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On Friday, November 1, 1991, a brilliant Chinese graduate student, Gang Lu, stood up during a regular weekly meeting of the University of Iowa Physics Department in Iowa City, Iowa, and shot three professors and a fellow Chinese graduate student point-blank with a .38 caliber handgun. He then walked down a flight of stairs to the office of the department head and shot him dead. Before leaving the building, Gang Lu returned to the seminar room and shot one of his original victims -- still alive -- again to ensure that he died.
Gang Lu next proceeded two blocks to the administration building where he shot the associate vice president of academic affairs and a student working there as temporary support staff. Lu then went to another room in the building and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
Four of Lu's victims died that afternoon. The fifth died the next day. The sixth -- the second student victim -- had been shot in the mouth. The bullet lodged in her spine, and she will has permanent paralysis of her arms and legs.
On the following Monday, on the front page of a local paper appeared a picture of a hand-lettered poster that had been placed upon a location sign identifying the building where the shootings occurred. It read: "What's it going to take to get a hand gun law if this can happen in a small Iowa pacifist community?" Currently in Iowa, a person must wait seven days to obtain a permit from the sheriff's office to purchase a handgun and must have another permit in order to carry the gun.
Radio, television, and newspapers carried stories saying, in essence, that, "Something should be done." The sheriff said that foreigners should not be allowed to purchase handguns. Legislators stated that they would like to pass more stringent gun control laws, but that they were stymied by the political clout of the NRA and of hunters who erroneously believe that gun control legislation would deprive them of their shotguns. Legislators took pains to mention that stricter gun control laws would be designed to prevent only criminals from having access to handguns. The implicit message was that control of handguns was acceptable as a starting assumption and that only the misguided efforts of the gun lobby kept needed guidelines from being implemented.
At this point, the reader may have the impression that the topic here is the fallacies of gun control laws: that the right to bear arms was not included in the Constitution to ensure we could continue hunting for our food but rather to ensure that citizens could protect themselves from a government gone over the edge into dictatorship; that Gang Lu had no criminal record, and to use his example to bolster calls for gun controls ostensively designed to stop criminals from obtaining access to handguns is a logical non sequitur; or that regulation of trade -- in guns or any other commodity -- is not a proper function of government.
All of those points are true, but a more important consideration is at stake here, one that transcends any particular topic. One can go through issue after concrete issue until blue in the face, but a more productive approach to dealing with the erosion of freedom in this country is to identify those fundamental principles that underlay and explain the greatest number of specifics. The one that is operative here was mentioned earlier, the notion that, "Something should be done."
Gang Lu's actions were premeditated. He left behind a number of letters written months beforehand describing his perceived grievances with the department and the actions he intended to take. He thought use of a handgun, i.e., violence, was a proper means for redressing wrongs. But the Constitutional right to bear arms exists for the purpose of self-defense, not for revenge.
People are rightly shocked at what this person did. Any murder is an occasion for sadness, yet it looms even more incongruous when it occurs in an academic setting, a realm where reason and discussion are at least supposed to reign supreme. In terms of rational thought, what Gang Lu did was senseless. Yet that very irrationality can be understood by a rational examination of what he wrote and did.
A deeper cause for sadness becomes evident when one considers that the first reaction of many people to a legitimate tragedy is to use it to advance their own agendas at the expense of that very logic and reason that someone like Gang Lu should have followed. Too frequently, the initial response is to call for more governmental action and interference -- for greater restrictions on personal liberty and rights -- to deal with problems which should and can be dealt with on an individual basis; to "do something," which often translates into doing "anything," action for action's sake, even if that action has no real connection to the issue at hand...or even makes matters worse.
No number of preemptive laws would have prevented Gang Lu from carrying out his vendetta. The freedom upon which this society was founded requires that people be considered innocent and be free from governmental interference unless and until they have committed an actual act that violates the rights of another individual. While some people might feel more "secure" in the short run if strict controls were placed on all aspects of behavior, the dictatorship that would surely result from such a course of action would, in the final analysis, destroy that very security that some seek at the cost of individual liberty.
If a situation exists for which "something should be done," rarely should that "something" include expansion of the activities of government. Whether the issue is pollution, education, poverty, drugs, or crime, it remains true that, except in very limited areas of life, government is the problem, not the solution. The answers to life's difficulties lie primarily with us and the voluntary actions we take alone and together as social beings. If a better life is desired (and who would not accept that premise?), then the best avenue for obtaining it is to restrict the actions of government to protecting us from violations of our rights to life and property. We need to recognize and accept the idea that if "something should be done," we -- as individuals -- and not the "other guy" in the guise of bigger government should be the ones doing it.
