After Virginia Tech: Self-Defense
317 words.
There are a lot of jumbled thoughts in my head after the Virginia Tech shooting last Monday. One of them is about personal self-defense.
Gun advocates say that if the students had had guns, they could have defended themselves. There is some logic to that, but there are also plenty of effective ways to defend oneself if one doesn’t happen to have a gun in their hand, and perhaps this mass murder coupled with the global threat of terrorism should prompt governments to invest in nationwide self-defense classes.
It may sound silly at first, but think about it. It’s fairly obvious that warfare of the future (both against terrorists and against random disgruntled sociopaths) is going to involve a lot of enemies deliberately hiding among and attacking civilians, so it makes sense that civilians should be given some training to defend themselves if they find themselves in danger. For that reason, I could see myself supporting legislation to require self-defense classes as part of a high school and/or college curriculum, perhaps augmenting P.E. classes.
It also leads me to wonder about compulsory tours of military service in this country. My father and grandfather both served in the Army (WWI and post-WWII), and I have no doubt that they would have had a calm, appropriate response to any kind of violence occurring around them because of their Army experience. I, on the other hand, would have to rely entirely on luck, primal instinct, and Quake. If we’re to live in a dangerous world where foreign or domestic terrorists could strike at any moment of any day, it makes sense for everyone to have at least some basic military training to rely on. Like it or not, there are a lot of bad people in the world, and a lot of us may find ourselves on a battlefield of some kind or another during the course of our lives.
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