The terrible shootings, murders, that took place at Virginia Tech will have people screaming for more gun registration laws both in the US and Canada, Well, that isn’t going to happen in the US and it makes no sense to talk about it here.

The fact is that mass murders are not the fault of the gun but the killer. While he can easily get a gun legally in America he can’t in Canada. But what consolation can we take from this? Because small firearms must be registered and that’s tough makes no difference to the killer. The thing that small arms registration do is, somewhat, remove the number of guns in general circulation but they scarcely keep psychopaths from acquiring them.

The lesson we should but won’t learn is that we’re a dangerous society, one that trivializes violence especially on TV, video games and at the Cinema. Children are not so much brought up to be violent. It’s just that extreme violence is so matter-of-fact in their lives. I recall a caller telling me of his grandson’s reaction to planes hitting the twin towers on 9/11 – “cool, Grampa, cool!” And why wouldn’t that be his reaction - what he saw in real life was indistinguishable from what he sees every day on TV or in his video games,

Our society hasn’t got the will to deal with this problem. It scarcely interferes with free speech if we ban shows and games that are excessively violent. If we do take the view that to do this would be to violate freedoms we must accept violence.

I think the fair analogy is to Criminal Code sections that ban hate literature if it’s directed at specific groups. Are not the shows and video games directed at young people and do we not know by now that these shows and videos do, in fact, invite violence, notwithstanding the bleats from producers that kids can sort out their violence from the real thing?

It’s past time that we took a long hard look at this.