The horrific Virginia Tech shootings have, as they should, inspired every political activist to use the event as a hook to their perennial issue. As usual, commentator Charles Krauthammer does so in as sensible a way as possible.
There are, we should never forget, tradeoffs that a free society makes in favor of freedom and against safety and security.
It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly... [S]tricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.
How many innocent lives would be saved by stricter gun laws and how many violent crimes would be deterred by more guns in homes?
Maybe a deeply disturbed person like Cho should have been institutionalized.
But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.
What we can all agree, surely, that the kind of rambling political nonsense generated by presidential candidate Barack Obama is not the solution. At a speech captured by Politico’s Ben Smith he connected the Virginia Tech violence with Don Imus’s radio insults.
Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur[.]
But if that is what Sen. Obama believes let us hear more of it. It is not, after all an extremist position. That sort of political free association is exactly what passes for serious political analysis among our liberal friends. It’s all part of the “cycle of violence” paradigm, “arms are for hugging,” and other magical thinking that proceeds from the assumption that humans are naturally peaceful rather than naturally violent. And nothing so exactly represents the mood as the comment made on The Volokh Conspiracy:
Schools and guns do not mix. Period.
One is tempted to quote Sir Toby Belch: “Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?”
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