WorldView: The majority of students of Virginia Tech are doing something ordinary yet also remarkable this week: they are studying hard for their final exams, writes Gerard Toal.
Working through the horrific murders of 27 of their fellow students and five of their faculty at the hands of a disturbed classmate, Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech community is refusing to be defined by a violent rampage that has shocked the United States and caused sorrow across the world.
Virginia Tech is an institution of higher learning, a place where the young can realise their potential and, as the university slogan puts it, "invent the future". The return of students in large numbers after such a terrible crime is a reaffirmation of this to the world.
The loss of so many young lives on April 16th has shaken us all. A flotilla of media decamped to our main university campus in Blacksburg and recorded our shock and tears. It has also encountered, in conversations with our students and faculty, our capacity to rally and persevere. As a Virginia Tech faculty member for 18 years, I was gratified by two aspects of our response. First, Virginia Tech faculty and students correctly challenged the widespread use of the multimedia images produced by Cho Seung-Hui which were integral to enacting his fantasy of heroic "re-masculinisation" through brutal violence. The complicity of the media in producing murder as fascinating spectacle is widespread across the globe. Second, amidst our pain, there was also human empathy for Cho's family and for those beyond our campus who suffer from structural and direct violence every day. The death toll in Baghdad last week was horrific. The Iraq war continues to claim the lives of young US soldiers, some former Virginia Tech students.
The daily death toll from gun violence across the US is also horrific. The New York Times reported last weekend that an average of 81 people per day died from gunfire in the US in 2004. Some were suicides, others "accidents" and the rest classified as homicides. In Washington DC in 2005, according to public statistics, there were 195 murders, the lowest level in recent years, yet still a grim total for a city of only 550,521 people. Look for a rise in the future if the staunchly conservative US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has its way. Last month it struck down the district's restrictive handgun law, opening the door to a broad rollback of gun control laws across the US, especially in its major cities (the decision is on appeal, and may come before the US Supreme Court).
Marginalised by last Monday's horror at Virginia Tech was a large demonstration in Washington DC for congressional voting rights. Despite having a population almost as numerous as states like North Dakota (636,677), Alaska (663,661), South Dakota (775,933), and larger than Wyoming (509,294), this overwhelmingly African-American city has no senators or representatives with political voting power in the Congress. This matters significantly when it comes to gun control laws to promote public safety. All of the states comparable to DC in population are power centres for those forces glamorising guns and undermining existing gun control laws. National Rifle Association constructions of "tradition" and "rights" are blended with frontier mythology to sell guns as necessary accessories of a supposedly "free" lifestyle. Paranoid fantasies revolving around government conspiracies and invading outsiders are used to mobilise gun owners into political projects as single-issue voters backing NRA-endorsed candidates. Gun laws are for sissies; real men pack heat. But there is no conspiracy, only the organised effort of the gun lobby, deeply entrenched in Congress, to thwart cities suing gun manufacturers for the devastation caused by their products, and to let the Clinton era assault weapons ban lapse. Under the Bush administration, a plethora of semi-automatic assault weapons are available for sale to the public.
Last Friday, in the wake of the Virginia Tech rampage, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a Bill creating a new congressional seat for Washington DC and, to attract Republican support, for Republican-leaning Utah also. The measure was previously stalled by Republican efforts to attach a law formally overturning the District's 31-year-old ban on handguns. The Bill moves forward into the Senate where the overrepresentation of rural states and the underrepresentation of the cities is most pronounced. It also faces a potential White House veto.
Beyond this modest gesture, the Virginia Tech massacre has generated no serious political response. Rather than face it, politicians have run from the issue, blaming university officials and campus security rather than their own complicity with making deadly semi-automatic weapons easily available.
The Virginia Tech community reacted strongly against an initial media-driven desire to blame the university and its security for the absence of a "lockdown" of campus (as if an open campus should be like a prison).
Petitions of support for the university president and police chief made it clear we were not accepting this easy "blame the local officials" strategy. Contrast this to how the Australian government reacted in 1996 to the massacre of 35 people in Port Arthur Tasmania by a deranged killer using a semi-automatic rifle. Within 12 days, the federal and state government agreed a ban on semi-automatic rifles and placed strict controls on other guns. The government also launched a large gun buyback programme. The result? Suicides and homicides have declined. In the decade before Port Arthur, there were 11 mass shooting incidents. In the last 11 years, there were none.
The US faces many difficult challenges. Can the US extract itself with dignity from Iraq and more effectively thwart terrorism? Can it meet the challenge of global climate change after ignoring it for so long? Can the federal government create legislative solutions that provide adequate healthcare for all its citizens as its population ages? And, while its leading politicians may not want to acknowledge it, the Virginia Tech killings renew the question: can the federal government establish meaningful control on handguns and assault weapons, as in Australia?
These are profound challenges for the future. My hope and feeling is that some of those students studying hard at Virginia Tech, in the wake of a horrible tragedy, will be involved in inventing a better future for the US, one where security is grounded in sensible gun laws and Virginia Tech is the name of an excellent university, not a citation in a continuing list of murderous rampages.
Gerard Toal is professor of government and international affairs at the school of public and international affairs at Virginia Tech