A lot of the justification for arming students and faculty on campus is built on the "what if" stories of a brave, armed student in one of the classrooms.
There are different stories that go to the argument for controlling the availability of guns. Here's one from this morning's New York Times.
A former student at Columbia writes about a classmate that showed the same symptoms as Cho at Virginia Tech but would not have been armed.
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The New York Times
April 22, 2007
Editorial Observer
Another Young Man Who Was Angry and Lonely, but Unarmed
By NICHOLAS KULISH
I will never forget that the Long Island Rail Road massacre happened during my freshman year at Columbia in 1993. Like the recent killings at Virginia Tech, it was an indelibly horrible event, but that’s not why I remember precisely where I was.
A handful of students from my freshman floor were watching the coverage in the tiny, ill-kept common room where we usually played a Sega golf video game or watched bad talk shows between classes. At first, the news that Colin Ferguson had murdered six people on a commuter train elicited the kind of stunned reactions you might expect. One of my classmates got a different message.
“I could take a gun into Butler Library and kill as many people as I wanted and no one could stop me,” this student said, not with a note of concern in his voice or a menacing cackle, but in a neutral tone that was scary exactly because of how drained of feeling it was. His words were all the more frightening because it was probably a true statement. There was nowhere close to the amount of security needed to stop an armed, determined assailant in the school library.
As I read classmates’ descriptions of Seung-Hui Cho last week, I heard echoes of conversations on my hall about the quiet but disquieting presence we had learned to live with. This young man — a classmate reminded me after the tragedy at Virginia Tech — was also flagged for bizarre writings in an English class. He usually did not accost people, but threatened his roommate repeatedly.
He prowled the dorm at odd hours. Even in the middle of the night, getting a drink from the water fountain in the hall, I would catch glimpses of him peering around the corner, watching me but never speaking. The flopping of his childlike bowl haircut was the last thing I would see as he darted out of sight when he realized I was looking back at him.
After the comments about taking a gun to the library, I spoke to the resident adviser, but no one did anything about it. His roommate could not get a new housing assignment and began sleeping on other floors, in other dorms, essentially going into hiding. I sympathized. I was a foot taller, at least 50 pounds heavier, and still completely afraid of the kid.
What strikes me now is how little we did to protect ourselves. This was before the shootings at Columbine and the copycat killings that followed. It was before the Oklahoma City bombing or Sept. 11. There was more of a presumption of safety in those days.
But the biggest difference to my mind was the absence of firearms. I never believed that this increasingly unhinged student would get a handgun or an assault rifle with the restrictive gun laws in New York City. And I certainly could not see him, unstable but also meek, making an illegal buy in an alley.
In my home state, Virginia, as the world now knows to tragic effect, it might have been a completely different story. The state has some of the lightest restrictions on owning and carrying guns. It’s the kind of place where a couple living in a posh Alexandria town house once bragged to me that they had the first two concealed handgun permits issued by the state.
I grew up in Arlington about a 10-minute walk or a five-minute bike ride from a pawnshop where almost anyone without a criminal record could buy guns. When my father drove me to school up the New Jersey Turnpike, we would talk about the police’s trying to stem the tide of illegal weapons from my home state to my adopted city. Friends at school joked that I could make pocket money bringing a few up every time I came back. For all the murders in New York committed with Virginia handguns, it wasn’t all that funny.
It is hard for me, after all these years, to second-guess the administration at Columbia. My strange classmate may not have been capable of following through on his fantasies. So many students act up their first time away from home, so many bright personalities clash in the glare of adolescent egos, so many mental illnesses blossom away from the steadying influence of parents.
To find with any certainty the one in a million who will turn into a spree killer will never be possible. Making it harder for him to acquire handguns is within our power. After several years of increasingly erratic behavior, my classmate was asked to leave. The episode ended as these things must end all the time, without headlines, without bloodshed, and without loss of life. I wonder how it might have ended in Virginia.
nytimes.com |
