Boris Kaimakov: Echoes of Virginia tragedy
The Virginia Tech massacre shocked Russia. Not that violence is new to this country, but the number of the cold-blooded killer’s victims strikes the most uncaring mind.No one doubts the killer’s madness. But then, it would be too simple to explain the tragedy by insanity alone. Russian online discussions also point to the American way of life and youth mentality.In their coverage of the university bloodshed, Russian media outlets focus on almost unlimited arms trade in the United States, so the majority of the public is sure that is the root of the evil. True, when just anyone can get a weapon, we Russians have ample reasons to cite an old sinister joke: “He who shoots first laughs best.”The more advanced Russian Internet users, however, take a broader view, blaming tremendous psychological pressure in the U.S. - and in all developed countries, for that matter. Russia is no exception here, though political correctness has not penetrated it that far yet, and social rules are not so stringent.An urge to break the law is present in almost every subconscious mind. Reaction equals action, so the urge is at its strongest and ugliest in America, with its unquestioned supremacy of the law. Though the South Korean student killer’s message has not been completely decoded yet, his sensational “Blame them, not me” shows what he thought of the American public. “America might have proclaimed freedoms, but its rules of the game are overly strict, and one feels it even as a toddler,” is one remark from a Russian blog. Many blogs say innermost human emotions clash with political correctness to cause inevitable rampages - a view born of young anarchism and social protest. “They’ve robbed us of the right to anger,” a Russian blogger quotes an American friend of his.The massacre gives a formidable argument to Russians demanding a ban on violent computer games, which are overwhelmingly popular in this country. As Russian psychologists see it, such games give the young mind an idea of death as virtual make-belief. One blogger reasons: “I am not sure to what an extent the substitute works but many children find an aggression outlet in computer games. When they get older, they feel the whole world is a huge game. That, too, may be a factor behind mass murder - one just sees no difference between virtual and real death. Lawyers, as I’ve heard, occasionally use that point to defend killers. ‘He felt he was playing. He pulled the trigger as he would a joystick,’ they say.”Some young bloggers advance strong arguments as they accuse “adults” of propagandizing social competition in a de-humanized world where might is right.“There is an alarming contradiction in American life. On the one hand, socialization, in its many forms, is a permanent and very aggressive demand. Political correctness is one of such forms. We Russians come down on it, though it is the least of all evils - if an evil at all. On the other hand, there is cutthroat competition. It is encouraged in every group while the community does not feel responsible enough for its individual members. What we have as the result is, first, huge problems bred by giving up coercive socialization and, second, doubtful emotional reward voluntary socialization brings. Some people protest, which is natural - and there is never a shortage of weapons. Then, the extent of one’s madness alone determines the outcome,” blogger dr_fedor says.
Russian students come to shocking conclusions as they look at their own environment. “It’s a wolf pack,” they complain. Some say American student life is no different. One blogger who attended high school in America, says: “It’s absolutely horrible. They pack several hundred 16 to 18-year-olds together and TEACH THEM NOTHING in particular. The guys mix any way they like. No wonder, hazing is awful.”
Some bloggers compare Russian young people’s all-pervading cynicism to their U.S. peers’ belief in the American Dream: “Russian students tell the world to buzz off, but only under their breath, while Americans have a sacred belief in their dream. That’s the most terrible thing of all. They are under the worst kind of pressure: they PUT PRESSURE ON THEMSELVES.”
Professor Yenikolopov, one of Russia’s foremost experts on violence, stunned the Russian web community by assuming that serial killers were a purely American phenomenon. Amazing though his point is, statistics support it - the number of serial murders in the U.S. exceeds the Russian several hundred-fold.
Will America manage to control rampant violence? Russian bloggers are pessimistic. “There is a cult not so much of abstract wealth as of routine consumption. Your colleagues, neighbors, girlfriends, parents and kids - all judge you by the price of your car, cell phone, watch and all that. The more expensive things you buy the greater social success you are. Otherwise, you are a loser, and God help you. That’s true not only for the States. It’s like that everywhere - in Russia, too. You have to show off day in, day out. You always feel uncertain of your success, and afraid of becoming the underdog. How to relax, to get away from it all? We Russians have vodka, and Americans have guns,” sums up a blogger.
Of course, the Virgina Tech incident is discussed on blogosphere. Particularly the “Russian view” on it. Sean Guillory of “Sean’s Russia Blog” and Lyndon of “Scraps of Moscow” both dedicated an entry on their blogs to the Russian view.
From the German perspective I’d like to add the following:
I strongly oppose the “constitutional right to bare arms” in the USA and the over all easy way to buy arms in this country. Firearms do not belong into private hands. Firearms belong into the hands of those who need them and who are qualified and certified to use them. The private “gun law” in Germany is very strict. You have to prove your “need” for a firearm, have to be a hunter, a forester, a security professional (e.g. bodyguard) or a sports shooter. Some very rare professions, which are accepted being “at risk” may also apply. Such a profession would be e.g. a person transporting goods of high material value, or money, as an employee of a transportation firm or an idividual, like a goldsmith.
You will be thoroughly checked by the authorities. Your background will be checked, there is no way for people with a criminal background or mental instability to obtain a “permit”. Such a permit is not for eternity, there are many ways it can be withdrawn. Drunken drivers will not only lose their driver’s license, the “gun permit” will be gone too.
Private gun owners will also have to prove their ability to store their firearm appropriately. Weapon and ammunition have to be stored seperately in a armoured box or safe, sport shooters may only transport their firearm, unloaded and secured, to the range (or to the gunsmith) and back. Some are even required to store their firearm in the gun club / sport club where they practice theri sport. Sport shooters may only apply for a “sport shooter’s permit” after the sports club testified that they have participated in security training and regular practicing for more than a year. Also the amount of arms per individual is strictly limited. I am not sure about the law today, but I rember that the amount of firearms per sport shooter used to be limited to 3 rifles and 2 revolvers / pistols per individual.
Guns restriction in the US is handled at the state level. So the restrictions vary state to state. Virginia has some of the most lax in the country. You don’t need a permit to buy a hand gun, nor is there a waiting period. They have instant background checks like most states. Virginia also restricts buyers to purchasing one weapon per month. According to some news reports, there is a question asking about being in a mental institution on the form you fill out when you buy a gun. But it appears that Cho lied about this.
I actually favor a more practical approach to guns like what you’ve described above. I think California is taking a step in the right direction by putting restrictions on buying ammunition. There was a bill passed the other day that mandates background checks on buying bullets. I think that this is a good idea.
What about all those “reloaders” ? Is this regulation about “factory made” ammo only or does “reloading” count as well ?
The majority of people are peaceful and not criminal. Very few people ever commit a crime. Banning guns assumes that if people have guns they will commit crimes, while in reality it is the other way around: people who commit crimes will probably have guns.
Very few people, relatively speaking, get killed by guns in the hands of citizens. The majority of deadly fire arm usage is the result of government action (i.e. mostly the police and the army). If we wanted to reduce the death from firearms, we would have to take the guns away from the governments. That, of course, is a stupid idea.
Banning guns to reduce crime is akin to banning encryption software to stop terrorists. We seem to believe that the only people who would want to use guns are criminals and deviants. The majority of gun owners, however, just like the majority of encryption software users, are law-abiding, non-criminal people. By banning guns, we assume that most people are potential criminals.
Thirty-four people died at Virginia Tech. That doesn’t even increase the average death-rate of Virginia by a fraction of a percentage. I don’t have any numbers, but I am sure that more people died in the USA that very day in motor vehicle accidents — and most of them as a result of people driving drunk. As a share of the total non-natural deaths in the US, guns rank at the very bottom (the top being smoking related deaths, car accidents, and such).
Rampages have a very emotional impact on people, and we therefore react to it very emotionally. There are 300,000,000+ people living in the US, and a significant share of them owns guns of all kinds. Yet, we see only a handful of these events every once in a while. Banning guns is going to do nothing about making the chance of an early death less than it is now.
What banning guns would achieve is treating the entire population as potentially criminal — and the implications of that are actually quite terrifying. People are free to vote as soon as they are 18 — which means, we let everybody almost without exception make decisions that impact the lives of everybody else on a daily basis — including war. Yet, we don’t trust these people to bear arms.
The causes of this massacre are neither guns nor the ’stress’ in American life. If ’stress’ were the cause, we should see thousands of such cases every day.
We are dealing with a single mad-man who killed 34 people with a gun. Put this into proportion of the fact that most people don’t go out on a rampage, even when they have guns.
Data on what causes death:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_19.pdf
(2004 data)
Firearms:16.912 suicides, 661 accidents, 222 unclear intent, 11.250 assault
Suicides NOT involving firearms: 15.044
Drugs: 28.457
Alcohol 20.398
Accidental Poisonings: 19.250
Motor vehicle accidents: 43.947
RM: The majority of deadly fire arm usage is the result of government action (i.e. mostly the police and the army).
How many innocent students and professors where shot by soldiers or policemen in the USA this year ? How many in Germany or Russia ?
A madman with a club won’t enter a room full of people and kill one after the other. A madman with a firearm will. I don’t feel the need to own a firearm, not owning one doesn’t make me less free.
Heribert asks: How many innocent students and professors where shot by soldiers or policemen in the USA this year ? How many in Germany or Russia ?
I don’t know. I don’t make a difference between professors, students, housewives, or street-sweepers. I think quite a few people who really didn’t do much wrong were killed by the US government in recent months. And Russia, for example, has one of the highest murder rates in the world — much of it through firearms, despite rather restrictive gun-ownership laws.
I don’t care how people die, what matters is how many. Guns in the hands of non-criminal civilians seem to be rather low on the death-cause scale. Gun laws won’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals (I don’t think the Baader-Meinhoff gang, for example, was actually slapped with ‘illegal gun-ownership’), but keep them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. The latter group is generally not prone to use guns in a murderous fashion.
I work on the presumption that the majority of people is not homicidal and generally law-abiding. Hence, the vast majority of people wouldn’t turn into killers even if you made them own assault rifles with ammunition (which, I think, is the case for quite a few Swiss citizens).
RM, 661 accidents wouldn’t have happened. BTW, in the news RIGHT NOW is report on a madman in Germany, a sports-shooter, who injured two policemen in Berlin. Visit http://www.n24.de !
Heribert, 661 out of a population of 300,000,000 is too insignificant to even calculate the percentage of. If we made alcohol illegal, we’d reduce the death rates from that by quite a bit (though, it would bring other things up).
How many killings have been prevented by the use/threat of use of fire-arms? It appears that those states in the US with the most restrictive laws on firearms have, on average, higher crime rates in general than those with more loose rules.
Funny thing is that non of the law-abiding citizens at Virginia tech actually carried a fire-arm / used it. Maybe we would have had a few less death if somebody / or a lot of people had pulled a gun on the dude?
Reminds me of the incident of a would-be bus hijacker, who accidentally wanted to kidnap a bus full of — police recruits returning from the firing range…….
“661″ would be a VERY SIGNIFICANT number if one of these lives had been the life of your wife / son / daughter / mother / father ….
Sorry RM, calling 661 lives “an insignificant number” and breaking it down to statistics is simply horrible.
Heribert,
if my wife were dying of an extremely rare disease that affects, maybe, 1 out of a billion, I’d consider that a global tragedy and would argue for the allotment of unlimited funds and efforts to solve it — damn the other problems afflicting this planet.
If I were a minister and had to allocate a limited amount of money to a) reducing a common disease that affected, say, 100,000 people a year down to 20,000, or b) reducing a rare disease from 100 to 0, I’d go for option a.
We are talking policy here, and policy only works on the depersonalized level.