VA Tech Shootout and the Cold War Mentality of MAD

By Tracy Dove, Ph.D
Editor, The Russia News Service

April 18, 2007

Robert McNamara might be enjoying a significant private chuckle right now at the expense of the American gun advocacy lobby. The tragic shooting at Virginia Tech this week hit the grizzly high-water mark of being the deadliest madman's spree with a gun in American history, and it isn't without concern about the availability of guns in the United States that we shake our heads in sorrow for the victims. Not surprisingly, the gun lobby is in damage control mode right now, coming up with its own explanation as how an innocent gun was used nefariously by a lone madman. Their position? More guns would have prevented the massacre if everyone in that German class had had a handgun at her side.

The argument can't be entirely written off if we jettison common sense, dignity and enlightened thought for a moment. The gun lobby is living in the black and white past of the Cold War when nuclear arsenals were ridiculously piled high and "Nuke 'em, Sir" was the final word in American defense strategy. Very easy to understand. Today the bogeymen are different; for those Americans who fear the United Nations helicopters flying overhead at night filled with evil Pakistani mercenaries with laser beams attached to their heads, it is surely a trying time indeed to figure out what the game is all about. Best to keep a lot of guns about the house, just in case.

Ah, nostalgia! We owe a lot of this mentality to the formative years of the 1950's, when the construction of nuclear warheads became cost effective and downright fun. The more the better became the logic of the Eisenhower administration, and it was Ike's pet foreign policy hawk- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles- who warned the Soviets of "massive retaliation" if they ever attacked the United States or its allies.

"It is irresponsibly dangerous to tell citizens that they may not have guns at schools," said Larry Pratt, director of Gun Owners of America, in response to the shootings, who is obviously a crypto-war hawk or closet Dr. Strangelove. Back in the 1960's, Secretary of State Robert McNamara was the lodestar of the military doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction- MAD- which in simplest terms was an American strategy to have so many nuclear weapons stockpiled so as to make a first strike by the USSR a virtual suicide mission. In hindsight we can say that this policy was a trap of logic; the Soviets built more weapons because the United States always had some kind of superiority over the Soviet Union, and it is this spiral that the gun lobby finds logical- arm everyone to the hilt and no one will dare shoot.

False. This may have worked reasonably well in past military strategies, but taken into domestic civilian context, it would be quite distracting if every student had a gun in class and would certainly hinder the complicated learning process of mastering the conjugation of those tough German verbs in the subjunctive.

Today, nuclear war between state actors has become highly improbable, while no amount of deterrence is going to stop terrorists from wanting to start one. This first truth is thanks to negotiations in the 1970's that eventually led to the disarmament of the Gorbachev era, and the second is due to the fact that much of the 3rd world is underemployed with idle time on their hands. As a matter of fact, if we look at the situation in Iraq, it seems that the terrorists actually enjoy a good gun fight. No amount of weaponry in the form of deterrence will stop them, and arming our young people won't stop the madmen that Larry Pratt says are terrorizing our schools.

The gunman who shot up Virginia Tech, if we look closely at his behavior in those hours, may have welcomed a MAD- style shootout with the students he seemed to be inconsolably bent on killing. The gun lobby says "guns don't kill people, people kill people"- and quite true. But let's not make it so convenient to get the guns that we count the body bags in numbers that remind us of a MAD policy at the civilian level.

Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and Dean of Summer Programs for the Lessing Institute. He also teaches history at the Anglo-American College in Prague.

See all previous articles by Tracy Dove here.