The Weekly
Standard marked the first anniversary of the Columbine High School
shootings with an excellent essay by David B. Kopel, the research director at the
Independence Institute of Colorado, entitled: “What If We Had Taken
Columbine Seriously?” His point, expressed with a savage, almost Swiftian
sense of indignation, was, first, that the police response to the emergency had
been cowardly and ill-judged and, second,
that none of those footling “gun control” measures—safety
locks, background checks, the gun-show “loophole,” etc.—questions of
whose enactment or non-
enactment had dominated public debate in America over
the previous twelve months, would have done anything to have prevented the
killings. Meanwhile, any discussion of either of the two measures which might
have done so was studiously avoided.
Gun control advocates, that is,
might have argued for a virtual ban on all firearms, like that enacted in
Britain in the wake of the Dunblane massacre a few years ago, on the reasonable
ground that it would probably have prevented the killers from accumulating
their arsenal of weaponry. A discussion of this idea might also have touched on
the fate of the Norfolk farmer, Tony Martin, who was recently jailed for life
for shooting and killing a burglar in his house. Supporters of gun rights (and
Mr. Martin)
could have argued equally reasonably that the
arming of teachers, even if it had not discouraged the killers from undertaking
their wicked project in the first place, would almost certainly have made their
toll of deaths