It never fails. Every time someone goes on a shooting rampage, the debate over gun control resurfaces. It’s a very explosive debate that leads to heated arguments with extreme points of view.

It happened again when a disturbed student at Virginia Tech went off the deep end and shot 32 people to death before taking his own life. Inevitably, the political labels started flying like bullets. You must be a leftist, a liberal, a commie if you think the possession of armed weapons should be more scrutinized, they say.

When someone decides to take a gun, a rifle, a semiautomatic -- or whatever other weapon they can get their hands on -- and kill innocent people out of the blue, we should be discussing and analyzing a lot more than the politics of gun control.

First, let’s get that part out of the way. There are valid arguments on both sides of gun control. Those who favor the possession of weapons by regular citizens argue, among other things, that people should have the right to defend themselves against aggressors or intruders. True. They say guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Also true.

However, had Cho Seung-Hui had a knife, a bat or only the chains he used to block the entrances of Norris Hall that cold April morning, could he have killed so many people? Probably not. If one of the students or teachers had been armed, would that person have been able to prevent the mass killing? It’s possible, if he or she happened to be among the first to confront the aggressor.

Either way, when a gun is used, someone dies, whether it’s the good guy or the bad guy. There was an interesting illustration in The New York Times the Sunday after the shooting at Virginia Tech. It showed an accounting of how many people die every day from gunfire. There were little colored bullets. Gray for homicides, yellow for accidents or police action and red for suicides. All in all, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 29,569 people were killed by gunfire in 2004 -- the last year for which figures were available -- and more than 64,000 were injured.

Now, let’s get to some of the core issues here. The young Korean outcast who attacked his schoolmates indiscriminately in Blacksburg was obviously mentally ill. No one, including myself, is going to dare justify his murderous rampage. It was not a spontaneous act of rage; it was, as we have learned through the investigation, a premeditated act of violence provoked by anger and resentment. Against whom or what specifically, we’ll probably never know. He most likely took his motive to the tomb.

What we do know is that he was disturbed and that the signs had been there for years. We know that health professionals and educators alike detected in advance that he was a troubled man. What concerns me -- and it should concern all of us -- is that we take mental disorders too lightly. We treat illnesses such as cancer and heart disease aggressively to prevent loss of life, but too often mental illness is not just ignored but treated as a taboo, a diagnosis stashed away somewhere in a private file. Yet in case after case, we have seen that a mentally ill person is not only a threat to himself, but a danger to society.

I don’t mean to be a moralist, but aside from the chemical imbalance in the brain, there is a serious breakdown of civility in our society that is causing the deterioration of the soul. There are just too many people out there who have a total disregard for the value of life. Feelings of rejection, humiliation and resentment brought about by a lack of morals and respect are creating monsters that potentially can let out their inner demons and turn us all into targets.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www
.mariaesalinas.com)
© 2007 by Maria Elena Salinas
Distributed by King Features Syndicate