School Shootings: For Some Reason, Exclusively American Disasters

Towards the end of the Harry Potter series, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is threatened with closure because parents start worrying too much about the safety of their children to allow them to go to school. If yesterday's massacre at Virginia Tech University in the US is anything to go by, parents in the real world should start worrying about sending their wards to school too. Schools and universities, at least in the US, are suddenly terrifying places. They have become the quintessential modern hotbeds of blood-spilling; so much so, that Quentin Tarantino might just be tempted to have his next flick centered around an American university. That's right - if there's any place today more likely to attract gunfire and violence than a crowded locality in Iraq, it's got to be an American school. Sounds ironical? Not nearly as ironical as it would have if Cho Seung-hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech slaughter, had been a native of North Korea rather than South Korea.

What comes across as an oddity, though not necessarily a surprise, is that school shootings are almost exclusive to the US. Of all the instances of gunfire-involving violence at educational institutions that have been reported in the last 30 years, nearly 90% have taken place in the US. So does this point to something inherently unstable about American youngsters? I wouldn't quite go to that extreme, but there's no going around the fact that the rebellious culture that has been prevalent in America has made picking up a gun and deciding to kill anyone who annoys you a lot less frightful than normal. Cho Seung-hui, a loner, had no apparent grouse with life other than 'rich kids', 'debauchery' and 'deceitful charlatans' on campus. Perhaps it is unfair to draw conclusions about the causes of these mishaps based on the unconfirmed emotions of a reclusive, possibly deranged student. But it is pertinent to note that there is an undeniable connection with the excesses reportedly observed in American universities and the angst, sometimes religiously motivated, that drives most campus killers.

There are other possible reasons for such shootings, of course. The most obvious among these would be that educational institutions, being invariably packed with a wide assortment of people, offer fairly irresistible attention-grabbing potential to the attention-seeking shooters. Then there's the inescapable fact that getting hold of handguns is remarkably easy in the US. In Virginia, for instance, any legal resident who is 21 years of age or older is eligible to purchase a handgun provided he or she has not been convicted of any felonies. Ridiculous? You bet. I wonder how the US lawmakers, in all their glorious wisdom, thought it fit to allow blatant selling of guns to every conviction-escaping potential criminal with such gleeful indifference. There was a movie adaptation of the John Grisham book The Runaway Jury some years back that changed Grisham's original cigarette/lung cancer plot to a courtroom brawl that had at its heart the prevention of indiscriminate trade in weapons. Though I was mightily annoyed about the change of plot, I couldn't have agreed more with the idea that handguns should NOT be sold without the strictest supervision and control. But that's just plain old common sense! It's amazing how notions of free trade and capitalism can sometimes blind one so completely to the benefits of basic reasoning.

The US needs to clamp down on such horrific incidents, and fast. After all, Mr. George W. Bush is out to reform the world and bring all savage (read: non-democratic) countries to American levels of civility and honour. It'd be a poor lookout for him if his own countrymen kept trying to drag American society into the revolting realms of barbarism replete with gun-toting madmen and tragic deaths of innocent people. Time for some soul-searching, Mr. Bush?