My brother has made some mistakes. I don't talk about him much on the blog, not because of those mistakes, but because we are in reality very far apart. 8 years is an incredibly long time in a young person's life, and by my estimation, Litty and I will only start to feel close in age when I'm in my later 30's and he's in his later 20's. We were just separated by too much time when he was little--for god's sake, he was 10 when I left for college. But in the last year or so, I've definitely gotten to know him better than I ever have, maybe since he was a toddler. And I have to admit that I like my brother a whole lot. As he gets older, and matures a bit, he's become a very, very interesting person. Like I said, he's made some very bad choices--choices that have made him who he is--in his short life, and I think he's paid for those choices.
And one of those choices? It may have saved his life yesterday. There's no way to know whether Litty would have been in that Geology class at NIU, but the possibility exists. If Lit were still enrolled at NIU, he could have been in that class. He could have been in the building, he could have been on that quad, or he could have been on campus. The fact remains that good friends of his might have been, and that's bad enough. But when I heard that horrible news yesterday, I didn't have to be nervous, because I knew Lit wouldn't be in that class. I knew, because a year ago, he dropped out of NIU and moved home, and began attending community college. And I've never been so happy that he made that choice as I was yesterday.
All the same, when you grow up in a town that's only 35-40 minutes away from the college, you know people who've attended. I'd say that a pretty good number of kids from my town attend NIU. I'd hazard a guess that anyone who grew up in that town knows someone who went there, or is currently going there. Or went there themselves. The shooting at Virginia Tech was tragic, there's absolutely no doubt about it. But it didn't hit home like this one did. It didn't happen to US. It just happened. And I can't really pretend that this is happening to me, because it's not. But I didn't have to wonder whether people I knew were safe with VT, because the chances that I'd know someone there were slim to none. The chances of my family knowing someone at NIU are much, much higher, and that alone brings it home.
The thing is, how do you stop something like this from happening? There's no way to "lock" a campus to prevent someone from going on a rampage. There's no way to "lock" up that killer before he commits the crime. The only answer I can come up with is to get rid of the guns. That's it. I'm one of those people who could give a shit about whatever rights people want to claim in regards to owning guns. I think they're a scourge, and I think we need to get them out of everyday usage. I can accept hunting guns, but I think they need to be highly regulated. I don't know that much about guns, but I do know that you don't use every single kind of gun out there for hunting. ONLY hunting guns should be allowed. And again, only under highly regulated and hard-to-get circumstances. If this person, this person who hadn't shot up NIU, hadn't had access to guns, this wouldn't have happened. Not the way it did, anyway. He may have charged in there, and he may have been crazy and made threats, but I simply don't think 7 people would be dead right now if he hadn't come in with 3 guns blazing.
I'm having a hard time thinking about it in any other way right now. This stuff doesn't need to happen. It just doesn't. But nobody, nobody will say it. And that's a tragedy too.
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