Final exams, the Freshman 15 and untimely hangovers: Things most college students try to avoid, ultimately suffer through and laugh about years later. The rituals have become almost-synonymous with the experience of being a university student, and while they can seem painful and humiliating in an isolated context, they are easily curable with time and perspective, and residual soreness almost always fades away.
The decision of University of Alabama at Huntsville faculty member Amy Bishop, who allegedly shot and killed three co-workers at a staff meeting, was a rare and outstandingly dark display of a twisted maniac. But it was also one of nearly a dozen on a college campus since Seung-Hui Cho gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech in April 2007. It was less than a year ago that a 21 year old was shot and killed just across the Charles River inside a Harvard University dorm and almost exactly two since a nursing student killed six and injured almost 20 at Northern Illinois University. And while the butcheries were jarring and chilling in the subsequent days or weeks, the victims were grieved over, prayed for and ultimately forgotten by most. Not because any incident was more or less appalling then the one before or after, but because there were too many to count, and because our hearts could only handle so much.
Whether they extend out of educational institutions or elsewhere, reports of attacks with firearms have become as frequent as payments made for apartment utilities. Lives lost in senseless displays of violence have become statistics and probability and reaction has developed into more of a sullen apathy than the stuff of emotional concern. We’ve had enough practice to develop a routine for how to close our eyes for a second, rationalize brutality and move on. After, we focus the whole of ourselves on hoping that whether the next breaking news story comes across the country or down the street, it’s not with the name of a loved one attached.
Firearms and their operators are not known for compromise or argument concession. While the debate between personal rights and public safety continues to rage on, innocent people continue to die at the hands of those who cannot capably express themselves by any other means. As legislation stands, the preservation of the right to wield a semiautomatic is more important than keeping the undeservedly murdered alive. The solution seems simple enough, but we must be missing something.
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