Ann Coulter is a bitch. This is a statement as absolute as “water is wet” or “Brooklyn is rad.” One of her books, Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, sits on my night stand. I read it from time to time, most often only for a chapter, until I get so pissed off that I change to Goodnight Moon to calm myself before bed. I read the essays on her website, where she talks about how dispicable Hollywood is, how anyone voting for Obama is simply suffering from “White Guilt” and, my personal favorite, how the media consists of a bunch of attention-grabbing whores. I read her. And I understand, I’m part of the problem. I’m fueling the fire. Pouring salt on the sociopolitical wound. Sadly, I enjoy reading her not just because of her inflammatory nature, but because while I often disagree with her, I also think she’s a pretty damn good writer.

And now Ms. Coulter has thrown in her two cents about the Virginia Tech massacre. I’m with her for the beginning. When faced with tragedies in this country, there is always an overwhelmingly optimistic desire to fix things. Americans (and other countries as well) feel the need to blame something, be it violence in entertainment, the parents, the school systems, in order to feel better. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s basic human nature. We see something wrong, and we want to fix it. To fix it, it needs to be assigned to a problem. I think Ann understands this too. However she goes on to say that:

“Virginia Tech even prohibits students with concealed-carry permits from carrying their guns on campus. Last year, the school disciplined a student for carrying a gun on campus, despite his lawful concealed-carry permit. If only someone like that had been in Norris Hall on Monday, this massacre could have been ended a lot sooner.”

Gun control is a ridiculously complicated issue, and the concealed carry laws have danced back and forth between states for decades. But there are a few things that I think Ms. Coulter needs to think about. First of all, a concealed carry law would not have stopped the shootings from happening, as she suggests earlier on in her essay. School shootings, at least in the cases of Virginia Tech, Columbine and the University of Texas, are never carried out with escape intentions. They are carried out by disturbed, jaded, (and in the case of Texas, mentally imbalanced) people who know that they will be ending their lives at some point during the attack. So somehow, I doubt they are afraid of being shot, whether by their own hand or someone else’s. Allowing private citizens to carry concealed weapons isn’t going to stop someone from unleashing their pent-up, violent aggression towards society. Also, it should be noted that the concealed carry laws would allow these private citizens to carry their weapons not just in times of desired heroism, but all the time. That’s great that Ann gives statistics saying “States that allowed citizens to carry concealed handguns reduced multiple-shooting attacks by 60 percent and reduced the death and injury from these attacks by nearly 80 percent,” but what about individual attacks? I can understand that some of these attacks may be cut short by another gunman taking out a mass murderer, but what about the individual gun violence accounts? What about the fact that we’d be adopting the same principles that were around in the old west? Doesn’t raising people in an environment where, in any heated situation, they can fall back on having a weapon in their pocket, seem a little fucking crazy?

I know that getting upset about something that Ann Coulter says makes as much sense as farting with the windows up, but this is an issue that a majority of the country stands behind by using the second amendment. Between the old west and revolutionary times, it seems that a lot of people in this country are more interested in regression than anything else. I know that even the most strong-minded people, in the wake of a tragedy, are desperate to make things better. Allowing private citizens to carry guns in their pockets is not the way to do that.