I Have a Soapbox

I’m not a typically issue-driven person. Often I wish I were more passionate about causes, but I’m usually pretty middle of the road. Sure, I have strong opinions about some things – like, it’s wrong to lie, and it’s wrong to kill, and the arts are incredibly important. But I’m starting to feel a strong disgust for certain aspects of the media coverage of the horrific Virginia Tech killings.

I’ve been scouring cnn.com. This event is unbelievably tragic, and while part of me doesn’t want to know that victims were found in four classrooms and in stairwells, the ghoulishly curious aspect of my human nature wants details. But what I don’t want? Two things I absolutely do not want: pictures of the wounded being carried out of buildings, and a video on the exact type of guns used.

Let’s focus on the latter. It’s an excerpt from Anderson Cooper’s show, so this is something that’s already been broadcast into whoever whatso’s living room. In the article I was reading, there was a video link that said something like “see how fast these guns can be shot and reloaded.” In the video, the reporter is at a gun store, and the gun store employee is explaining the details of one of the guns used, saying it can shoot as fast as someone can pull the trigger. Then the reporter motions to the clip and elucidates in layman’s terms to the effect of “So you fill the clip with 15 bullets, and you can shoot them one right after the other?”

And I just cannot BELIEVE that this is on the news for all to see. It’s practically a mini-lesson on how to shoot quickly! Sure, it’s meant to elicit even more sympathy and shock – “Oh my God, he could kill 15 people without even having to reload!” But while most of us are shocked and horrified, isn’t there a chance that someone else who is completely effed in the head is watching and getting tips? For God’s sake. Let’s not show people the kind of gun best suited for massacring a classroom of innocents.

My boyfriend is pretty anti-NRA, pro-gun control. He can get on his own soapbox, and I will listen and agree and snort with derision at the NRA magazine that his roommate gets in the mail. But I’ve never really felt strongly about it. My brother used to collect guns and was in rifle club in high school. My father, a retired military officer, used to go to target practice, and I even went with him once. So I always felt a little bit like the black sheep when I expressed annoyance that there were guns in my family members’ households.

At the same time, I never really gave a crap about the “Right to Keep and Bear.” And you know what? I’m thinking I’m just plain anti-gun now. You don’t need a gun. You don’t need to shop for guns. And I would even say you don’t need to freaking go hunting and shoot guns. Let the damn deer overrun the earth – to hell with ecology!

But seriously folks. I’m absolutely appalled that a journalistic segment would include a visit to the gun shop. Why do we need to know what that gun is capable of? We already know that it was capable of murdering 32 people. 32 thinking, feeling, dreaming people. Students who had maybe stopped thinking about the German lesson and were instead remembering a meaningful conversation they’d recently had with a friend, or maybe some eye-contact they had with a crush, or maybe they were thinking about a paper they were working on for another class. Other students who were discovering how much they liked the language they were learning. Professors who had built their careers around Virginia Tech, who, years ago, smiled with satisfaction when they were offered the job, a payoff for the years of research and writing that result in a PhD. All those minds.

Guns are meant for killing. Nobody can walk into a classroom with a knife or with a bow-and-arrow and destroy dozens of lives in a matter of a few seconds.

I know horror is everywhere. There are whole countries that deal with genocide every day. The loss of innocent lives is sick and sad, no matter where it is.

We need to grieve. We don’t need a how-to on the weapons that lead to death.