VA Tech Victims’ Families and Mission Creep
You give some people a 0ne vote majority in one house of the General Assembly, and they start acting like we live in Massachusetts.
The shootings at VA Tech last April were tragic and preventable; not by Tech’s administration, who can not be expected to shut down a 30,000 student campus, but by Virginia’s mental health system. If the General Assembly finishes the 2008 session without reforming and improving (not all reform is improvement, after all) our mental health support structures, our lawmakers’ inaction will be immoral. The shootings exposed problems that can and should be fixed now.
Yet like many organizations, the families of the victims of the Tech shooting have already experienced “mission creep.” Mission creep is what happens when, for example, an army designed for winning a war takes over peacekeeping and construction duties. Or when a force intended for domestic defense is stationed overseas. Or when a group of families who have lost loved ones decide to force private sellers at gun shows to run background checks on gun buyers.
Did the Tech shooter get his guns from a private seller at a gun show? No. Have there been any recent shootings involving weapons purchased from private sellers at a gun show? I can’t remember any. Is anyone being harmed by private sellers not running background checks at gun shows?
Anyone?
Again, the families who have lost loved ones deserve our sympathy and support. They are right to demand changes to Virginia’s mental health system because it failed them and all Virginians. But in allowing mission creep, they risk losing their goodwill among Virginians who use guns, own guns or know more than nothing about guns. There may be good arguments for making private sellers run background checks at gun shows, but they don’t have anything to do with the Tech shooting and using the emotional appeal of the memory of the victims politicizes their deaths and cheapens the tragedy.
Would arming all college students have prevented the shooting? No. Would forcing private sellers to run background checks at gun shows prevented the shooting? No. So let’s stop using the Tech victims as political pawns and let them rest in peace while we fix the one thing that could have prevented the shooting: Virginia’s mental health system.
