Blacksburg, violence, and America

Published by <a href="http://davesmidlife.com/author/admin/">Dave </a> April 25th, 2007

I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven&#39;t really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling.

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/isss/weser_award.html">Thomas Weser</a>, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun.

On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us.

Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing.

In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren&#39;t sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session.

After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/US/9702/24/empire.shooting/index.html">a man had opened fire</a> with a handgun on the Empire State Building&#39;s observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/US/9702/24/empire.shoot/">Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws</a> for the rampage.

America&#39;s latest adventure in easily available firearms is, of course, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre">massacre at Virginia Tech</a>. As I have <a href="http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/18/blacksburg/">mentioned</a>, my wife and daughter, who had visited Blacksburg the day before, missed this one by about 18 hours.

The world press paid close attention to this shooting for a long time. It was front-page news in just about all the newspapers of the world for four or five days. As I write this, nine days after the attack, major papers in <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de">Germany</a>, <a href="http://derstandard.at/?id=2854321">Austria</a>, <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_breve/1,13-0,37-986031,0.html">France</a>, and other countries are still reporting the aftermath.

The one thing the world press has emphasized, without exception, is their absolute bafflement at the U.S. gun laws-or lack thereof. We are the laughingstock of the world in this department. People from civilized countries around the world look at the apparent American fascination with guns and cluck in disapproving astonishment. The unifying theme is something like this: how can a great country such as the U.S., the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, continue to allow this to happen?

After all these years and decades, I cannot come up with an answer. The National Rifle Association seems to have our congressional legislators in a deathgrip. One mass murder happens after another, all carried out with handguns or assault rifles, and yet nothing changes.

The morning after the Virginia Tech shootings, I heard Washington Post sports reporter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Feinstein">John Feinstein</a> on <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/wtwpradio/index.html">WTWP</a>. I wish I could find a transcript of his remarks. Essentially what he said was this: when gun owners and gun fans complain about the inconvenience or unfairness of having to register these deadly weapons, he is sick of hearing about it. Since 9/11 we have been subject to a series of ever more humiliating and inconvenient searches of our persons and property at airports. Nobody really complains, because that&#39;s just the way the world is.

Well, the world is also selling deadly handguns on the Internet to psychotic young men, who then commit mass murder. Couldn&#39;t we endure just a little inconvenience to combat such madness?

I am very angry now at our American stupidity. I am angry at the weak will of the majority of Americans who want stronger gun controls, yet who will not raise hell with their congressmen or senators about it. I am embarrassed to have to try to explain to my European friends and colleagues why Americans are still allowed to buy and carry handguns.

The <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/patoliphant/2007/04/19/">cartoonist Pat Oliphant</a> has captured my sense of befuddlement and rage.

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Original Source: <a href="http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/25/blacksburg-violence-and-america/">http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/25/blacksburg-violence-and-america/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License</a>.

Dave Shepherd

2007-06-08

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

eng

Va. Tech Shooting: Privacy Laws Are Inhibiting Gun Control Legislation

<a href="http://www.groundreport.com/poetsdream">Ann Clemmons</a>
May 03, 2007

Cho Seung-Hui a tormented young man, already exhibiting crazed behavior, ignored the advice of a teacher, slipped through a mental health care facility, conned campus police, and bought two firearms. Teachers, students, and law enforcement personnel were not able to prevent this tragic event. It seems many people, agencies, and family members were aware of the fact that Cho Seung was "troubled" however, due to the so-called protection of privacy laws; they were unable to help him.

Privacy laws are inhibiting gun control legislation. There is now a bill before congress promoting states to report mental health records to the national database used to conduct background checks on people buying guns. Already federal law prohibits anyone involuntarily admitted as a "mental defective" from purchasing a firearm. However, only twenty-two states provide mental health records to the National Criminal Background Check System. At present, the National Criminal Background Check System, screens people before they can purchase a firearm. However, if states are not required to push mental health care facilities to provide mental health records, for all persons including voluntary commitments, what good is the law doing anyone?

This problem has been going on for years, and gun control advocates, special interest groups, and law enforcement officials have been trying to shed light on the this unpredictable reporting. However, the biggest obstacle has been the privacy law in relation to mental health care records. Evidently, if you are voluntarily committed to a mental health care facility, privacy laws prohibit the facility from reporting your time there.

If Virginia, had required mental health care facilities, to report voluntary records to the National Criminal Background Check, the people who died that day at Va. Tech., would still be alive. Cho Seung-Hui would not have been able to purchase the two firearms that killed thirty-three people, including him. Meaning, Virginia only reported involuntary commitments. Moreover, we do not know for sure when someone approaches the counter in a store, to purchase a firearm, if they have or have not threatened to harm themselves or others. We are in the dark as to whether they have or have not spent time in a mental institution.

In the case of Cho Seung-Hui he had voluntarily gone to St Alban&#39;s, after his involvement in two prior incidents with the police involving two female students. However, since Virginia did not require mental health care facilities too report voluntary commitments, Cho Seung-Hui was able to purchase two firearms. Therefore, someone who rattled off incoherent babble on a video tape, and then sent it to NBC was able to buy not one, but two guns! In fact, after the shootings police investigators were unable to get information about his mental health status, all due to the privacy act. It is no wonder that Cho Seung Hui shared the same characteristics as other school shooters. Privacy laws prevented these characteristics from becoming available to the proper authorities before the shootings took place.

What senseless acts, especially at a time of war, when we are already losing scores of human lives.

After Cho Seung gunned down two people, crossed the street into a classroom, bolted the door to keep help out, and fired two firearms into his fellow students, reaction around the world was that of sadness and outrage. Thirty-three students died that day, including Cho Seung Hui. When are we going to wake up? There are American kids across the world battling terrorism, and more are killed right here in our back yard, due to the American people&#39;s debate over gun control.

Since the first report of this shooting, we have heard urging from other nations on the need for reforming Americas gun control laws, and self -defensive attitude. By not implementing some changes in American policy and culture, we will earn more than the right to bear arms. We will also earn the right to bear unspeakable pain and sorrow, consequences that follow the lack of proper procedures in place to protect our citizens from the improper use of firearms.

--

Original Source: Ground Report
<a href="http://www.groundreport.com/articles.php?id=2833707">http://www.groundreport.com/articles.php?id=2833707</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License</a>.

Ann Clemmons

2007-06-05

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

eng

Lodge: Cho's choice: Murder

By Richard Lodge/Daily News staff
GHS
Fri Apr 20, 2007, 12:20 AM EDT

The debate over gun control in the wake of Monday&#39;s massacre at Virginia Tech had already reached the presidential campaign trial by midweek, and it&#39;s sure to surface many times between now and November 2008.

Why had it been so easy for Cho Seung-Hui to buy a 9mm handgun from a Virginia gun shop, then use it to kill 32 fellow students and professors at Virginia Tech, those within the gun-control faction asked?

If only the Virginia legislature hadn&#39;t voted down a bill in late 2006 that would have allowed students and staff at VT to carry guns on campus, Cho would have faced armed resistance before Monday became a massacre, declared the defenders of the Second Amendment.

This tragic slice of life in America is only partly about guns, although that&#39;s likely what the debate will boil down to. The Virginia Tech massacre is about mental illness and whether we can learn to recognize it and treat it.

As more comes out about Cho&#39;s disturbing behavior, the trail of red flags seems clear. One of his professors, Lucinda Roy, raised the alarm years ago about Cho&#39;s disturbing writings and behavior and tried to urge him into counseling. Virginia authorities revealed that in December 2005, a court magistrate ordered Cho to undergo an evaluation at a psychiatric hospital. The magistrate signed the order after an initial evaluation found probable cause that Cho was mentally ill and was a danger to himself or others.

So how could Cho so easily buy a handgun - legally - from a Roanoke gun shop to use in his murderous spree?

Tougher gun laws might have delayed Cho&#39;s purchase with a waiting period, but his lack of a criminal record would not have prevented the gun dealer from selling him the weapon. Should psychiatric exams be part of the process to buy a gun? There&#39;s not a legislature in the country that would have the backbone to do that. And even if they did, how would such an exam be done without excluding and stigmatizing anyone who has been treated for depression or sought psychiatric help at some point? Unlike a felony record, which is an obvious stop sign in the legal purchase of a gun, mental health records would be open to interpretation, and possibly abuse, by the reviewing authority.

But history shows you don&#39;t need to buy a gun legally to commit a massacre. Anyone bent on crime can buy a gun on the black market or steal one.

Closer to home, the tragic fatal stabbing at Lincoln-Sudbury High School earlier this year shows that a weapon as basic as a kitchen carving knife can be the means to a terrible end.

But for wide-scale school violence, the common thread of mental illness and easily obtained guns is clear.

For example:

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers, bought a rifle and two shotguns through a straw purchaser, illegally circumventing the law. Five years after the Columbine massacre and the suicides of Harris and Klebold, the FBI&#39;s lead investigator and several psychiatrists labeled Harris a clinical psychopath and Klebold as a "depressive" under Harris&#39;s influence.

In 1998, Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, stole seven firearms from the home of Golden&#39;s grandfather and used some of them to kill four students and a teacher at a school in Jonesboro, Ark.

In March 2005, Jeffrey Weise killed his grandfather, stole two of his guns, then used those guns and a third one to kill seven people at Red Lake High School in Minnesota.

Even mass murderers who bought guns legally have tended to have mental problems as a common theme.

Charles Whitman, who used the rifle he bought at a hardware store to kill 15 people from his perch in a University of Texas clock tower in 1966, had been prescribed medication for depression.

In 1992, student Wayne Lo used an SKS rifle he bought legally at a store in Pittsfield, Mass., to kill a teacher and student - and wound four others - at Simon&#39;s Rock of Bard College in Great Barrington. Experts at his trial disagreed on whether Lo suffered from schizophrenia or simply had a "narcissistic personality disorder."

Time and time again, killers - almost always men - murder innocents. It&#39;s impossible to imagine that any of these killers is sane.

The Rev. Paul Papas, a pastoral counselor and president of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Framingham chapter), agreed Wednesday that mental illness is a likely trait among those like Cho.

"It&#39;s all about choice, about a person&#39;s ability to choose," Papas said.

In Cho&#39;s case, evidence now says a professor and several others who knew Cho tried to convince him to seek counseling. Apparently immersed so deeply in his own mental quagmire, Cho rebuffed offers of help and rarely even spoke with other people.

Asked what lesson might come out of this week&#39;s tragedy in Virginia, Papas suggested that people paying attention and caring for others might be a good start.

"Anybody who has any kind of relationship with somebody else, hopefully they would see changes in that person and recognize that they might need help, and that they should seek help," Papas said.

But, as we&#39;re learning this week, getting through to a person as deeply troubled as Cho might be more than is humanly possible.

Richard Lodge is editor of The Daily News and writes a column published on Friday. His e-mail is rlodge@cnc.com.

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Original Source: <a href="http://www.dailynewstribune.com/columnists/x232888155">http://www.dailynewstribune.com/columnists/x232888155</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5</a>.

Richard Lodge/Daily News Tribune Staff

2007-05-31

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5

eng

Defenseless Victim Zones

Harold X. O&#39;Boyle / <a href="http://www.the-extremist.com/">The Extremist</a> (Blog)

May 03, 2007

Mass murder invariably gets the Victim Disarmament Lobby into a lather promoting safety through helplessness. The Virginia Tech shooting is no exception. A brief but honest look at how the world works, however, should convince any but the most craven cowards that there is not much safety in being as helpless as a newborn. Acts of senseless violence will never be stopped by simply declaring them illegal.

It is ironic to me that many of the same people who so adamantly oppose self-defense in the face of violence are the same who claim that boosting "self-esteem" is the highest goal of education. Once we&#39;ve created people enthralled with their own individuality and inestimable worth how can it be that the lives of those people are not worth defending?

Education authorities create "defenseless victim zones" where if confronted by violence students are expected to stand and deliver, whether the delivery involves their property or their dignity. The theory is based on the idea that life is immeasurably precious, to be preserved at any price and that a sane criminal, like a thief or a rapist, will let you live if you just lie nice and still. But what if he isn&#39;t a nice sane criminal? What if he just wants to kill you?

There was a time, long before years of government schooling and media propaganda had removed the spine from so many Americans, when the failure to defend yourself was considered the equivalent of suicide. That theory was based on the idea that life was a gift from the Almighty, not to be taken lightly or abused. Educational discussion in those days more often centered on "self-respect" and "courage" than "self-esteem."

In keeping with the modern preference for self-esteem over self-respect Virginia Tech is a "gun free school zone." That means only law enforcement personnel and psychopathic killers can have weapons on campus. On the day of the recent shooting not a law enforcement officer could be found until after the psychopath had already shot more than 50 people and himself.

The cops that did show up, and the SWAT teams, hid behind their cars until the shooting stopped. Then they rushed inside the building and threatened all the survivors with sudden death till everyone was properly prone.

Despite the death toll and the utter failure of the police to protect anyone, college officials are steadfast in their enthusiasm for maintaining the campus as a "Defenseless Victim Zone." According to a spokesman, the administration wants students to "feel safe" on campus. I have to agree that "feeling safe" is an important part of a good education. But just think of how a policy that actually provided some safety would make everyone feel.

There is no way to know whether the dead and wounded at Virginia Tech "felt safe" attending class in a gun free zone. I&#39;m sure it finally dawned on them that no matter how they felt, they were in big trouble.

The shooter ignored laws against carrying a gun without a permit, bringing a gun on campus, assault and murder. The idea that another gun law or "gun free zone" or psych test would have prevented this tragedy is as about as credible as a Senator&#39;s promise.

In an astonishing turn of events Virginia higher education authorities already had experience with a campus shooting that should have made the solution to the safety problem clear.

Five years ago at a law school not far from VT 43-year-old exchange student Peter Odighizuwa shot two professors with a 38 caliber handgun. He also killed a student in the same building and wounded three others. But unlike today, Virginia colleges in those days were not a Helpless Victim Zones.

Two students, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, acting independently, ran to their cars to retrieve handguns when they heard the gunfire. Gross was an off-duty police officer in his home state of North Carolina. He got his 9mm pistol and body armor from the car. Bridges returned with his .357 Magnum.

They approached Odighizuwa from different sides and proved that guns are not just for killing. Bridges yelled for the shooter to drop his weapon. He dropped it and several unarmed students subdued him. Gross went back to his car for handcuffs to detain the shooter until police arrived.

Other school attacks have also been cut short by armed civilians. A vice principal who got a handgun from his car stopped a student shooter in Pearl, Mississippi and detained him until police arrived. A restaurant owner in Edinboro, Pennsylvania used a shotgun to convince a shooter at a school dance to surrender. He did it without firing a shot himself.

Israel had to deal with armed attacks on schools in the 1970s. These were attacks by terrorists, not students, and even then there were cries for disarmament instead of self-defense. Instead of disarmament, the Israelis decided to arm and train their teachers. Terrorists went looking for easier targets. The school attacks stopped.

The belief that guns cause murder is like believing that spoons cause obesity or that matches cause arson. The problems of school violence won&#39;t be solved by increasing the helplessness of potential victims. When confronted by bad guys with guns we always call good guys with guns. Good guys with guns are like taxi cabs and waiters, the more there are the less time you have to wait for one. Mr. Rogers doesn&#39;t become Mr. Hyde just because he has a pistol in his pocket.

Declaring insanity illegal won&#39;t eliminate insanity. We can only be prepared to minimize the damage that the worst among us can do. To do that we must abandon insane policies that make us "feel safe" while in fact increasing danger.

The only sane response to insane violence is to allow armed people to defend themselves and others. The tools and will to confront evil with self-respect, courage and dignity will improve self-esteem more than any number of useless gun laws designed to make us "feel safe."

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Original Source: <a href="http://www.the-extremist.com/2007/05/defenseless_vic.html">http://www.the-extremist.com/2007/05/defenseless_vic.html</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5</a>.

Harold X. O&#39;Boyle

2007-05-27

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5

eng

What could have been done to prevent to massacre at Virginia Tech?

By Arlen Parsa
Filed: Thursday April 19th 2007, 9:05 AM

In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech on Monday, April 16, many asked how such a thing could have happened. It was the deadliest shooting spree in American history, and already there seems to have been several moments where the incident could have been avoided. The killer, Cho Seung-Hui, himself said in a manifesto mailed to NBC News "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today."

While there probably weren&#39;t "a hundred billion chances and ways" to have avoided the massacre that claimed the lives of 33 people including Cho, but there were several common sense things that could have been done.

It&#39;s important to recognize that this horrific incident didn&#39;t happen just anywhere: the shootings happened in Virginia; a state known for having some of the most relaxed firearm regulations in the entire country. In fact, critics and safety advocates had complained for years that VA firearm regulations were wholly inadequate and substandard when compared with the rest of the country.

Here are a few ideas that the Virginia state legislature ought to consider implementing. I&#39;m not holding my breath since it&#39;s made up of staunch NRA types and has been controlled by Republicans for years. But tragedies like these force everyone to reconsider their ideologies.

First, how about a law that says if you&#39;ve been classified as mentally unstable and an imminent threat to yourself or others by doctors and a court- then you&#39;re not allowed to walk into a store and walk out with a gun and enough ammo to kill dozens of students?

This might sound like a no-brainer, but there is currently no mechanism in place in Virginia to stop mentally unstable people from buying as many deadly weapons and ammunition as they like. In this case, the shooter Cho Seung-Hui was diagnosed with mental disorders, had been taken antidepressants and been checked into a mental hospital in 2005.

But that didn&#39;t stop him from buying deadly weapons. He had also been referred to Virginia Tech&#39;s counseling service after he wrote disturbing violent plays about killing people. Through a loophole in the law, Cho wasn&#39;t added to a list of mentally-unstable people not allowed to purchase firearms even after the mental hospital episode because although all the doctors who examined him agreed that he was mentally unstable, he didn&#39;t formally get committed and left a short time afterwards.

Next, how about a law that says that if you&#39;ve been accused of stalking people, you don&#39;t get to walk into a store, point to a small, easily hidden powerful handgun behind the counter and get it along with 50 bullets to use for "self-defense" in a matter of minutes.

Also, what about a law that requires background checks to be done for every firearm purchase in Virginia? Oh, you thought that sort of thing was already required? Nope. Turns out there&#39;s two other loopholes in the Virginia state law: one allows people who buy firearms at gun-shows to forgo the background check process entirely.

The other loophole allowed Cho to forego a Virginia state background check on one of the weapons he purchased because he bought it from an out of state gun dealer over the internet and picked it up at a local pawn shop for a 30 buck fee. The out of state internet gun dealer was supposed to handle the background check, although it&#39;s hard to tell whether they did it or not.

Here&#39;s another idea. How about a law that says if a gun dealer sells five weapons to murders who use those guns to kill people, then they&#39;re not allowed to sell any more guns? Call it the "five-strikes-and-you&#39;re-out rule." A gun dealer that Cho bought a glock and 50 bullets from had been responsible for selling similar weapons to at least five other murderers in the past. Did Cho hear about the dealer&#39;s reputation for being easy to get guns at?

Another thing that&#39;s gotten criticism recently is Virginia Tech&#39;s reaction to the shootings, including their lack of prompt action to warn students. I won&#39;t join the group of rabid idiots blaming Administrators for deaths because I feel sorry for everybody involved at Virginia Tech. At the same time, I think in the future there could have been more done to warn students, especially since the whole incident happened over a span of several hours.

Call this the "better safe than sorry" law. Require all educational institutions (from elementary up to college) to revamp their procedures on what to do if there&#39;s a school shooting or something like that. The government can pay for consultants to help poorer schools figure out a better plan, cost doesn&#39;t matter. But the plans have to include detailed procedures about how to warn students that an incident could be ongoing. At Virginia Tech, students and staff were sent a series of short, sometimes confusing emails updating them on the situation. That&#39;s okay, but what about people in classrooms who weren&#39;t their computers while the massacre was ongoing?

If the school had used their indoor and outdoor PA system throughout the morning to provide updates, it is almost certain that more students and teachers would have been warned. True, they did turn it on after a couple of hours as the incident was ending, but it should have been used immediately and continuously.

If educational institutions do not use every tool they have to warn students that a violent incident is occurring, a law should be put in place that would punish them. And although a punishment shouldn&#39;t really be needed, if heavy enough it would act as a motivation for schools to develop new warning abilities and actually use the ones that they already have. Better safe than sorry.

Some people have suggested that SMS messages over cell phones could be used to warn students. That&#39;s an interesting high-tech possibility, but there are a few problems with it. For one, school safety experts say that ring-tones and all other types of audio phone sounds should be stifled when schools are in lock-down- for obvious reasons. If a student is hiding in a janitor&#39;s closet (purely hypothetical) and there&#39;s a gunman on the loose, the last thing that&#39;s needed is for them to get a text message and their phone to start playing some obnoxious ring-tone betraying their location.

And I&#39;m no expert. To me, this isn&#39;t a question of banning guns, and I think the conservatives who say the debate is between having guns and not having guns are rather disingenuous. This is a matter of common-sense pro-active safety regulations that make the country safer. And these types of changes (and all the ones we haven&#39;t thought of yet) can&#39;t just be implemented in Virginia- they have to be put in place nationwide. There&#39;s no excuse to have some places in the country safer because the laws in those places were designed better. We should have learned that in Columbine in &#39;99, and I&#39;ll be damned if we don&#39;t learn it now. Once and for all.

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Original Source: <a href="http://www.thedailybackground.com/2007/04/19/what-could-have-been-done-to-prevent-to-massacre-at-virginia-tech">http://www.thedailybackground.com/2007/04/19/what-could-have-been-done-to-prevent-to-massacre-at-virginia-tech</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0</a>

Arlen Parsa

2007-05-26

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0

eng

How to Stop a Killer

April 18th, 2007 by Ben

The tragic massacre this week at Virginia Tech will be one of those events that you will remember how you first heard the news, where you were when you heard it, and what you were doing at the time. Like September 11, 2001, it will stick to the national memory for the rest of our lives. The shooting was the most violent act perpetrated on American soil since September 11.

Coming almost eight years to the day after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre">Columbine shootings</a>, the VT murders are the latest and most violent example of the psychotic, suicidal student rampage. Like Columbine, the VT shooter, now identified as senior English major Cho Seung-hui, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3048467&amp;page=1">was calculated and cunning.</a> He chained potential exits shut to prevent possible escape routes. He was carrying multiple clips of ammo. He lined up students and shot them execution-style.

On the Monday night newscasts, the networks went all-out, providing coverage with limited commercial interruption, and many reported directly from the campus. If you listened carefully you probably heard the most repeated phrase of the night: "This is the worst incident of gun violence in American history."

This is true. But the story really has very little to do with guns. Did the anchors get hung up on "the worst incident of airplane hijacking" angle when covering September 11? The story has everything to do with a psychotic <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/17/vtech.shooting/index.html">"loner"</a> who decided it would be better to take as many innocent people with him when he ended his own worthless life.

Acts of mass murder always follow a predictable pattern. First, there is the period of shock. Depending on the magnitude of the incident, this phase can last for days, even weeks. Then there is the healing process: the dead are mourned and remembered, moments of silence are observed around the country. Finally, there is the "let&#39;s-not-let this-happen-again" phase.

With September 11, this phase was complex and expensive. More airport security. "No-fly" lists. Federal air marshals. All of these steps have doubtless made our skies safer and have helped prevent a repeat attack.

With shooting sprees, like Columbine and Virginia Tech, the final phase <a href="http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0402f.asp">revives the gun-control advocates</a> from their slumber. "See," they say, "look what guns do. They kill people. Guns are bad." Do guns kill people? Or, maybe, is it actually <em>people</em> that kill people?

We could prevent another September 11 by banning all airplanes. That would solve the problem, right? We would all just have to drive cars or ride riverboats everywhere. Maybe bring back the horse and buggy. No biggie.

Already the gun control lobby is licking their lips. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.) <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/17/AR2007041700826.html">said in a statement</a> that she believed the killings at Virginia Tech would &#8220;re-ignite the dormant effort to pass commonsense gun regulations in this nation.&#8221; Of course they will. It&#39;s the preventative instinct.

We could try to prevent another Virginia Tech by banning all handguns, but it&#39;s a lot easier to keep an airplane out of the air than it is to keep a gun out of someone&#39;s hand. Let&#39;s start with those evil airplanes first.

Just as we learned on September 11, the issue is the attacker (in that case, radical Muslims, who we now know want to kill us all), not the weapon. If Cho Seung-hui didn&#39;t have access to a handgun, would that have stopped his homicidal plans? Doubtful. He would have just found another way to kill people�a homemade bomb, perhaps.

Tragic as they are, school shootings will never disappear. We can&#39;t wage war on psychotic students like we can on radical Islam. The best way to stop future campus rampages is to allow students to carry handguns. If just one student or professor had had a gun in one of those classrooms, there might be a lot more Virginia Tech students alive today.

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Original Source: <a href="http://joneckert.eckertservices.com/wordpress/?p=61">http://joneckert.eckertservices.com/wordpress/?p=61</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5</a>

Ben Blanton

2007-05-26

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5

eng

VT Massacre: Could it Happen at Hampden-Sydney???

Submitted by JohnMaxfield on Tue, 04/17/2007 - 7:30am.

<b>Would this have happened at a school like Hampden-Sydney? That is the question.</b>

And the answer must be dealt with <b>delicately</b>, in the aftermath of such a horrendous massacre that hopefully we will never see repeated in our history. But the fact remains--could this tragedy have been down scaled and at best, diffused, if students were allowed to possess firearms on school campuses?

I noticed Cliff Garstang&#39;s blog going through the aggregator. He had a <a href="http://democracyinvirginia.blogspot.com/2007/04/virginia-tech-tragedy.html">post up about the tragedy</a> and I thought for once, that he might have a kind word to pass along to the families in mourning. Instead, it ended up being a diatribe about how <i>guns are <b>bad</b>, guns are <b>evil</b>, <b>conservatives</b> are <b>wrong</b> and <b>reactionary</b>, I&#39;m <b>right</b> and <b>you all are wrong</b>, etc. <b>etc.</b></i>

He went on to say how conservatives are of the mindset that if perhaps either some of the students or faculty had been armed, then this might have stopped the shooter. Of course, he disagreed saying, "<b>Put a gun in the hand of every college kid in the country? That&#39;s not only absurd, it&#39;s just crazy. Arming the citizenry will mean more gun-related deaths, intentional and otherwise, not fewer. The sane approach is to make sure that there are fewer guns. Not more.</b>"

<b>What?</b> So here is where my question comes in? Do you think that this tragedy would have happened--better yet--do you think the students would have ALLOWED it to happen at Hampden-Sydney College? Of course not. Why, you ask? Because Hampden-Sydney promotes and allows the use of firearms on campus! Students sleep with shotguns under their beds! They hunt, fish, and target shoot on school property. The Admission Office houses a literal armory of firearms and weaponry under neath that building in their vaults. Statically, the college flaunts, enough firepower to defend the campus against a small country. In talking with a friend after the incident who goes to school there, he said that had discussed this exact issue. They figured that if a shooter dared tried to commit the same horrendous atrocities like at VPI, they wouldn&#39;t last but 10 minutes...alive. So is it absurd, Clifford? Is it a crazy notion? If you was that unidentified Asian...who would you be more likely to attack? A school who prides itself in the respect of the Second Amendment--or schools like VPI, UVA, or William and Mary--that have strict anti-gun polices on campus?

Cliff said that, "<b>Arming the citizenry will mean more gun-related deaths, intentional and otherwise, not fewer.</b>" <b>Really?</b> Well when was the last time of anyone hearing about those gun related incidents at schools that allow and promote gun usage on campus? Why do the &#39;incidents&#39; only occur in school that have anti-gun policies? One can almost draw this parallel--why are the more violent crimes committed in cities like Washington, D.C. and in countries like Great Britain where firearm usage and most possession is illegal? Are we seeing a pattern here? And, sorry, just had to make this final comment, Cliff says that, "The sane approach is to make sure that there are fewer guns. Not more." <b>So people at Hamden-Sydney are insane?</b> Is that the point you are trying to make? And are the people in D.C. who make the gun control laws <b><i>SANE</i></b>?

More on the tragedy: <a href="http://swacgirl.blogspot.com/2007/04/va-techs-derek-odell-story-of-survivor.html#links">here</a>, <a href="http://swacgirl.blogspot.com/2007/04/george-allens-statement-regarding-va.html#links">here</a>, <a href="http://www.spankthatdonkey.com/spankthatdonkey2/2007/4/17/va-tech-vs-applachian-law-school-take-your-pick.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://kilosparksitup.blogspot.com/2007/04/virginia-tech.html">here</a>

--

Original Source: <a href="http://www.progressiveu.org/103032-vt-massacre-could-it-happen-at-hampden-sydney">http://www.progressiveu.org/103032-vt-massacre-could-it-happen-at-hampden-sydney</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0</a>.

John Maxfield

2007-05-26

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0

eng

It's time to confront the gun lobby

by D. Grant Haynes <i>Thursday, Apr. 19, 2007 at 2:10 PM</i>

<i>The senseless murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech underlines once again the necessity for stricter gun control laws in the United States.</i>

Americans are busily soul searching one more time after another mass killing at an educational institution.

This time the setting was a university rather than a secondary school.

But the ghastly spectacle that unfolded at Virginia Polytechnic University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 when a disaffected student--Cho Seung-Hui, 23--systematically executed 32 innocent students and faculty members was fully as terrible as other such recent massacres in America--only worse.

More were killed at Virginia Tech than at Columbine High School in Colorado eight years ago. And the killer&#39;s cold-blooded and methodical resolve, as well as an inexplicable lack of appropriate and timely responses from police officers on the scene, will put the Virginia Tech massacre in a class apart always.

Media pundits, politicians, university administrators, psychologists, clergymen and others talk endlessly now about what lessons might be learned from Virginia Tech.

The university should have had a better evacuation or lock down protocol in place.

University and other police officers should have been more diligent in protecting students from Cho Seung-Hui&#39;s rage after his first shooting spree in which he killed two individuals more than two hours before he reappeared on campus to kill 30 more students.

The mental health community should have done a better job of intervention when Cho Seung-Hui had, over several years&#39; time, displayed symptoms of mental illness.

There is ample blame to go around in this botched and bungled phantasmagoric mess that, seemingly, could not have been handled in a worse way than it was handled.

But in all of the hand-wringing 24-hour non-stop media reportage and speculation about Blacksburg, few professionals and fewer politicians with their fingers to the wind and their campaign coffers chock full of National Rifle Association dollars in some cases, have been willing to state the obvious.

Cho Seung-Hui could not have murdered 32 people so efficiently in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 without access to two pistols and endless rounds of ammunition for them.

Cho was a brooding youth. One of his teachers had identified him as deeply troubled because of the excessively violent nature of his fictionalized scenarios. She had even referred him for counseling.

He had had encounters with the university police over allegations of stalking others.

He had been described as a potential menace to himself and others by a mental health professional.

Should not these facts alone have been a red flag sufficient to dictate a more than perfunctory look at him when he sought to acquire death-dealing hand guns?

That should have been the case and would have been in a more sensible culture.

Had minimally effective gun control laws been in place in Virginia when Cho sought to purchase his pistols and cartridges, he would have been denied a permit and 32 dead Virginia Tech students and faculty members would be alive today.

For all practical purposes, anyone in this nation can obtain a firearm, regardless of his or her emotional stability, maturity, or legitimate need for the weapon.

This is wrong and is cause for people in more sane societies to fear for their very lives when contemplating a trip to America. This writer knows whereof he speaks because he lived in Great Britain for a time and was asked often about the danger of being gunned down in America.

What must they all think today?

More stringent gun control is the only answer to the madness of disaffected youths and others who, repeatedly, have walked into schools and work places and murdered innocent people.

But cowardly Democrats who should be at the forefront of gun control legislation are already distancing themselves from calls for tougher gun laws in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Congressional Democrats fear the wrath of the National Rifle Association and that organization&#39;s clout with a certain segment of American voters too much to do what they know is both right and desperately needed.

Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D-NV) squelched serious talk of more rigid gun controls following the Virginia Tech shootings. The Associated Press reported Reid&#39;s lackluster and cowardly response to questions of stricter gun control as blood was being mopped at Virginia Tech.

"After the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cautioned Tuesday against a &#39;rush to judgment&#39; on stricter gun control....

"I think we ought to be thinking about the families and the victims and not speculate about future legislative battles that might lie ahead," said Reid... ."

And you should also be thinking about the families and the victims of the next such massacre, Senator Reid.

A ban on the sale of assault rifles in the United States--one that was in place from 1994 until 2004 when a Republican Congress permitted it to expire--should be reinstated as soon as possible.

And hand gun acquisition requirements should also be made more restrictive as soon as possible.

The American with a legitimate need for a personal hand gun--certainly and especially a license to carry such a weapon on his person--should become a rare exception rather than the rule.

The Cho Seung-Hui&#39;s of this nation should never be permitted to purchase a handgun or an assault rifle. Background checks prior to the sale of a pistol should be infinitely more thorough--modeled, perhaps after the British system.

The only viable solution to the epidemic of mass killings at American educational institutions and work places is to drastically reduce the number of guns in the hands of Americans.

This can be done and should be done.

And to those who would at this point trot out the tired old bromide, "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns", one can only observe that we must start somewhere and at some point in time.

The process may take decades, but if assault rifle acquisitions are stanched altogether and hand guns are made infinitely more difficult to obtain, there will be ever fewer of each in circulation over time.

That would represent a move in the right direction and would be a fitting memorial to those who gave their lives at Virginia Tech because Virginia&#39;s gun laws had permitted a psychologically impaired youth to acquire the instruments to murder 32 people on a morning that will live in infamy throughout American history.

How many more Virginia Techs must occur before our elected representatives muster the courage to confront the gun lobby and do what must be done?

--

Original Source: <a href="http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/04/197101.php">http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/04/197101.php</a>

(c) Los Angeles Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Los Angeles Independent Media Center.

D. Grant Haynes

2007-05-25

Brent Jesiek

(c) Los Angeles Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Los Angeles Independent Media Center.

eng

VT Students turn to God

<p>Dr. Roger Passman</p>
<p>April 18, 2007</p>
<p>Reporting for <a href="http://tinyurl.com/35g965">Reuters</a>, Andrea Hopkins writes:</a></p>
<blockquote>By all accounts, the prayers started even before the gunshots stopped at Virginia Tech university, and the pleas to God from grief-stricken survivors of the massacre have continued ever since.</blockquote>
<blockquote>"God cares about Virginia Tech," said Megan Martin, 24, joining about a dozen fellow students in a traveling prayer vigil that rambled across the sprawling campus a day after the worst U.S. shooting spree in modern history.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Carrying placards reading: "Jesus loves you," "God knows and He cares," and "Can we pray with you?" the small knot of students worked their way through the university grounds in Blacksburg, a Bible Belt town in the mountains of southwest Virginia.</blockquote>
<p>I suppose turning to God(s) cannot do any serious harm to the individual that does the turning. The evidence, however, does not justify such a move. <i>"God cares about Virginia Tech," said Megan Martin</i>, is quoted in the article. Is this God so cruel that he (she, it) only cares after the fact? Is this God(s) so indifferent that he (she, it) only takes an interest after the dastardly deed has been accomplished? God knows and He cares, is another after the fact fantasy that may serve to salve heightened emotions but does not address the fundamental issue-was this God who cares so much simply on vacation when Cho Seung-Hui decided to engage on a shooting rampage on the VT campus? Does the evidence point to a God(s) who cares, who knows? I think not. What the evidence points to is a random series of events that occur every so often because Americans are willing to sacrifice security for the right to bear arms for any purpose whatsoever. The evidence does not point to a loving God(s) but, rather, to a heightened probability that because guns are so readily available in the United States tragic events such as the VT shootings are more likely than not to occur.</p>
<p>While turning to God(s) is a defensive move in cases of unthinkable tragedy for many people, it seems to me that it is simply a misplaced use of human energy. Telling one&#39;s self that God(s) really care, while that might have a temporary calming effect, does nothing to solve the problem that lies at the root of the VT shootings. Far more productive an approach is to focus the anger and frustration one feels in moments of unspeakable tragedy into efforts to place meaningful regulation on the ownership of weapons that have no other use than to cause permanent harm to those to whom the guns are directed. Gun nuts that demand no regulation of weapons spouting rights granted under the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States <i>(A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,)</i> must ask: <b>to what militia did Cho Seung-Hui belong</b> when he began his rampage? Why was Cho Seung-Hui permitted to purchase and own guns? Why do we put up with this cowboy mentality? Is life really imitating the wild west shootout of the movies?</p>
<p>Rather than turning to God(s) how about turning to Congress and demanding that your lawmakers do something to prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again. If you don&#39;t then, it seems to me, that events like the VT shootings will surely occur over and over, again and again. One Italian journalist wrote that the VT shootings are as American as apple pie. It this the image America and Americans portray to the world? Is this the image we want to portray? It is time to stop the madness.</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Original Source: <a href="http://rpassman.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/vt-students-turn-to-god/">http://rpassman.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/vt-students-turn-to-god/</a></p>
<p>Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States</a>.</p>

Roger Passman

2007-05-24

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States

eng

Virginia Tech: It's Not About Gun Control, and You're a Fool or a Monster If You Say It Is

Apr. 18th, 2007 at 12:02 AM

Virginia is, if memory serves, one of the states that had a particularly malevolently horrible 2004 national election, one marked by substantial Republican chicanery and vicious suppression of the minority vote, so the last thing on earth that I could ever have imagined myself doing was cheering for Virginia&#39;s Republican governor, Tim Kaine. But Tuesday afternoon I not only cheered out loud over something he said, I was so glad he said it that I was waving my fist over my head and very nearly jumped out of my chair. And it wasn&#39;t just what he said, but how he said it; I wish I could find a way to show it to you. But at the end of the Tuesday press conference, some sleazebag in the audience, knowing how pro-gun Kaine is, tossed him what he probably thought was a softball question, namely, did the governor think that some of the deaths could have been averted if Virginia Polytechnic students had been allowed to carry concealed firearms on campus? Instead of the reaction the so-called "reporter" was expecting, what happened was that governor Kaine&#39;s face twisted up as if he had bitten into a bug. And with disgust dripping from his voice, he said something to the effect that the only response he had to anybody who would try to use this tragedy to make any kind of a point about gun control was "total loathing."

And he&#39;s right. So I don&#39;t feel good that I&#39;ve let some of you prod me into having to defend my statement from last night that neither more guns on campus, nor fewer guns, would have made things any better. That some of y&#39;all are sliming up this horrible but essentially random tragedy, that some of you are dragging your muddy political bootprints all over this while the corpses aren&#39;t even yet in the ground, that so many of you are so sick as to seek to twist this massacre into proof that your side should win in the literally pointless debate over gun control before even one family can bury their dead in peace, both sickens me and lowers my opinion of some of you. It lowers my opinion of your collective intelligence, too, because both arguments are so trivially disposed of that I&#39;m having to struggle to maintain my faith in your sincerity -- or even your basic decency, your humanity. If you&#39;re one of the people who&#39;s been doing so, whether pro-gun or anti-gun, you should be ashamed of yourself.

<b>Fewer Guns Wouldn&#39;t Have Prevented the Massacre.</b> I&#39;d like to thank <a href="http://xiphias.livejournal.com/">xiphias</a> for being the first to point out to me, in the replies to somebody else&#39;s journal posting, that while the Virginia Tech massacre is the worst school shooting in American history, it is only the second worst school massacre. The worst school massacre in American history was in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster">Bath Township, Michigan</a>, and its murderer used no guns at all, but instead a pair of bombs. It was in 1927, before the Depression even really began, when a farmer about to lose his farm because of rising property taxes decided to vent his wrath on the community by destroying the public building they were taking his farm to pay off, the local school. With the students still in it. He then waited at the scene, and made history as the first ever suicide car bomber, blowing up the first wave of would-be rescuers who rushed to the scene.

This is probably also a good time to remind you that it is, perhaps, a good thing that Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold had guns. They had not planned to shoot up Columbine High School. They had planned to level it, and to that end had planted two ill-designed propane bombs. Their original plan was to use the guns only to pick off any survivors of the blast that escaped the rubble, before killing each other. Had they not had guns, they might have come back another day with better bombs instead of wandering around shooting at random, and the death toll would probably have been substantially higher. I know that Seung Cho didn&#39;t do anything at Virginia Tech on Monday that he couldn&#39;t have done just as easily and even more effectively with a machete or a good kitchen knife and a couple of ordinary pipe bombs.

England&#39;s got pretty strict gun control, you know. During the Troubles, this caused neither the Irish Republican Army nor the Ulster militias any difficulty whatsoever whenever they got the urge to slaughter a large number of people in British-occupied Ireland, either. Oh, once in a rare while they used guns smuggled to them (depending on which side they were on) either from the British army or from sympathizers here in the US. But more often, they used explosives. It&#39;s also worth pointing out that, since we destroyed their government, Iraqis have had a Virginia-Tech-sized school massacre at least once a month for the last four years. Even though the Iraqi people are some of the most heavily armed in the world, even more heavily armed than your average American, none of their school massacres have involved guns, either. When al Qaeda wants to slaughter high school or college students, they use suicide bombers, just like at Bath Township, just like the Columbine killers tried to do. For that matter, when Timothy McVeigh decided to slaughter a ton of federal employees in Oklahoma City in revenge for the Waco massacre, he didn&#39;t need any guns to do it, either, remember? Just some ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a couple of barrels of diesel fuel, and a few blasting caps.

Throughout history, we&#39;ve been lucky when the sickos take up guns rather than bombs; the bombers were the ones that produced the truly horrific death tolls. So you should count yourself lucky that Seung Cho had decided to buy two handguns when he was indulging his violent fantasies to himself over the last month or so, one of them a weeny little .22 that he probably didn&#39;t manage to kill anybody with, rather than the dynamite or pipe bombs or other improvised explosive devices he might have bought or built if he hadn&#39;t had guns.

<b>More Guns Wouldn&#39;t Have Prevented the Massacre, Either.</b> I grant that this case is a little harder to make, but the only reason that this isn&#39;t obvious is that too many of you have failed to think through what would have happened if some armed student had tried to use his own handgun to overpower Seung Cho. So let&#39;s roll back the clock to Monday morning, or roll it forward to the next school shooting, and pit Rampaging Killer against some hypothetical John Q. Student, both of them armed with handguns. It&#39;s 9:45 on a Monday morning, and it has slowly dawned on John that that banging noise down the hall isn&#39;t construction, but some guy with a gun and a ton of ammunition working his way from classroom to classroom. Or maybe John gets a text message on his phone from someone who tells him that there&#39;s a pistol-wielding maniac in a bullet-proof vest full of ammo heading his way. John, being a responsible type, draws his weapon, pulls the firing pin out of his wallet and resets it, removes the safety, chambers a round, and somehow miraculously gets this all done in time to draw a careful bead on the door, waiting for Rampaging Killer to enter. We will even give him the unlikely credit for having thought to look for the flak jacket and the gun, so he doesn&#39;t accidentally shoot any of his fellow students who are fleeing from the shooter into this room. So the door bangs open, and John Q. Student sees a flak jacket and a gun, and then one of only three possible things happens:

1. Remember that John Q. Student has not just spent the whole morning practicing shooting at real human beings. On the contrary, shooting at an actual human being is something that he&#39;s never done before. In fact, the odds against his having ever fired a pistol at any moving target are astronomical. Also, we know that John Q. Student has at least some humanitarian impulse, at least some urge to not shoot at people. I say this because, frankly, if he&#39;s been carrying this gun with him everywhere he goes for long enough that he happened to have it on him when he needed it, if he didn&#39;t have that hesitation to shoot another person, he would have shot somebody by now and would be in jail, not in a classroom waiting for Rampaging Killer. So I flatly guarantee you that he shoots late, and that he jerks the weapon when he shoots as his body reflexively tries to stop him from shooting someone, and the round goes completely wild. How can I guarantee this? Because this situation has come up over and over again since the invention of the gun, and it is what everybody except for a few combat veterans has done, the first time that they&#39;ve fired a gun at a criminal. And that&#39;s if he fires the gun at all. In example after example, we have seen that what John Q. Student is much more likely to do is the stupidest thing he could possibly do: shout "drop the weapon" or yell "stop or I&#39;ll shoot" or fire a warning shot, wanting to give Rampaging Killer a chance to surrender. All that this achieves is to tell Rampaging Killer, now a practiced shooter, exactly where to aim. If Rampaging Killer hadn&#39;t made up his mind whether or not to shoot up this particular room, he does now, starting with emptying his clip at John and thereby gunning down everybody between John and the wall behind him, and everybody for three feet on either side.

2. Or else, when John Q. Student sees a flak jacket and a gun come through that door, he&#39;s thought of this possibility. Or maybe he&#39;s a combat veteran himself. So knowing better than to try to get Rampaging Killer to not shoot, he immediately opens fire the instant he has a target, and let&#39;s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he shoots improbably accurately. Only guess what? More doors were banged open by the SWAT team, who covered more of the building looking for Rampaging Killer, than were banged open by Rampaging Killer. So the odds are that John Q. Student shoots Officer Friendly, and now we have at least one more corpse. And at least one more killer.

3. Or else maybe this particular John Q. Student is a combat veteran, and an Olympic quality pistol shot, and has faster reflexes than your average Olympic athlete and thinks faster and more clearly than any college aged student you&#39;ve ever met in your life or that you ever will. So in the 1/10th of a second between when the flak jacket and gun crash through that door and when he would need to pull the trigger, he recognizes Officer Friendly&#39;s police uniform, and therefore holds his fire. Officer Friendly makes his combat entry into the room, sweeping his weapon across it in a practiced move, knowing that if Rampaging Killer is in the room and waiting for him then he absolutely must get a shot into Rampaging Killer fast or he&#39;s going to die. Officer Friendly sees John Q. Student&#39;s gun barrel, mistakes John Q. Student for Rampaging Killer, and empties an assault rifle into the area where John Q. Student is sitting, killing John, everybody within 3 feet either side of him, and everybody behind him for at least two rooms. Alas, Rampaging Killer was two floors away. Now we have an entire roomful of more victims.

No other outcome is even vaguely humanly possible. Frankly, if he had any impulse to fight the Rampaging Killer rather than to jump out a window or bar the door, John Q. Student would have been safer and just as effective if he had used his bare hands.

And to again draw the parallel to Iraq, I&#39;ve read that virtually every adult male Iraqi owns an assault rifle, and has since long before Saddam was overthrown. If "more guns" are the solution to school violence, then why are the Iraqis having at least one Virginia-Tech-sized school massacre every month?

<b>So What Are the Politicians Supposed to Do?</b> Voters in a democracy are prone to an obnoxious fault: when something truly awful happens, they demand that every elected official do something about it, right now. It doesn&#39;t matter whether or not there is anything that elected official can do that would be at all useful. All that matters is that the voters see every politician prove that he or she cares about the same things the voters care about by doing something, however futile or counter-productive. So in a way, while it&#39;s sick and tragic and pointless and futile and stupid and inhumane to the families of the victims that we&#39;re having a gun control argument now, I suppose it is sadly inevitable. So what do I think the politicians should do to prevent the next massacre like the one at Virginia Tech instead of arguing about gun control? Nothing. Let&#39;s face facts. One third of the nation is mentally ill. Of that hundred million people, there are probably at least 10,000 who are sick, twisted loners who are total losers with their preferred sex, prone to stalkerish behavior, and altogether too fond of really sick violent imagery. Heck, I&#39;ve known at least two of them personally. Every eight years or so, one of those 10,000 people goes off. And there is still no way to predict which of those 10,000 people are going to go off, and no way to coral or herd or manage or contain or even disarm those 10,000 sickos without setting even more of them off than already go off.

Learn elementary first aid, practice building evacuations, live a good and loving and full life, and if you have dependents pay your life insurance. Not because every eight years or so you have a one in 10,000,000 chance of being the victim of a rampaging mass murderer, but because you run a much higher probability of at least once in your life of being involved in some kind of random disaster, whether from dangerous weather, or other natural disaster, or a building fire, or an act of war, or any of a long long list of things that can go wrong in this life. Sometimes death just comes at random. Sometimes there just isn&#39;t anything useful we can do about that other than to do what you political carrion eaters aren&#39;t allowing us to quietly do instead of getting dragged into your pointless argument, and that&#39;s to comfort the survivors and rebuild.

* Mood: aggravated

--

Original Source: <a href="http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328865.html">http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328865.html</a>

licensed under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike 2.5 License</a>.

J. Brad Hicks

2007-05-24

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike 2.5

eng