Gun control? How about whacko control.

Steve Hall is taking a lot of shit for his column on the recent VT tragedy and the issue of gun control. (And I thought Prince’s songs were a sore spot over there.) It’s unfortunate because he’s expressing his passion on the issue and it’s getting lost on people taking it as a direct threat to their right to bear arms.

Geez man, people, c’mon, get past the words and hear the emotion behind it all. Gun control advocate or not, we should be outraged this happened. I am. However, I also come at the issue from a decidely different POV. Everyone has their own opinion and nothing I say will change that, nor should it. Just throwing my own meandering, frustrated rant out there for consideration.

I grew up around guns. While other 8-year olds were playing with the toy versions, I was shooting the real things on a range. Learned to handle, clean and respect them, as did my brothers. My father helped built a small firearms company out of Buffalo, NY which later grew into Charter Arms. If they made it, I fired it. We didn’t think twice about the issue of guns being right or wrong. They were part of our everyday life.

Except when it came time to explain what dad did for a living:

“No, he’s not a doctor like Jimmy’s dad. No, my dad makes guns. [crickets chirping] Yeah, the .38 used to shoot Alabama governor George Wallace? His. Oh yeah, and the one The Son of Sam used? .44 Bulldog. He made that too.” And if I wasn’t despised enough at that point, “Mark Chapman also used a CA .38 to shoot John Lennon.” Talk about a nice career hat trick. (My father was out of the company at that point, not that it matters to those swearing at me right now. Maybe there’s bad karma coming my way, who knows.)

Regardless, every single time there was a major shooting, I’d hear the gun control debate loud and clear. “Guns don’t kill people...,” or “You can pry my gun from my fingers....” “Someone gets attacked with a baseball bat or knife, we’re not going to now eliminate all the bats and knives, are we?” All of it.

Now you can argue the number of guns we have in this country is so plentiful that by eliminating them, we cut down on the ratio of deaths from them by default alone. Maybe. But realistically, as long as there are some bad motherfuckers out there bent on doing what they do, they will find the guns or other weapons. They’ll likely steal them from law-abiding citizens if they have to.

They always do.

Now if you haven’t stopped reading at this point or aren’t throwing rocks at the screen, I’ll also say that while I feel there needs to be some form of general gun control, I can’t support eliminating them. Cops need them first of all. (Game hunters, please, you don’t need an AK for Bambie. Not even Chuck Heston can convince me they do.) But secondly, trying to take guns off the street does nothing to eliminate the ones that will be hidden as soon as you make the move. You’d have to declare martial law and go house to house to get them all.

Good luck there.

Inevitably, the first thing you hear after a shooting like this is, “Well, if there were gun control, there would have been no gun for so-and-so to use.” Ok. But we live in the real world, not the ‘if’ world, and we do have a lot of guns around. Wishing they weren’t doesn’t deal with the fact they’re out there now.

This nation was built on firearms, and that hasn’t changed, has it? If you wanna go further, then take Chris Rock up on his idea and have more bullet control–charge $5,000 per round. Instead, I propose there’s something else we need to better at: whacko control.

Make that, whacko detection. (And before I get comments saying I’m not being PC, how about ‘detection of people with mental health issues.’ Better?

Metal detectors in schools may pick up a concealed weapon, but who detects the list of ‘people to kill’ that some kid has in his backpack, and why aren’t they doing a better job?

To misuse another farm metaphor as I tend to do, we’re really good in this country at fixing the barn door after the horse escapes. Hell, we reassembled a 747 from nothing and determined within feet just where in the cargo hold the radio with C4 was placed that had brought it down over Lockerbie, Scotland. And in the coming days, we’re going to apply that same Good Old US of A can-do spirit and find out much about this VT shooter:

His grades. His favorite bands. His myspace friends. His dog’s name. Even the vultures on network TV news channels under the guise of “making sure it never happens again” will interview his neighbors and his coworkers for those ‘signs of trouble.’

And it won’t fucking matter.

Because we SUCK at figuring out ways to prevent that horse from escaping in the first place, let alone knowing why it wanted to. And those signs of trouble? We do nothing about recognizing them. The very characteristics and warning signs we’ll soon discover were there all along in this case.

We always do.

How many examples of ignoring the troubled, the evil people, do we need?

For weeks leading up to the Columbine massacre, the mother of one of Satan’s Spawn heard constant banging of pipes and noises late at night in her kid’s room. They wore all black and were writing hate messages on their own web pages. Yet she dismissed the sounds as nothing, returning to her work. She didn’t even know about the writings.

It’s stuff like that which truly outrages me. This denial, this attitude of, “Oh, they’re only kidding” or “They’re kids being kids.”

This has nothing to do with gun control and everything to do with failure to act on what is right in front of you, that which you know feels wrong. (And if anybody should be blamed in this, it should be VT for not locking down the whole place sooner.) After all we’ve gone through at this point in society, every threat must be treated seriously. Two hours later? 30 more dead. Officials act as if they can sleep at night knowing they did all they could.

Yeah, right.

Until we take them seriously and deal with the depressed person who says “What’s the use,” or “I want to end it all,” the student who says they “have a list” or “people will be sorry,” the despondent former boyfriend who keeps stalking his ex even with a restraining order in place...

This. Will. Keep. Happening.

So while we should think about the families left behind who lost somebody in this, also think about the others around you who are asking for help in subtle ways. Cut off access to their illegal and legal guns if you want, especially if it’s determined they have mental health issues, but take them seriously, because they will find some other way to hurt themselves and others.

They always do.