Collegiate Times

Two hundred and fifty-two years ago, a small frontier outpost in southwest Virginia fell victim to a bloody massacre. A band of Shawnee Indians converged on the settlement, killing four settlers and taking as many more captive. It was an attack of bows, arrows and tomahawks against muzzle-loading muskets. For more than two centuries, it was the only massacre that this small town had ever known.

The event inspired books and a play based on the experience of Mary Draper Ingles who was taken by the Shawnee to present-day Kentucky as a slave. She escaped and walked barefoot several hundred miles back to Blacksburg. Beyond her eyewitness account, not much more is known about the incident. The following is an attempt to imagine the ensuing response to the Draper Meadow Massacre of 1755.

Within days of the incident, 2nd Amendment activists barraged colonial inboxes with flaming e-mail forwards capitalizing on the event. (It should be noted that the majority of e-mail forwards up to that point were about stamp taxes and tobacco tariffs and that 2nd Amendment was not yet numbered as such since the Constitution was still in rough draft.) The e-mails claimed this event was further justification of the new slogan: “A gun in the hand of every child, woman and man.”

On the other side of the debate, settlers were up in arms about tougher laws on tomahawk trading. As a result of the public outrage, new laws made it all but impossible to buy or even possess a bludgeoning implement of any kind throughout the colonies. In many frontier hot zones, settlers were relegated to using household silverware to cut firewood. Cutlery of all types was confiscated at river forgings and wagon turnpikes. Within the year, lawmakers in Philadelphia were pressured to outlaw the mining of flint altogether in an attempt to curb the black market stone weapon industry.

The county sheriff resigned as a result of harsh criticism for not investigating reports of smoke signals leading up to the incident. An inter-colonial task force was formed to construct a wall of defense along the entire frontier from Georgia to the Great Lakes. Opponents to the wall cited failures of a similar project in China, yet the colonial politicians were pressured to not stand idle with their constituents living on the precipice of uncertainty.

I’ll stop there. This historical fiction is obviously not what happened in 1755, but future historians may follow a similar storyline in the chapter they write about our current period. 4/16, just like 9/11, has focused our attention on trying to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of potential madmen. It seems logical but it should be obvious to our generation that accessibility to weapons is not the crux of the issue at all.

The Oklahoma City Federal Building was brought down with fertilizer, the Twin Towers with box cutters, and, in Blacksburg's previous internationally-publicized shooting, two people were killed by a weapon stolen from the law enforcement. When a man sets his mind on killing, he will find a way to do it and no law can stop him.

In the coming months, we will watch intense debate locally and nationally on how to make schools safer. Our university administration will be forced to make exhaustive changes so that the events of April can never happen again. This is an impossible task motivated by an understandable yet irrational emotion. Will our campus remain a gun-free zone? Will there be 24-hour card access to every building (the university announced Monday that there would), metal detectors in classrooms, gated entry on the perimeter, barbed wire? Billions more dollars will be mobilized to secure schools across the nation and, though our parents might feel better about it, we may inadvertently increase the creativity and motivation to commit even worse violence.

Mass murder is a sad but inevitable side effect of a free society. Where there is freedom to do great good, there will always be the option to do great harm. Humans naturally respond with closed fists, trigger fingers and thousand-mile walls, but none of these address the cause of our illness: our own self-centeredness.

The deep change we need cannot be enacted by legislation. We must resist the temptation of drastic policy shifts and stop expecting our government and academic institution to bear the full burden of keeping us safe. Our best defense against violence is to get to know our neighbors, to find out what we need from each other, and do all we can to strengthen the fabric of our community. As each resident of Blacksburg lives more interdependently, this small Southwest Virginia town can regain her frontier identity and live once again on the dangerous edge of the free world.