Random Madness, Again

Less than three years after the Virginia campus massacre, another mass murderer strikes at the American heart, this time at a military base where the victims are troops preparing to fight in the Middle East.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of yesterday’s mass shooting that killed at least 12 at Fort Hood, Texas, unlike the disturbed undergraduate Seung-Hui Cho who slaughtered 32 at Virginia Tech, ironically is a psychiatrist trained to treat veterans suffering from combat stress.

He spent most of his professional life at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, caring for trauma patients, yet he is reported to have spoken openly of his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and may have been motivated by anxiety over his imminent deployment.

In the coming days, his life and motives will be endlessly dissected, but such outbursts of violence on American soil are as disturbing as terrorist attacks and even less fathomable, creating even more anxiety for being totally unpredictable.

There will be blather about everything from his Muslim faith to the discrimination he may felt, but the sad truth is that nothing will explain why those innocents are dead or what we can do to keep it from happening again.

The only possible human response is to grieve.

The Gun-Nut Gap

Our national schizophrenia on firearms defies rational explanation. In the wake of yesterday's Supreme Court decision, both presidential candidates and, according to public opinion polls, most voters believe in "the right to bear arms."

Yet only one out of three Americans owns a gun and, after mass murders like Virginia Tech, there is an upsurge of grief and outrage at the easy availability of deadly weapons.

Somehow, there is a disconnection between the idea of guns and the reality of what they do that can't be explained away by NRA lobbying or the fierce protestations of "gun nuts."

How do we reconcile the apparent contradiction that many of those who believe in preserving the life of fetuses are just as passionate about the right to own weapons that kill human beings after birth?

By now we are inured to arguments such as that in a "liberal elite" New York Times editorial today:

"This is a decision that will cost innocent lives, cause immeasurable pain and suffering and turn America into a more dangerous country. It will also diminish our standing in the world, sending yet another message that the United States values gun rights over human life."

Many of us agree with that, but there is no justification for feeling morally superior to those who deny it if we can't find a way to talk about that basic human difference without demonizing each other.

A Virginia Tech Memorial Ceremony

In a gesture of compassion for the 32 victims of a year ago, the man who sold one of the weapons that killed them came to the Virginia Tech campus this week to express his dismay ("I felt like I was hit by a truck") and sympathy (""My heart goes out to the parents and anyone who lost a loved one").

Speaking to Students for Concealed Carry on Campus during "Firearms Education Week," online gun dealer Eric Thompson underscored his remorse by announcing on his web site a sale of guns at cost for two weeks to "help give law-abiding citizens the tools to prevent tragedy."

Organizers of the meeting reacted to a University spokesman's disapproval, saying it would "serve to inflame potential conflict" and placed armed guards at the entrance of the meeting room.

Thompson was bringing a humanitarian message. "We all want to be safe, and we want our kids to be able to go to the park and play."

No word of whether his backers are planning to organize a subsidiary, Tommy Guns for Tots.

The Politics of Murder

Déjà vu won't do. Recurring nightmare is a better description for what happened today on a college campus in DeKalb, Illinois--an armed-to-the-teeth gunman, random shooting, sudden deaths.

This time there were five victims, plus the shooter, who stepped from behind a curtain in a lecture hall and started firing indiscriminately before killing himself on the stage. He had a shotgun, a Glock pistol and another handgun.

Ten months after Virginia Tech, the body count is mercifully lower, but the aftermath will be the same.

A special agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is at the scene, promising to "be urgently tracing the firearms and learning the history of the weapons" to "learn where they came from and how the shooter came to possess them."

Last April, John McCain responded to the Virginia massacre by saying, "We have to look at what happened here, but it doesn't change my views on the Second Amendment, except to make sure that these kinds of weapons don't fall into the hands of bad people...Obviously we have to keep guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens."

Now, as the Republican nominee-to-be courts the favor of his from-my-cold-dead-hands constituency, will his response be any different? The rest of us will have to mourn without him.

Mall Killings: The Arc of Insane Fame

Half a century ago, TV created a new kind of American assassin, one who would escape insignificance by killing someone famous--a President or a star like John Lennon--and become famous for doing it.

Now we are in a new phase of this madness, where quantity has replaced quality in selecting victims. After yesterday's random killing of eight people in an Omaha mall, police report finding a suicide note from the 19-year-old shooter, who had been fired by MacDonald's, saying he was going to be famous.

He joins the Virginia Tech rampage killer who left self-pitying videos in achieving notoriety through mass murder. Perhaps this new stage of insane fame was inevitable. Arthur Bremer, who was just released after 35 years in prison, wanted to assassinate Richard Nixon but settled for Gov. George Wallace because the President was too well-guarded. It's so much easier to kill numbers of people at random.

In our grief, perhaps we should do with these sociopaths what the media do with rape victims, withhold their names, certainly not to protect them but to deny them the fame that motivated their savagery. It's the least we can do out of respect for the victims.

A Boycott of Larry Craig's Oppressors

After the Virginia Tech massacre, a few courageous believers in the Second Amendment, Fred Thompson among them, spoke up and put the blame where it belonged, on those who let innocent students and faculty be killed by not being armed.

Now, public-spirited citizens of the American Land Rights Association are speaking out on behalf of Larry Craig, denouncing the “Gestapo tactics” of the Minneapolis police and calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Air Terminal.

“This is a really serious case of police overreaching, and the victim here is Larry Craig and the Constitution of the United States,” civil libertarian Ben Stein declared on Fox News.

No word from the ACLU as yet.

"Shane" Remake Starring Fred Thompson

George W. Bush’s favorite Western is “High Noon,” but his hopeful successor wants to do a new “Shane,” playing the role of a good-hearted gunfighter who protects the little people against the powerful and the predatory.

The casting is a bit iffy, but Thompson will give a game performance as the defender of those who can’t “come to Washington and look out for themselves.”

The little people who benefited from his gun-slinging in the past include deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a British company trying to limit payments to asbestos victims as well as two corporations producing a taxpayer-financed $1.7 billion “hole in the ground” for a proposed and abandoned nuclear breeder reactor in Tennessee.

Like Shane, Thompson has been impartial in his good work, once riding shotgun for an abortion-rights group despite his deeply held pro-life convictions.

Now he is ready for his closeup after touring the Iowa Fair and being escorted by the Pork Queen to look over Big Red, the prize boar. There are centralized-government villains out there, and he will face them down or shoot it out, as he sadly says the Virginia Tech students should have been able to do to avoid their massacre.

There will be script changes before the new “Shane” goes into production, morphing little Alan Ladd into the lumbering Thompson and definitely rewriting the final scene in which the mortally wounded hero rides into the sunset.

Today’s audiences will want a more upbeat ending.

Exposing Bad, Bad Joe Biden

In last night’s “debate,” the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was unmasked as the vain, insensitive person he really is, but TV watchers may have failed to notice until keener observers revealed it today.

The New York Sun blog blasts “Biden's obnoxious response when he insulted the gun owner toward the end as being nuts. It wasn't so much a personal gaffe as a moment that projected an ugly image of the Democratic Party as out of touch with rural voters and gun owners.”

On the blog of Reason Magazine, we learn that Biden hurt the feelings of “a libertarian-leaning voter who wants the government off his back.”

Biden’s inhumanity was in response to Jared Townsend of Michigan who asked “if our babies are safe” as he cradled his semi-automatic weapon, explaining, “This is my baby.”

“If that’s his baby,” Sen. Biden heartlessly jibed, “he needs help. I don’t know if he’s mentally qualified to own a gun.”

On Slate Mickey Kaus cites that as another of Biden’s “cringe-making, unhinged spontaneous reactions,” akin to a 1987 incident in New Hampshire when the Senator unfeelingly answered a question about his credentials by saying, "I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do."

Those who have been bamboozled into thinking Biden is a distinguished Senator with 34 years of service should be ashamed of themselves. How can they support the kind of insensitivity that led to the martyrdom of Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and that has been visited on countless other Second-Amendment heroes?