should be responsible for their own lives.  That the government cannot promise to make everyone safe with its big programs and its reckless promises.  People must look to their own resources. They must build and maintain their own networks of mutual aid and security.

And not the least of the value of these networks is to fold adolescent loners into the social network of community.

So for conservatives the spectacle of an adolescent loner going berserk in a government megastructure like a government university makes complete sense.

For us the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?

It is our job and our sacred mission to tell the world how to walk back from the dreadful anti-social society that the educated middle class has built in the last century.  In this society everything has been stripped away except government power and individual helplessness.

We know better.  And we live with the awful truth that we have failed to make our voices heard.  We have failed to break through the wall of liberal power to demand an end to the monstrous society of alienation and privilege.

So today we start again.  Break down the megastructures!  Shatter the privileges!  Grow the human-scale mediating institutions like families, churches, associations, and clubs!

And above all connect the adolescent loners back into society.