The Funniest Column Ever

100 rounds

You know what’s hilarious? That thing that went down at Virginia Tech. That’s hilarious.

In fact, I’m having trouble because every time I watch the news and every time it comes up in conversation and every time I idly wonder how many of those 33 people had plans for the next weekend or an upcoming birthday or their graduation from college, I can’t quite decide which part is the funniest.

For the sake of argument, though let’s say that the best bit of comic gold came from Virginia’s Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, who, immediately following the massacre by young psychopath Cho Seung-Hui, said, “People who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it, you know, their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them.”

It’s funny, because I have nothing but loathing for politicians who traded their testicles for a good grade from the National Rifle Association.

I’m being a bit harsh here because obviously there are 33 families, not to mention thousands of friends, professors, and students, who right now could not care less about gun policy in the United States. I think even I would have to spend a week or so sobbing into my hands before I could have the stomach to start any kind of political argument (my previous record is 43 hours), but here is the undeniable Catch-22 of the gun debate in this country: It does not actually exist.

Conventional wisdom dictates that during the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore alienated voters with his tame gun control proposals, and since then even Democrats have treated the issue like a potato with a uranium isotope embedded within. Six years of President Bush and a Republican congress later and you couldn’t find anyone seriously talking about gun control without Google and infinite patience. The only time anybody actually talks about gun control is when some crazy asshole kills a bunch of innocent people with an easily purchased handgun and oodles of ammunition, at which point the NRA crowd and their proxies start moaning that the tragedy shouldn’t be exploited for political purposes. “No,” they say, “there will be time later for debate. Let’s focus on the suffering families right now.”

As if these armies of compassion are busy starting a college fund for a mother’s recently orphaned child.

And what happens? They say let’s not do anything rash, let’s have that debate later, and then we all sit around for another two to eight years until the next crazy asshole kills a bunch of people, and thus like the changing of seasons, the process begins again.

It’s quite a pickle.

Of course, I can’t give all the comedic credit to Virginia’s governor because there’s so much more worthy of mention. I really like this one: “If only one of the students had been carrying a gun!” This is the height of genius. I think I had that same fantasy when I was in third grade and had just seen Die Hard for the first time. I was just itching for the day when a terrorist or killer would burst into my school, so I could make an appropriately delicious quip when I punched his ticket with the handgun I’d picked up off the dead cop. “Say hello to Salazar,” I’d say with a sneer.

What bizarre logic. What a sad state of mind to live in, right? To raise a nation on a breakfast of bullets and carnage until they get to the point where people are more comfortable sending their loved ones into every public place with an automatic handgun. It’s like saying that the world be a safer place if every country on the globe had nuclear weapons. I want the polo-wearing frat guy sitting beside me in Shakespeare class to have a gun about as badly as I want Slovenia to have tactical nuclear missiles.

Another side-splitting little nugget I like to giggle over is the rampant discussion that gun control laws are not effective. Hey, no sh**? I thought Wal-Mart was doing a smashing job of discerning which drunken hicks to sell rifles to.

The United States does not have gun control laws because the word “control” suggests that the government has some type of organizational capacity over this country’s deadly weapons. We have gun “suggestion” laws, which don’t take a Virginia Tech undergraduate to figure a way around. I assume Cho was smart enough to not check the box that asks: “Are you mentally deranged?” on his gun application.

Because of that glaring error in the Bill of Rights known as the Second Amendment, Americans have little stomach for actual gun control, and as far as I’m concerned that’s all there is to it. It’s a debate where my side will likely never gain much ground and undoubtedly never win. It’s a lost cause, and thus I long ago decided that I’m done with it. Let the NRA do their dirty work. Let the flag-waving red-staters have their guns. Let white suburbanites keep their weapons locked in closets they think their kids don’t know about. Let all that cold steel trickle down to the poor inner-city youth because black kids killing each other doesn’t stand a chance to make the national news anyway.

One of my idols, Kurt Vonnegut, passed away recently, so it’s only appropriate that I paraphrase what he pointed out about guns. Essentially, he said, there will always be mean, crazy people. You can’t eliminate mean, crazy people, but you can try to eliminate the one tool that makes it so easy for them to carry their bat-sh**-crazy cruelty into the lives of others.

It makes me physically ill to think that a human being could do what Cho did, but I fear part of the reason is that guns are so easy. They’re so easy because you don’t have to think. You can just make simple love to a trigger and fire off over a hundred rounds—a hundred goddamn rounds—without ever considering the faces of those you’ve condemned: That this girl is someone’s little sister, whose brother once tickled her until she peed herself. That this is someone’s ex-girlfriend, whose heart broke when she told that boy she had met someone else. That this guy is someone’s best friend, who refused to let him study with so many good basketball games on TV and so much beer to drink. With a gun, it’s so simple. You never have to consider the scope of another human being’s life, the joy and the love and the pain you’re robbing from all the people who loved that person.

Hilarious, right?