Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre

The worst shooting rampage in American history took place this morning at the Virginia Tech campus in sleepy Blacksburg. Families across the country have received the grim news of a dead or wounded child, and countless more have stopped to question the safety of their loved ones studying at far off universities.

I am sure the scars to the community and the families will be deep. For many, today’s events will redefine the word “tragedy.”

Already the news media has politicized the killings, using the deaths as a rallying cry for gun control or as a call to arms. “If only the killer hadn’t had access to a firearm” they say. Or conversely, “If only the victims had been packing, none of this would have happened.” Sorry, but getting tough on crime isn’t the answer to this problem.

This is a time when we should be mourning the frailty of human beings, not just in Virginia but across the world. When something truly terrible and disturbing happens, we cannot stand to look it in the face. We either speak of it as “incomprehensible” and “senseless” or we reduce it to the coldly pragmatic and political. We ask what kind of metal detectors we need to buy, what kind of laws we need to pass to keep this from happening ever again.

What we cannot admit is that this sort of violence is perfectly understandable and in fact quite common.

When he pulled the trigger, the students were just animals in his gun sights. Like countless killers, soldiers, and criminals before him, he had disregarded the rights of his victims.

A lone gunman has turned a safe place, a happy place, a place of learning and friendship into a slaughterhouse. The indelible marks of his cruelty will cause future generations of students to shudder as they pass the spot where he died.

While I would take comfort in the belief that the Virginia Tech killer is somewhere underground being poked by demons, it’s probably not true. His hell was standing there in that classroom full of bodies, putting the hot barrel of a gun into his mouth, and in that moment realizing how irreparably fucked and irretrievably wasted his life was.

If we go by the calculus, there will always be balance in the universe. The number of human births will exactly equal the number of human deaths. However each time we ignore the humanity of others, we contribute to the sum total of our suffering, building in the world around us new infernos. Our capacity for this evil is matched only by our capacity for the opposite, our ability to transcend the bullshit of the day-to-day to create those heavenly moments of peace and love. If you want to see heaven or avoid the torments of hell you don’t have to wait for God to choose for you. If you paid attention you’ll notice that you made one or the other today.