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March 2008
How to stop the killings
As a newspaper reporter and then an editor, I’ve written or edited my share of grisly stories. I’m not usually shocked by the depravity of mankind. Wednesday’s murder of Eve Carson, a UNC-CH senior, disturbed me, however.
When I Googled her name, there was a picture of stunningly beautiful young woman. She was the Student Body President. She was a Morehead Scholar. She was Phi Beta Kappa in political science and biology, preparing for medical school. She worked for a number of campus organizations helping people less fortunate.
That was sad enough but then my son, also a senior at Carolina, called. He knew her well enough to occasionally hang out, share a beer. She was a good person, fun, Andrew said. Eve Carson was probably a victim of random violence, that means it could have been my son dead or my daughter, a junior at Chapel Hill. That’s when it got me.
Imagine being a parent, sending your wonderful child off to a great university where he or she is brutally murdered. What kind of society are we living in? What can we do about it?
There have always been bad people out there. Now they all have guns. Not five or six-shot Saturday Night Specials but powerful, accurate 9 mm automatics that fire from a 14-shot clip. When will Congress or the General Assembly have the courage to outlaw handguns? That’s the obvious answer.
We pretend like we respect law enforcement but when they say, “Get the guns off the streets,” our elected officials say, “Oh, no. Can’t do that. It’s against the Right to Bear Arms!” The Second Amendment is the most debated amendment in the Bill of Rights because its interpretation is not clear. The federal courts can’t even decide. I say let people keep shotguns and rifles for hunting, sport or home protection. The only thing you use a 9 mm for is to kill people. Outlaw handguns. That’s the only way to eventually reduce the type of killings we have had at Virginia Tech, UNC or the streets of Rocky Mount.
