There is this Sandra Bullock movie about rehab called 28 Days (not 28 Days Later, that's something else altogether, involving zombies and a lot more indie movie cinematic ambition). The movie I'm talking about is a typical Hollywood treatment of a less-than-Hollywood-beautiful ailment: alcoholism. (Not that Hollywood is lacking in substance abuse -- perish the thought! -- I more refer to their tendency to portray excessive drinking as something you can easily survive with a fabulous complexion and a shiny sheaf of hair. Talk about suspension of disbelief.)
Anyway, there is a part in the movie where, over the course of Sandra's character's twelve-stepper revelations, someone intones an adage about the definition of insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Personally, I always think of real insanity as involving a little more paranoid drama, yelled gibberish, and forced injections from Nurse Ratchet, but this movie's argument has its merits too. I mean, if people in asylums could figure out that their current course of action was keeping them there, they would likely change that course, right? It makes sense. Which brings me to my topic -- school shootings. (Didn't see that coming, did ya?)
But the truth is, if doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, is a passably working definition of insanity, what exactly is going on with the school shootings in the United States? Is America -- its courts, its laws, its system, and its society -- insane in its treatment of guns and that treatment's innate consequences? I will tell you, as an expat American who has been perched across the Atlantic for a lot of the last decade, it kinda looks that way. And as a man who has a niece at college in a major American university, I'm not averse to pointing out the need for straight talk on the subject...or straitjackets, I guess, if it comes to that.
Because there is a clear pattern emerging, starting with Columbine, or even earlier (don't forget that guy in the tower in Texas). There is a tragic event at an institution of learning. It involves firepower - guns of some kind. And it involves death. For weeks, news coverage returns to this event and its victims, with the morbid regularity of a newly neutered dog licking its stitches. With good cause, in an essential way -- we should be horrified. This is not something that should happen in our country. We are first world. We are not a war zone. But this stuff does happen here, apparently. It keeps happening.
The reality is we have different gun laws than the rest of the 'civilized' world. We have the whole pesky "right to bear arms" built into our rights. But when does common sense finally rule? When do we finally say, "Hey, this is not working. This is proving disastrous, this is proving nightmarish, this is proving fatal. Guns are not something we need to have a right to own in the same way we need to have a right to assemble. We need to re-evaluate."
Maybe, just maybe, our founding fathers couldn't have envisioned our 2008 scenario back in 1791. You know, like how a few generations later we weren't able to predict greenhouse gases and global warming. How were those men, raised in a world where you had to reload most hunting muskets after a single shot, to anticipate the "great strides" humankind would make in their ability to kill each other?
So we Americans say, guns don't kill people, people do. And we Americans say, it's in our Bill of Rights to have all the guns we want. And we can voice these platitudes all day long, and they aren't incorrect. But does it change the plight of the college student gunned down in his classroom? Does it help the mother who thought her daughter was in the safest of places, and whose daughter is now in the stillest of graves? When do we admit instead that we have grown more violent, and quite different, in those 217 years since that right to bear arms was conceived, and now we are smart enough to realize that we aren't going to need our citizenship to form a militia anytime soon. We aren't fighting the British Empire anymore. In the words of the young people we need to protect, we are so over that.
Nowadays, we need to fight to keep our country's children and their teachers from being gunned down because an overly hormonal and misguided moron decided to take his vendetta against society into a classroom or cafeteria, along with a too-easily acquired weapon of death. Let's admit it -- things change.
Or I guess we can keep on doing the same thing, and hoping for different results. Crazy? Not us.