Dave Hancock talks about his .38mm Smith & Wesson as though it were $3 800 of Dolce & Gabbana. ”It’s light, easy and comfortable to carry,” he says, easing the snub-nose pistol out of his pocket and gazing at it nostalgically.
Hancock, who works at the Bob Moates Sports Store in Midlothian, Virginia, loves guns. At the handgun counter, he slips out a jet-black 9mm Glock 19 — the kind that Cho Seung-hui used to slay 32 of his fellow students and then himself last week — and hands it to me. It’s heavy, and doubtless feels all the heavier for its immediate associations. Hancock shows me how to reload the magazine. Then pulls the trigger and watches me flinch.
The relationship between this weapon and the massacre that took place on Virginia Tech campus 320km away is not moral but functional, he insists. ”They flew airplanes into the World Trade Centre, but nobody is saying we should stop flying,” he says.
Hancock believes there might be a case for stronger checks on the mental health of prospective gun owners. But, if anything, he argues, what happened last week is an argument for more people to carry weapons, not fewer. ”If one single professor had been carrying a legal weapon, they might have been able to stop all this,” he says.
The main problem with the obvious retort that if guns were less easily available Cho’s insanity would probably have been less deadly is that it is obvious. The debate between advocates of gun rights and gun control reached a painful stalemate long ago.
Painful because, in a country where more than 30 000 people die every year from firearms, there is a lot to talk about. Stalemate because neither the arguments nor the balance of forces of those who make them seem to change sufficiently to break the logjam.
”The right to bear arms” is enshrined in the Constitution. The founding fathers intended it so that citizens could protect themselves against state tyranny. Now gun lobbyists argue that they want them to protect themselves from other citizens.
However, in the more violent cities in the United States there is hostility to that view. ”When they wrote the Constitution I don’t think they really had this crazy kid in mind,” says Debbie Yorizzo, a student-teacher at Hunter college.
In 1966, after Charles Whitman shot dead 14 people in Texas, The New York Times wrote: ”Whatever the motivation, it seems clear that the way is made easier by the fact that guns of all sorts are readily available to Americans of all shades of morality and mentality.” It would have been no less prescient had they published it last Tuesday.
A Pew research poll, taken before the shootings, shows that, although public support for greater gun control has waned over the past 10 years, most people still back it.
The trouble is, despite everything that happened on April 16, nobody with the power to do anything substantial is interested in having a substantive debate about it. The shootings returned guns to the centre of national conversation but left them on the margins of political discussion. Before the 2000 election, the National Rifle Association (NRA) boasted that it was so close to George W Bush that it would be working ”out of his office”. It has been pretty much true to its word. Virginia governor Tim Kaine said last week he held ”nothing but loathing for those who take the tragedy and make it political”.
And so the murders were rendered into a purely emotional event borne from a psychotic moment — a subject more likely to be resolved by Oprah or Dr Phil than by the House and the Senate.
Like hot air, the week’s coverage of the shootings expanded to fill the space available to it. The issue of gun control was occasionally raised, but rarely seriously discussed. Instead, they kept asking ”How could this happen?” The US’s innocence is one of its few eternally renewable resources. Its ability to shock itself with the predictable is itself predictable.
‘Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell,” wrote Graham Greene in The Quiet American. ”Wandering the world doing no harm.” There were few who couldn’t see this coming even if no one knew where or when.
Amid the hours of reconstruction and speculation, we heard from creative writing professors about the tell-tale signs of psychosis in student literature and from student counsellors about referral procedures. Some of it was interesting. But, whatever route the interviews took, they always ended up at the same destination — if someone wanted to do this, there was nothing we could do to stop them.
By last Thursday, CNN was reduced to gleaning insight from the woman who drives the student shuttle bus and screening Cho’s rambling rants.
The videos made Cho the source of much revulsion but proved unworthy of moral panic. Some commentators tried to emphasise his Korean birth as somehow relevant to the slaughter. But Cho was made in the US, every bit as much as his elder sister who had gone to Princeton. True, he was an immigrant, who came to the country at the age of eight. But his parents were ”good” immigrants — legal, solvent and self-employed. At home they had been poor. Now they’d put one child through an Ivy League college with money from their dry-cleaning business.
Back at Moates’s store, a draw for a silver Para-Ordinance Model 1911 .45 automatic was due to take place last Thursday. The 1911 is part of the company’s new line of ”gun rights” pistols, which carry the guarantee that Moates will donate $25 to the NRA for every one sold. The ”Bloomberg Gun Give-away” was intended to cock a snook at the New York mayor, who has issued a lawsuit against several gun stores for selling firearms that end up being used by criminals in New York.
Moates is no stranger to lost causes. In the parking lot, two cars bear Confederate registration plates. One says ”Secede”, the other ”Lee.CSA”, honouring Robert E Lee, the general who led the South to defeat in the civil war. Inside, on the book rack is a work entitled The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and an Unnecessary War.
But when Moates refused to postpone the raffle out of respect for the victims in Blacksburg, it looked as if his ”pride” and ”attitude” would result in him shooting himself in the foot. ”The draw is April 19,” he told the New York Daily News. Last Tuesday a clerk said nothing had changed.
Suddenly, last Wednesday, Moates had a change of heart. ”We didn’t want to be insensitive to the people in Blacksburg. But we also didn’t want the draw to take place quietly,” says Dave Hancock. ”So we put it off until May.” Within a fortnight everything will be back to normal. The draw will take place with much fanfare. And the US will prepare its next surprise. — Â