In the London Times, under the headline "The United States of America has gone mad," the British novelist John le Carré began his modest polemic, "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember."
Perhaps I've found it. On this first anniversary of the massacre at Virginia Tech (April 16), I'd like to quote part of a recent Letter to the Editor from a man who identifies himself as "a gun owner, a shooting sports enthusiast and a National Rifle Association member." He actually signs his name, though I'm not reckless enough to pass it along and engage him directly. The occasion of his letter was the mindless murder of Eve Carson, president of the University of North Carolina student body, by a pair of habitual criminals with handguns.
"Don't blame me or the NRA," the sports enthusiast begins. "When a person drives a car through a group of people to do them harm, do people automatically call for the banning of the manufacturer's autos? When a person uses any other kind of tool to do harm to fellow humans, is there a call to banish these tools?
Your handgun is a tool, all right. It's the perfect tool—the only easily acquired, easily transported, easily concealed tool—for turning sick minds into killing machines, domestic disputes into rows of tombstones, petty larceny into homicide, neglected teenagers into executioners. This is of course the only country with any claim to civilization where every certified madman and violent felon is welcome to all the firepower he can afford, where in fact it's almost guaranteed that he will acquire it.
"If we can't protect our children, what good are we?" asked Richard L. Canas, the Homeland Security official in charge of school lockdowns in New Jersey. Not much, is my reply. As long as we indulge a minority of armed bullies whose model for America is Dodge City, we're all as crazy as they are. Reversing T.S. Eliot, this is the way our world ends, not with a whimper but a bang.
