The news about the tragic shootings at Northern Illinois University the other day will, I’m afraid, have the effect of reigniting the call for permitting students and professors to carry guns on campus.
Americans are the people of excess in all areas of life. Faced with the horrific occasion of terrible violence we call for more of the ingredients that make violence possible.
I am not a social psychologist and I never took a Sociology course in college. Yet I know that the abstract process of emulation depends in no small measure on the absence of revulsion.
The call for more gun toting people at our nation’s colleges is of course a product of fear.
But it’s also a proposition that’s made possible only if one accepts violence as a signature circumstance.
I am repulsed by the industry and machinery of violence.
I don’t accept the proposition that carrying a gun makes a man or woman safer.
I’m not alone by virtue of having this view. I hold no moral compass.
I think that more guns in more stray hands is no solution to our nation’s evident epidemic of mental illness.
Still it’s the abstract admission of violence as a necessary component of civil life that most troubles me.
More! Let’s have more!
Or to paraphrase Orwell: “perpetual violence for permanent peaceful co-existence.”
S.K.
Our heart goes out to the family and friends of those whose lives were lost by this terrible act of violence.
Planet of the Blind 