Self-Defense

I made a very deliberate decision yesterday not to watch the Cho home videos that have been made widely available in the media. I can’t stop the media from airing a 24/7 Cho-fest but I can choose not to participate by not watching.

In my mind, Cho is not a great mystery of the universe, and consequently, there is no personal value or knowledge to be gained from watching his home videos. Perhaps, if I was a trained psychologist, but I am not. If I were to sum it up I'd say, he was a madman and a crazed killer. I don’t have a definitive philosophy on why some of us are born on the outer edges of the human gene pool per say but I readily accept aberrations happen. We call argue till the cows come home on “why” it happens, but it has never stopped it from happening.

What is far more important to me is where do we go from here? Being a Canadian with a long history of stricter gun control laws than our American neighbors has not left us immune from school shootings. In fact, most Canadian schools have been “gun-free zones” longer than Virginia Tech officially has been, and still we have yet to be insulated us from these kinds of tragedies.

We can legislate from here to tomorrow but what do our laws mean to the Marc Lepine, Kimveer Gill or the Cho’s of our world? I suspect they are not more troubled by them than a moth crossing their path. So where do we go from here? Do we make a 360 degree turn and develop a culture of individual responsibility for self-defense? And if not; why not?

Here’s just one of the things I would like to see happen. Every child in every school across the country, irregardless of age, will have to take mandatory classes in self-defense until high school graduation - with an emphasis in the later grades of secondary school on teaching students how to turn every day objects into weapons.