When the shooting at Columbine happened, I was
living in Galway, Ireland in an apartment that I shared with two German
students and two American students.
I came home from class and found my German roommates standing uncharacteristically close to the television, watching the news. They turned to me as I entered our shared kitchen. On their faces they wore expressions I will never forget. It wasn't anguish. It was complete bewilderment.
It took them finding words, me watching part of the
news, and a few minutes for me to come to understand what had taken place in Colorado. But it took their questions and
their fumbling for me to start to contemplate this from a different
perspective.
My shock as Columbine unfolded was connected to the
horror and tragedy. To the suffering,
and the lives lost, and the aftermath for each family.
Their bewilderment was different.
Soren asked me: Is this true?
Was what true?
Is it possible? he asked.
What?
This. How
could one person have so many weapons?
How could this boy get a gun, or multiple guns?
Anybody can get a gun, I remember saying.
There was this blank silence.
But how is this so?
Kristina asked.
How is this so?
I had never contemplated gun laws before this
conversation.
But I started paying attention to some questions and
began to understand Soren and Kristina's complete confusion. They could not even register the tragedy
immediately because their minds could not get past the how is this even possible?
I had no problem understanding the how. Guns, weapons, are not hard to come by.
After Columbine, I continued to talk with my German
flatmates about crime in their country.
I started noticing the nature of violent crime within Ireland.
During that period in Ireland, it wasn't that there
were no violent crimes. There were many
during my 8 months there.
Stabbings. Muggings. Beatings.
The reaction within the community and splashed across the newspaper was
the same as the reaction we have in the US when a crime is committed: pain,
grief, questioning.
It's also not that Americans are a more violent brand of humans.
We simply have unprecedented access to a means which
causes excessive harm in a short period of time.
This is an awful point, but here it is: it takes far
longer kill 3 people without an automatic weapon than it does to shoot 20, or
30 with one.
The beatings and stabbings in Ireland seemed to line
up with Soren's explanation of violent crime in Germany. They are horrific. But intervention can happen more quickly
because of the nature of the crime.
We have come to exist with such ease of acquiring
weapons that it does not touch the national consciousness until something like
this occurs.
It keeps occurring.
We can question the young man and whatever illness
plagued his mind.
We can look at how to make a school better
protected, with metal detectors.
Or we can ask: why is a constitutional right that
was written in 1791 still upheld in 2012?
The Right to Bear Arms was inked at a time when it
made sense.
Does it still make sense today?
Does it fit?
Do we need to have such access to automatic weapons
to protect ourselves?
This amendment was adopted on December 15. 221 years
ago.
Two hundred and twenty-one years ago.
The right to bear arms was written during a time when "arms" were single-shot weapons. Before the existence of high velocity clips and semi-automatic rifles. The technology of our weapons has far exceeded the original "arms."
We are being called---yet again---to explore this right, and who exactly it is protecting.
