LACRIMOSA

I have thought long and hard about the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech. How awful that so many lives were cut short. The taking of any life is a dreadful thing, but I find the level of horror much higher when it is a young person who is killed. A whole life ahead of them lost. We ought to remember them in our prayers and ask God to give comfort to the families and friends. I also hope that the many people traumatized by this incident will receive help and support.

Peole are trying to make sense of it all, but I am not sure there is sense to be made. The murderer was obviously severely mentally disturbed. All the warnings were there, but we lack the will to address problems of this magnitude. There aren't enough places in secure psychiatric units to hold all the mentally ill who have committed crimes let alone those who might commit a crime. Our legal system is rightfully reluctant to deprive anyone of liberty on the grounds that they might commit a crime. And yet I can't help but think that in this case, where even a judge found Cho a danger to himself and others, there ought to have been something that could have been done to restrain him.

My experience has been that it is difficult to get help for people who suffer from mental illness. The curse of this kind of affliction is that it can make the person unable to see a problem and to refuse to accept help. I have personally seen people having a psychotic episode suffer because they had no way to get to the public health clinic. (I've taken the persons to hospital myself.) I have had persons who were disturbed and suffering paranoia make all sorts of accusations and threats against me, only to find there was nothing that could be done to make the person get help. I have had students in college who had some type of mental illness that didn't make them dangerous in any way, but it did prevent them from functioning at the level that they needed to function in order to complete the course I was teaching. In every case they refused to accept any assistance I offered so that they could succeed. I have seen the agony of families with a member suffering from dementia, but lacking the financial resources to provide custodial care. It is unbelievable that the richest, most technologically advanced country in the history of the world can't do better in carrying for people who cannot care for themselves.

I was greatly disturbed that the echos from the shots had hardly faded before the gun-nuts were out warning people against using this event as a reason for placing any controls on guns. And the right-wing wackos on talk radio were already saying that if more people had concealed weapons this sort of thing could have been stopped. Somebody with a gun could have taken out the shooter and saved countless lives. Maybe that's true in this case, but I doubt it. I can imagine frightened people accidently shooting innocent people because, unlike law-enforcement officials, they really wouldn't know how to handle the situation. I have trouble with assumption that increasing the number of weapons per capita will decrease the number of people murdered.

I don't see a problem with people who collect guns or use guns for target shooting or for hunting (real hunting, not this nonsense where people buy an animal or a flock of birds and then proceed to slaughter them.) I don't see a problem in people having guns in their homes for protection and maybe for some people in specific circumstances to carry weapons in public. I am just very uneasy with lots of people carrying concealed weapons just because they want to. I have watched several fender-bender traffic accidents erupt into fist-fights and wondered what would have happened if one of the persons were carrying a gun. I have also know people who got wounded in the cross-fire between two people shooting it out. How many more times would that happen if the number of guns people were carrying in public were increased?

I am not proposing outlawing guns. As a practical matter we couldn't do it. There are too many already loose in our country, more are made all the time, and illegal ones pour in from overseas. We have no idea what's in most of the shipping containers that are unloaded in our ports every day. We don't have enough custom agents to find out. It would be easy enough to put a small nuclear weapon let alone a bunch of Uzzis in a container and send it into the country. We seem to be in a panic to build a wall and send out the National Guard to make sure no poor Mexican sneaks across the border to work illegally, but ignore the real dangers. No, it would be hard to limit the number of guns.

And then there is the constitutional right to bear arms. Of course the NRA seems blind to purpose of that right, to provide for a well-regulated militia, not to arm a bunch of vigilantes. And what our founding fathers pictured as arms was a muzzle-loading musket, not the sophisticated weapons people are able to own today. Why does someone other than law enforcement need a Glock 19 that can fire five rounds a second, with 33 shots in a magazine that can be changed in two seconds? And why would they need hollow-point bullets that only have the purpose of killing people?

I found it ironic that after 9/11, the Attorney General refused to allow investigators to review gun registrations for clues. It's perfectly all right to spy on American citizens, listen in on their phone conversations, find out what books they are checking out of the library–all without a warrant–but it's not all right to find out who might have a weapon.

Gun ownership aside, something else troubles me. It was horrible, horrible that 32 people were murdered at Virginia Tech. Yet the murder rate in the U.S. is so high that nearly 50 people are killed every day, about 2/3 of them with guns. We are hardly aware of that. Was it Stalin who said something like when one man is killed it's a tragedy; when millions are killed it's a statistic. We politicize the problem rather than trying to solve it. Our governments have become ineffective bureaucracies that do everything except serve the people.

Case in point: in our community we have an excellent agency called Church Without Walls. They work with youth who have come under the juvenile justice system and with youth who seem to be headed for trouble. They are very effective at turning these youth around and keeping them out of trouble. They recently applied for a grant to continue their work. It's a grant they have received in the past and had every right to believe they would receive again because they actually accomplish something worthwhile. In some sort of administrative oversight, one form didn't get signed when the proposal was submitted. Did the agency that received the proposal call the administrator to tell him he made a mistake and he had to come sign the document? No. They rejected the proposal outright. The program will not be funded. Some kids who might have been rescued will be lost. Who knows how much grief that will cause sometime in the future? Who will save us from the idiocy of our own government?

Where are some leaders with vision and common sense, people who will make government work for the common good instead of for special interests? Where are leaders who will do what's right and not what's politically expedient? Where are they? They lose the elections. People prefer to be told what they want to hear rather than the truth. So the problems continue. Oh, there will be a fuss for a while, maybe congressional hearings, maybe even a select committee that will make some well-reasoned suggestions that will be ignored. And on it will go.

What can we do? People of good-will must do whatever they can to make things better now how small the results are. People of faith must continue to commit themselves in prayer. And we must struggle on the way, no mater how dangerous and convoluted it seems.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne