Editorial | Gun Violence

"We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility."

British author Cyril Connolly wrote those words in 1938. The harsh week just ended gives them fresh relevance - and offers a starting point for a national conversation on the role of responsibility in a society that prizes liberty and individualism.

Cho Seung-Hui, 23, exploited those aspects of the American character to kill 32 others and himself last week at Virginia Tech.

Liberty and individualism have produced great inventors, inspiring artists, brilliant thinkers. They also create space for evil acts.

Using the liberty that America and Virginia afforded him, Cho bought two handguns and ammunition despite a history of mental-health problems and threatening gestures toward others. Acting on a sick individualism, he took those guns and made sad history.

As the funerals begin, Americans ask, why does this keep happening to us?

Let no one misunderstand: Cho is responsible for killing those 32 people. But his rampage raises broader issues that begin to explain why this keeps happening to us.

One issue is how the country's advocacy groups shape - make that, misshape - issues and solutions.

The gun lobby has framed the gun violence debate perversely to its advantage - and done a powerful job of it. It is time for adults to stand up and demand that reality prevail.

The most extreme gun rights advocates seized upon last week's shootings and declared that they could have been averted if only Virginia law did not ban guns on college campuses. The core problem, according to the gun lobby, is that Americans do not have enough access to firearms.

The gun lobby is fond of demanding that those who seek more limits on gun ownership guarantee ahead of time that those limits will work perfectly and solve the problem fully.

OK, let's turn it around. Please explain how putting more firepower within easy reach of adolescents, with their penchants for depression, romantic drama, and binge drinking, would make campuses safer.

Let's keep turning the tables. Instead of forcing anti-violence activists to prove a point most don't believe - that gun control is the sole solution - let's force the National Rifle Association to explain why gun violence is so much lower in other Western industrialized societies. If it's not their far stricter gun control, what is it? Are they better people than we are?

Dramatic rampages like last week's just don't happen in other nations with the frequency they do here. Few European cities experience anything like the steady drip of deadly shootings that Philadelphia does.

And when guns spill innocent blood abroad, that often spurs efforts to keep guns out of the hands of the criminal and the mentally ill, such as Cho.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been a strong ally of President Bush's war in Iraq. But he is on the other side of the world when it comes to gun regulations.

When a shooter killed 35 people in Australia in 1996, action was taken to limit the availability of guns, which has led to significantly fewer shooting deaths. "We showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country," Howard said last week.

America is defining deviancy down. That tendency will continue if tighter gun restrictions do not flow from the killings.

To be a free society does not require enabling the unfettered exercise of dangerous behavior. Every right in the Constitution comes with responsibilities. A free press still may not defame with impunity. Religious freedom does not empower adults to harm children. And rights do come into conflict. That's why we have a Supreme Court. The right to bear arms should not be allowed to overpower others' right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Lawmakers, especially the cowardly Democrats now in charge of the House of Representatives and Senate, have the responsibility to treat violence as a dire public health issue rather than an electoral albatross.

They need to look at reality (isn't that what Democrats have criticized President Bush for ignoring in Iraq?) and stand up against the powerful gun lobby to enact tighter gun regulations.

Voters, if they feel strongly enough about changing the culture of violence, should reject elected officials who avoid that responsibility.

"We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility."

For too many years, those who shudder at tragedies like last week's have shirked their responsibility to create a world that is fit and safe for our children.

If we do not rouse ourselves from our languor, the percussion of gun violence will quicken.