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They can’t decide if it’s twenty dead or thirty from the shooting this morning at Virginia Tech; the numbers in the newspapers don’t match the headlines or the AP wire or the captions underneath the photos of law enforcement officers crouching behind dumpsters with rifles. The women in the next cubicle are talking about gun control. Which I guess is what lots of people are talking about, including the president, who is horrified, concerned, and “believes that there is a right for people to bear arms but that all laws must be followed.” That’s from this morning.Furthermore, according to his press secretary, "Bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting ... is against the law and something someone should be held accountable for," and are we really talking about this, right now? Because I don’t so much have the stomach for it, at the moment. At the moment I’d like to go home and be quiet, I’d like for all of us, this afternoon, to go home and be quiet, and for the world to feel a little less fragile. But since that seems unlikely I’ll just offer out the unhelpful opinion that I am tired of accountability, that accountability is always and necessarily too late. And I don’t want to discuss gun control right now, because it’s more complicated than a sentence and because it can wait, I think, until tomorrow. I’d prefer instead that right now we all had just a little space of quiet to think about a bunch of young men and women, and all they probably hoped for, and how this day should have been different. And about how to have a world where we aren’t talking about the lives of college students - the ones here on their campuses, and the ones we’ve sent far away - in terms of plus or minus ten.
posted by tortaluga @ 2:16 PM
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