Virginia Tech Tragedy

Brian Hollar is providing a personal and detailed report of the news coming out of Blacksburg. I've just received an email from GMU's Office for International Students, evidently some news agencies aren't specifying which university in Virginia was the scene.

This is a constitutional moment in its worst sense, but as so many seem to take glee from the opportunity to discuss gun control, I want to add some thoughts:

• This isn't about the inevitability of a tragedy due to the sheer prevelance of gun ownership. If that were the problem we'd be focusing on stories of children accidently killing themselves, not on college shootings
• The right to bear arms is a libertarian tenet, but it's unsound to judge this in isolation. To some extent non-libertarians have to accept that we don't live in a libertarian society, and therefore events are a mixture of causes. Liberal gun laws is a factor, but we shouldn't underestimate the wider, anti-libertarian reasons for gun crimes. I think drug prohibition plays a massive role here
• Europeans must accept the constitutional grounding of this debate. It is a cultural issue with phenomenal significance, and goes far deeper than being a simple policy instrument

Some peoples instinct on hearing this news is sadness and fear. Some people think you reap what you sow. For shame.

Comments

[Andrew Mellor]

I personally thought it extraordinary that the representative of the Virginia Citizen's Defence League (sorry, it might be a very similarly-named organisation) claim on last night's Newsnight that students at college should carry guns, and that if they had, this tragedy would not have taken place. Anthony, I know you've touched on this debate above, and suggested how huge and un-compartmentalised it is, but I have a fundamental problem with students on university campuses carrying guns. To suggest it would result in safer campus environments it pure lunacy - I can think of a few occasions during my time at university in which, if guns were 'the norm', would have resulted in fatal or near-fatal shootings. As it happens, during my (our) three years at Liverpool, I'm not aware that there was a single fatal shooting on campus (though I have not sourced that claim).

[tc]

Not true Andrew, according to game theory anyway. The case for giving everyone a gun is that everyone then has equal power. You won't shoot someone in your lecture if everyone around you is armed, as the consequences will be your own inevitable death. Banning guns makes it possible for one person to seize enormous power over others, as happened yesterday. However, this seems to me to suppose that human beings are all rational which, as anyone who works in education will know, is not the case. Also, if we had guns around at my college, I'd have shot myself long ago.