In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, the gun debate rages on. This isn’t anything new, but this time around, the notion that armed students or professors would have prevented the massacre is getting significant play. Admittedly, it is plausible, and some might argue, even cool that some heroic student would have just blown Cho away thus ending the carnage before it could fully blossom. The view that an armed populace is necessary for general safety immediately reminded me of the Star Trek episode entitled, “A Piece of the Action.”
In this episode, the Enterprise visits a planet that has chosen to based their society on the old Chicago gangs (Al Capone, etc…). The different gangs are constantly fighting each other for territory which, apparently, necessitates an armed populace. Every adult is armed, even moms have a machine gun stashed in the baby carriage. Would we really be safer in such a society? I don’t know, but I do know that there is one scenario that people have left out that bears mention.
We all assume that if there were other armed students, they would have acted to stop Cho. But it is certainly possible that some of them could have decided to help Cho! There are a lot of angry and disaffected people in our world, and just like looting seems almost infectious after a blackout or disaster, why shouldn’t some people choose to take part in the developing carnage? A lot of the time it just takes one “deviant” to show the way and push others over the edge. We see this with copycat crimes all the time. So in this worst case scenario, there could easily have been far more deaths than actually occured.