False posturing and real threats

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Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem:

"What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss."

According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to "fear guns."

Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab.

Yale's Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg reacted to the Virginia Tech murders with decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to "permit the use of obviously fake weapons" such as plastic swords.

But it's not just the danger of overly realistic plastic swords in college plays that we face today. In yet another of his not-ready-for-primetime speeches, Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, started out deploring the violence of Virginia Tech as yet another example of the pervasive violence of our society -- the violence of Iraq, the violence of Darfur, the violence of... er, hang on, give him a minute. Ah, yes, outsourcing: "the violence of men and women who... suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country." And let's not forget the violence of radio hosts: "There's also another kind of violence, though, that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously, had to do with [Don] Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters."

I have had some mail in recent days from people who claimed I had insulted the dead of Virginia Tech. Obviously I regret I didn't show the exquisite taste and sensitivity of Mr. Obama and compare getting shot in the head to an Imus one-liner. Does he mean it? I doubt whether even he knows. When something savage and unexpected happens, it's easiest to retreat to our tropes and bugbears or, in the senator's case, a speech on the previous week's "big news."

Perhaps I'm guilty of the same. But then Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutes of learning on the planet, announces it's no longer safe to expose twentysomething men and women to "Henry V" unless you cry "God for Harry, England and St. George," while brandishing a bright pink and purple plastic sword from the local kindergarten. Except, of course, that the local kindergarten long since banned plastic swords under its own "zero tolerance" policy.

I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they have created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so.