The Recent Shooting

I feel a need to comment on the recent shooting in Binghamton, New York, although I have absolutely no idea what to say. It's all over the news, and I don't want to look insensitive by writing about one of my usual light subjects.

I feel like I hear about this sort of incident all of the time: a disgruntled person goes on a killing spree, then he kills himself. Roughly a decade ago, there were the two teens who did that at their Colorado high school. More recently, there was the man who shot all of those Amish children, as well as the shooting at Virginia Tech. (I just checked out a book on the latter tragedy.)

Why has all of this been happening in my lifetime? Did it occur as much before the 1990's? Are more people depressed at this time in history? I'm not just talking about the present economic crisis, but it seems like everywhere I turn people are on medication for depression. Did people know how to cope better in the "old" days? Maybe there was more community support, whereas nowadays some feel as if the world does not care about them and thus act out in a disastrous manner. I don't know.

At my AA meeting today, two people talked about problems they were facing--legally, economically, socially, etc. One of them was in tears as she told us her dilemma. Another person there told the woman that she was teaching him to come to a meeting whatever he might be experiencing--trial, death of a loved one, etc. I've often thought that it's unfortunate a person has to be an alcoholic to go to AA, a place where people can share and gain hope. Life is hard. It's insecure, as we see with the shooter who's now in the news, who lost his job at IBM. As I was thinking during a fit of insomnia last night, life is downright scary!

I have a hard time hating the shooters, since they often have a lot of pain, and they generally feel bad enough about what they did to kill themselves afterwards. But they have no right to allow their pain to put others in even greater pain, to rob people of their future by taking their lives. That's where love should come in.

I think of the episode of Desperate Housewives, in which Laurie Metcalf is holding the supermarket hostage because her husband cheated on her. Lynette tells her, "We all have pain, but we don't go out shooting people! We deal with it." Good point, but "suck it up, you're on your own" doesn't exactly reassure people. It only reflects our current extreme individualism, under which people don't care for one another.

I'm sure liberal and conservatives will make their respective plugs on the issue of gun control, as they usually do in these sorts of tragedies. Liberals will say the tragedy occurred because guns are so available in the United States, while conservatives will counter that the tragedies usually occur in gun-free zones, where shooters know that no one will pull out a gun and stop them. Society looks for a bandaid solution, whether it be gun control or conceal-and-carry. But there's something sick about where we are right now, and I can't really pinpoint what.