Insanity

It never ceases to amaze me how, in the aftermath of any tragedy involving guns, the immediate response of a great many Americans is to call for more guns. "If everybody had themselves some shootin' irons, ain't none of this be allowed to happen".
It likewise never ceases to amaze me how, in the aftermath of any Canadian tragedy involving guns, the immediate response of a great many Canadians is to call for more restrictions against guns. "If you ban the guns, see, and then reinforce the ban with another ban...well, hell, let's just triple-ban the damned things, eh?"
For those Canadians who are so viscerally anti-American as to semi-automatically put out of mind the fact that school shootings happen in the True North, Strong And Free Of Those Damned Yankees, here...constitutes... a... refresher... course.

The fact is, these school shootings happen all over the world, and the gun control or lack thereof in any given country has very little if anything to do with them. There are countries such as Britain and Australia in which guns are banned outright, yet somehow people in those countries (including schoolchildren) are killed with guns. There are also countries in which guns are standard issue to teenagers (Switzerland and Israel come to mind) , yet rampages such as the one we saw at Virginia Tech yesterday are all but unheard of.

You're never going to rid the world of these tragedies entirely, try as you might. But you can minimize them. The key to doing so doesn't involve handing out guns to anyone who wants one; nor does it involve registries, stiffer sentencing, or confiscating hunting rifles.

It involves a wholesale change in our attitudes towards violence.

In this twenty first century--roughly our three hundredth as a species--you'd think we would have outgrown the urge to bash our neigbour's head in with rocks. Instead, we've devised ever more sophisticated ways of doing just that (our most advanced invention in this area involves splitting the rocks into atoms, and then splitting the atoms...)
I'm far from the first person to suggest that Homo sapiens, supposedly at the pinnacle of evolution (who says? We do, of course!), hasn't evolved much at all. My friend Peter Dodson recently wrote an article rather despairing of humanity, citing opinions I've long held myself. I love individual humans, quite a few of them, in fact...but whenever we coalesce into groups, bad things seem to happen. We starting behaving like chickens.
Chickens seek out the weak, not to elevate them, but to utterly destroy them. Other animals do the same thing, and we call it Darwinism, survival of the fittest and all that. Then--strangely--while frantically convincing ourselves we're above all that "nature, red in tooth and claw", we act in precisely the same ways.
The funny, sad thing is, we are above all that. Or at least we have the potential to be. Humans have the ability to elevate the weakest among us, to measure 'fitness' on a wide variety of scales, and to ensure that basic needs are met for all. This is the ideal expressed in a panoply of constitutions and credos the world over. Nearly all of us believe people should not be massacred, individually or in groups. Most of us think it's wrong that people starve to death, that women are raped, that children are sold into slavery. All these forms of violence and neglect are held to be immoral by much of the population.
And yet, it all happens. The weak are battened upon by the strong worldwide, emotionally, spiritually, and often physically. We cultivate a culture of difference, then rank the differences, making ourselves superior. Then we use our self-appointed superiority as a justification for violence. Whole groups of people are robbed of their humanity. They're occasionally exterminated, like vermin. And occasionally, out of a desperate desire to even the playing field, they exterminate right back.
What will it take for us to realize we are all one human race? When will we finally understand that winning does not have to mean somebody loses? When will we accept that violence is not a solution to anything?
The shooter at Virginia Tech no doubt thinks all his problems are solved. But he's dead. Some solution.
Violence is insane. Cho Seung-Hui was insane. The world is insane. It's all related.