Some Reflections on the Tragedy at
Virginia Tech
The
tragic shooting of thirty-two students and faculty at Virginia Polytechnic
University last month should prompt some serious questions. One, of course, is how it is that an
obviously deranged or mentally disturbed student was allowed to continue as a resident
in a college dorm, even after authorities had taken it into their hands to have
him temporarily committed to a mental institution on the basis of his possibly
being a danger to himself and to others.
How a clinic could come to any certain conclusion regarding his mental
or emotional stability on the basis of his being there over one day and night
is hard to fathom. One can only suppose
that the reluctance of politicians to implement an adequate public health care
system in this country has something to do with it and it is probably no wonder
that the system released him as quickly as it possibly could.
Then, as if this wasn’t enough, this same
person was able to walk into a pawn shop and after lying about his brief
hospitalization in a required but apparently unverified background check, walk
out with one of the deadliest handguns in the world, a 9mm. Glock
semi-automatic pistol, lightweight and easily concealed, and capable of firing
nearly a dozen shots without reloading, and several times that many when
supplemented by special high capacity ammunition clips. All this in addition to an even more easily
concealed .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol, which although packing less of a
punch than the 9mm., is easily capable of killing a person, especially at close
range. Armed with both of these weapons,
the killer, after taking time out to mail his picture and written diatribes
against society to NBC after killing his first two victims, fired nearly two-hundred rounds in the space
of nine minutes to kill thirty more persons and finally, himself. That such weapons, which only by a far
stretch of the imagination be considered “sporting” firearms, can be legally
owned by anyone other than law-enforcement officers certainly gives cause in
much of the world to doubt American sanity. If people, not guns (by themselves)
kill people, this tragedy proves that people with some kinds of guns can kill
more people than anyone else.
But these rather obvious conclusions
don’t answer another question that I’m afraid we also have to ask. Many people, after hearing that the shooter
was a Korean immigrant, seemed to assume that he wasn’t a Christian. In other words, not somebody like us. Wrong: Korea has the second highest
percentage of Christians (after the Philippines) in the far east. Whether he was attending church at all while
in college, I don’t know, but according to reports he had been a member of a Christian youth group while in high
school. And while the rantings he sent
to NBC expressed outrage and hate towards other he considered to be richer and
more privileged than himself, all this was capped by an expressed wish “to
die like Jesus” — apparently trying to see himself as a Christ-like victim of a
cruel and hateful world.
Of course this deranged young man was, at
least at this point, clearly out of his mind.
But these statements got me wondering if the violence in our society
also has something to do with our Christianity, or a distorted version of
it. When I commented to some friends
about the murder rate in Japan (where handguns are illegal for all except law
officers and security guards) is only about one-sixth of what it is in the USA,
it was pointed out that the Japanese have a very different culture — which is
certainly true, with Christians making up less than 1%. Is there something about Christianity and its
ideas of divine punishment and its image of a Redeemer whose suffering somehow
makes things right? But even if that latter
is the case, how can we square our use of violence, even if for the sake of
justice or even self-defense, if the Redeemer himself had to renounce all that
in order to set us free? Free
from what — if not sin and more violence?
If so, then something has gone horribly wrong, not just in the mind of
demented college student, but perhaps in our understanding of Christianity as
well.
R