Harris and Klebold, students, arrive at school in Columbine, Colorado, United States of America. They then enter school and a few minutes later these two guys start shooting other students and dropping bombs wherever they go – a lot of people die. They finally kill themselves right inside the school. This is not a movie. This is not a book. This is not fiction. It really happened on April 20, 1999. We first created weapons to hunt and feed, then we start defending ourselves from possible enemies or from nature, later we hurt people to gather information, and today… Well, today we almost do not use fire guns to hunt – or do we?
A long time ago, we used stones as a tool to hunt. If we could hunt, we could eat. It was a practical use for a weapon, helped us to survive and develop new ways to obtain food. Stone was an extension of ourselves one time. It was a new technology that at that time, had a purpose.
As time goes by, people developed new purposes for stones. Yes, we found out that we could not only hunt, but hurt… And these two little letters [HUnT or HUrT] affect all of us. We then invented more types of weapons, and people use(d) them in many ways: There was a time to defend ourselves from “enemies”, conquer lands, to get heritages back, and sometimes we use these weapons to get food. The development of weapon changes the rhythm of things and objectives of life.
And what comes from the development of weapons? A hot mess. We no longer have control over what we are doing and weapons became [more] dangerous. Our society has so many technologies and new researches for types of arms, and almost everyone has access to fire guns. We became a violent civilization (mess + free access to weapon = civilization?). This so-called civilization has access to weapons that are considered to be a powerful thing and/or even safe. Cops have weapons to protect a community from criminals, the government has weapons to keep enemies away from their lands, women have weapons to feel safe, men have weapons to show their power… And do teenagers have weapons to kill?
This is how we are using our weapons today. Those two teenagers used guns, that they bought on the internet to kill their colleagues. I bet the person who came up with guns did not think that this was the purpose of them… or maybe they did, I don’t know.
What’s certain is that we are not following the right rhythm for this technology’s development, because maybe, we are not ready to have guns and to use them! Ask yourself: Are we using this technology properly or as a useful extension of us? We all know that technologies are invented to be an extension of ourselves… This does not seem to be the case of fire guns. Are we developing new weapons and forgetting to expand our brains to learn how to deal with such dangerous technology? Isn’t this technology much more advanced than we can live with? Or are weapons a true and useful technology and we are actually the villains?
Mabel Marin 