Sour Nothings

Been reading a lot recently from this fella, an anarcho-capitalist. Can't say I'm one. But at the very least anarcho-capitalism's core principle makes the work of justifying government's role in any interaction as hard as it, by all rights, should be.

I generally take his line this week that what could have prevented Cho's mass murder at Virginia Tech is unimaginable. I'd guess, unsatisfyingly, whether at Virginia Tech or in almost any other workplace in the country, it's "nothing":

*not more restrictive gun laws, a political non-starter for reasons not the least of which is that guns are what people across the country want and, therefore, will be sold legally or illegally;

*not less restrictive gun laws, inconceivable as they are to begin with to both pro-and anti-gun legislators and activists who must ever-so-slightly obstruct gun ownership to "just do something" about violence that most people--least of all university students and teachers--would never think until Monday of having to arm themselves against;

*not more psychiatry, at least as a crystal ball that lets us look into the future at which of the thousands of enraged and delusional young men among us will emerge as a unconscionable shitbag;

*not, deserved though it may have been had the two students he harassed had pressed charges, his expulsion from Virginia Tech, in essence a city within the city of Blacksburg that, unlike the high schools from which most of these young people came, cannot simply be "locked down";

*and not more "outreach" (and what an icy, but appropriately unfriendly word that is for the fear-driven, clinically condescending contact we too often mistake as compassion) from Cho's classmates and teachers, whom he rejected and by whom he was rejected.

Cho had in him what's in all of us: a choice. Who among us doesn't know it was the wrong one? There's no telling. And nothing that we in a free country can do about it.