Don't blame the messenger

IF YOU SAW or bought the

Daily News

yesterday, you are a member of one exclusive club: You saw one of the very few times the paper has run a front page with no headline. You saw, instead, a disturbing image of Cho Seung-Hui pointing a handgun, taken from a video image he sent to NBC right after his first deadly assault and before his second assault. This is a disturbing, even sickening image that has prompted many complaints about the media's glorification of a killer, and the glorification of violence.

But it also makes you a member of a sadly less exclusive club: those who know what it's like to look down the barrel of a gun pointed at you. It's the last image that 32 people saw in Virginia.

It's the last image 406 people saw in Philadelphia last year.

Living in a culture saturated by guns and violence, it's easy for those very terms, "guns" and "violence," to become neutralized and abstract. We're so used to the words they no longer have the power to jar us.

But if this startling image can do one thing, maybe it's this: to remind us that guns are real. Maybe seeing one close up, in all its frightening, disturbing, and sickening reality - held by a deranged killer - might succeed in jarring us out of our collective sleep and move us to finally get serious about better, common-sense controls over who can buy and own guns. *