Chilean reaction to Virginia Tech events

There's really not much I can say about what happened on Monday that hasn't already been said. Shocking, tragic, appauling, etc, etc. It's really scary to think that this kind of tragedy can happen anywhere at anytime, to anyone. You think that school is a safe place to spend your formative years, a shelter from all the bad things that happen in the world, but then these things happen and it just hits you that even on campus (even at Columbia, with its gates and guards and sense of impenetrability), you're just as vulnerable as anywhere else.

Being in Chile has let me compare the US to the rest of the world, and the one thing that I keep realizing is how messed up and different (in the mad sense) we are from everyone else. Here, students protest all the time, but never with the intention of hurting anyone- disturbances are political in nature, just to make a point. In the US, you hardly see the level of political protests that there are here; instead, it seems that students just jump from feeling upset with something to grabbing a weapon. It's like we're missing some rational impulse, something that makes up stop and reflect on what we're about to do.

It's not like US and Chilean students are that different- almost all of the risk factors that US "experts" point to as causing gun violence are just as present here as they are back home. My host brother plays violent video games all the time. The same rap music with violent lyrics is played in the clubs and on the radio. Chileans have one of the highest rates of depression on the world. But instead of resorting to violence, Chileans debate, throw small rocks at armored police cars, or just internalize their feelings.

About the only thing that's different here is gun use, and that's the one cultural difference that Chileans can't wrap their head around. When my history professor today mentioned that the NRA said that the VT massacre could have been prevent if students and teachers were allowed to carry guns, there was an audible gasp in the classroom. In Chile, the only people who carry guns are the armed forces (ARMED forces, as in firearms, as in what makes their force special and distinct is that they carry them), and they only raise them against Chileans during a coup. Here, it's impossible for a prvate citizen to get a gun. My host family couldn't beleive that all you needed to get a gun in the US was an ID and money.

I'm not saying that all the US needs to do to prevent these kinds of things from happening is to ban guns. Surely, we need a massive dose of national psychoanalysis and lessons in anger management. But it's so freaking obvious that these kinds of things would never happen if guns were harder to get. It's the same argument as preventing suicide- if you put a fence in front of a bridge, people will think twice about jumping, because they'll have the time to think twice. Murder, like suicide, is an impulsive thing, and given the chance, most people are rational enough to think it over and calm down. Maybe stricter gun control won't prevent all events like this from occurring, but even if it stops only a few, its a step in the right direction.