Gun control won't work in U.S.
By: KONRAD KLINKNER
Columnist
Posted: 4/23/07
The intricacies of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech are proving to be very enduring media fodder, with NBC lapping up Cho's media package and the investigations probing deeper and deeper into the background of the gunman, savoring every juicy drop of sordid drama. It's been so lasting because, as the act of an irrational psycho, it's riddled with questions that will never be answered - and that always keeps an audience.
Almost grudgingly, one of the few concrete issues that the tragedy has forced back into the national spotlight is one of America's least favorite debate topics: gun control. One might think that the massacre naturally lends itself easiest as an example of how guns are too easy to acquire here in the States. But, pro-gun rights advocates are already quick to turn it into a case for more self-defense.
Indeed, some gun-rights proponents are even suggesting that Virginia Tech's campus policy of prohibiting the possession of firearms on campus should be reviewed. A fair number of students are quoted as saying they wished somebody had a gun with them on that day. Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said, "All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last 10 years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen - a potential victim - had a gun. The latest school shooting at Virginia Tech demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation's schools at the mercy of madmen."
So Pratt is suggesting here that allowing guns on campuses would be a big step toward curbing shooting outbreaks. Really? Who thinks to bring a gun to class on a regular basis?
Beyond making a strong case for having more vigilant background checks, though, it's very unlikely that the Virginia Tech tragedy will spur any significant gun control initiative within the United States. It's not like any previous mass shooting has.
To many people elsewhere in the world, the recent tragedy is yet another bloody stain on America's generally ugly reputation. European critics, as to be expected, particularly express their never-ending bafflement that Americans never seem to do anything about their gun laws.
And well they may wonder. But as much as I don't care for guns and identify more with the ethos of gun-control advocates, I can't believe that gun control alone is going to fix things. Serious gun control legislation, like what Europe has, is doomed to fail in the United States as it is today, and that's because guns are just too embedded in American culture for laws alone to make lasting changes about it anytime soon.
History has shown us that prohibition laws are rarely ever effective when they run up against big cultural institutions. A real attempt to bring our gun control laws anywhere near the standards of Western Europe would be disastrous today. If someone ever miraculously pulls off an outright ban on general gun ownership in the United States, that person will probably get shot, and I'd fully expect ferocious, widespread defiance of the law across the entire nation. You'd have to pry those guns from America's cold, dead hands. Before law reform can be used effectively to curb guns, our gun culture must first undergo reform.
Gun ownership is often trumped up in the United States as a testimony to the hallowed virtues of individualism and self-sufficiency. The civilian's gun embodies vigilante security and is about as literal as "power to the people" gets - this harkens all the way back to the Revolutionary days when militias actually mattered, which is indeed where we got this Second Amendment from in the first place. It was an assurance to those suspicious of the new federal government that they'd always have their guns to protect them should the feds ever get too tyrannical. Even today some pro-gun rights people will talk about a civilian's firearms as the last line of defense against governmental tyranny, which really can't be anything more than just a psychological comfort, since I can't imagine today's citizenry armed with handguns and hunting rifles having any chance against our government's tanks and bomber planes.
But of course it's naive to say that gun enthusiasm in America mainly comes from a militant devotion to liberty. On a more simple level, people just like shooting things, and having guns makes you dangerous and therefore potentially cool.
I get somewhat torn when it comes to this, because on one hand, I'm not a fan of real guns, but I honestly also think guns are quite awesome when kept to the realm of fiction, as in video games. Most U.S. politicians tend to take an inverse stance, being way more comfortable supporting restrictions on the mere depiction of guns rather than restricting guns in real life. Personally, I would rather there not be necessary restrictions on anything, and that American culture could just chill out with the guns out of its own volition. That, I think, will bring more peace than any law will bring about, but it will be a long time in coming.
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Original Source: <a href=http://media.www.pittnews.com/media/storage/paper879/news/2007/04/23/Opinion/Gun-Control.Wont.Work.In.U.s-2873292.shtml> The Pitt News - April 23, 2007</a>
KONRAD KLINKNER
2007-08-19
Sara Hood
Annie Tubbs <annietubbs@gmail.com>
eng
A brutal mind
11.15am
Media reports portray Cho Seung-hui as a troubled boy with a murderous imagination
<b>Michelle Pauli
Wednesday April 18, 2007</b>
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2059933,00.html">Guardian Unlimited</a>
Just one face stares out of the front pages of the papers today. With the naming of the perpetrator of the Virginia Technical College massacre, all attention is focused on Cho Seung-hui, the South Korean loner who shot dead 32 of his fellow students and professors.
The Telegraph and the Mirror both use the killer's own words as their headline: "You made me do this." The line comes from the note left behind by Cho, which also rails against "rich kids", "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans".
The picture that is emerging of Cho is of a troubled loner with a history of mental health problems. Roommates at the dormitory where he lived called him "weird", while fellow students in his creative writing class describe being frightened by his "morbid and grotesque" plays.
The Washington Post has an interview with the head of the English department, Lucinda Roy, who had taught Cho in one-to-one sessions after a colleague had been disturbed by his work.
According to the Post, Roy said she warned school officials. "'I was determined that people were going to take notice. I felt I'd said to so many people, 'Please, will you look at this young man?' "
The question of whether Cho could have been stopped - if not before the first two killings then in the period before the further shootings - continues to be examined. The Guardian says that "angry" students want to know why the campus was not locked down and classes cancelled and why it took more than two hours for them to be sent a warning email. Details from those two and a half hours "remain sketchy" says the paper but it is believed that the police thought that the first two shootings were a domestic murder committed by someone who had then left the campus, leaving them surprised when the second shootings occurred.
"The university has blood on their hands," says one student, Billy Baston, in the Guardian.
But what about the gun vendors? As attention, in the UK press at least, turns once again to America's gun laws, it was revealed yesterday that the pistols used by Cho had been bought legally on March 13. "It was a very unremarkable sale," says the owner of the shop. And, the assumption is, such sales will continue to be unremarkable in America.
The National Rifle Association is too potent a foe for any party to take on, says the Guardian, which flags up the $14m donated by the lobby group to politicians over the last 14 years. "Once again the rest of the world will look on in amazement as America proves itself unable to defend its ordinary citizens from armed maniacs," says the paper.
Elsewhere, commentators generally agree that little is likely to change in the area of gun law. And why should it, asks Richard Wolffe from Newsweek, in the Independent. You can't take the guns out of American life and you can never really stop another Virginia Tech, he says.
Magnus Linklater in the Times thinks that "probably" tighter gun control would have prevented the Virginia Tech shootings but that banning guns is a salve rather than a solution. "What is needed s a wholesale shift in the national culture - and that will take rather longer than an arms ban," he comments.
The Telegraph, meanwhile, has a rather odd comment piece from David Frum, a former speechwriter for George Bush. Headlined "No policy can outwit the Grim Reaper", Frum argues that we must blame the criminal not the gun culture. "Death lies waiting around the corner for us all," he remarks and "no public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact".
Along with profiles of the perpetrator and the analysis of how he could have been prevented, the third area of focus in the pages and pages of coverage of the tragedy are, of course, the victims. And, among the tributes, the papers pay particular attention to Liviu Librescu, a 79-year-old professor of engineering who had survived Nazi death camps but died saving the lives of several of his students by blocking his classroom's doorway as Cho approached. Professor Librescu has emerged a hero, says the Telegraph, which describes how he barricaded the door of his classroom and told his students to jump from the second floor window. Many leapt to safety. He was shot dead.
"It is worth reflecting on the significance of Professor Librescu's life of quiet heroism, which encompassed the Holocaust, a career of internationally admired teaching and research, and a final act of sacrifice that saved at least nine other lives," says the Times in its leader.
The Guardian describes how friends of the victims are gathering online to remember the students through videos, blogs and message boards. An instant memorial to Emily Hilscher, the first victim, has been created on the social networking site Facebook. The page asks "everybody that joins to post one or more things that made Emily cooler than you". The paper reports that within a day of the shootings, more than 120,000 people have joined a discussion group to pay tribute to the victims.
<B>On Guardian Unlimited</B><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/virginiashooting/">Full coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/0,,182056,00.html">Gun violence in the US</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/gun/0,,178412,00.html">Gun violence in Britain</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/0,,759893,00.html">Full US coverage</A><BR><BR><B>Related articles</B><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2059217,00.html">Virginia massacre gunman named</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2059103,00.html">Unofficial list of shooting victims emerges</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2058887,00.html">Massacre on campus</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2059250,00.html">Q&A: US gun laws</A><BR><BR><B>World news guide</B><BR><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldnewsguide/northamerica/0,,618255,00.html">North American Media</A><BR><BR><B>Media</B><BR><A HREF="http://edition.cnn.com/">CNN</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/">New York Times</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/">Washington Post</A><BR><BR><B>Government</B><BR><A HREF="http://www.state.va.us/cmsportal2/">Virginia state government portal</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.usa.gov/">US government portal</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.whitehouse.gov/">White House</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.senate.gov/">Senate</A><BR><A HREF="http://www.house.gov/">House of Representatives</A>
Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007.
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Original Source:<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2059933,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2059933,00.html</a>
Michelle Pauli
Guardian Unlimited
2007-08-12
Adriana Seagle
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Editorial: The necessary right of self-defense
From the <a href="http://www.californiapatriot.org/magazine/issue/8/8">May 2007 Print Edition</a>
Respectfully observing tragedy is never easy. Tempering a respect for the deceased and their families with a desire to draw upon lessons from the tragedy to prevent future occurrences is touchy. Indeed, allegations have already been levied that some have exploited the Virginia Tech shootings for political gain. Within hours of the attack, gun-control advocates began a full-fledged campaign against gun-rights politicians, as many in the media were quick to call for increased regulation of guns, ostensibly to prevent future tragedies.
We at the <em>Patriot</em> give our condolences to the families of the deceased, and pray for a quick recovery of those affected by the attack. At the same time, we take a firm stand against gun-control advocates who attempt to offensively use the recent tragedy to silence other voices.
The aftermath of Columbine was no different. Second Amendment advocates were branded "insensitive" and politicians seized the opportunity to put gun-control measures on the table. However, Virginia Tech bears little resemblance to Columbine.
Though the first two student deaths in the dormitory were unexpected, the subsequent slayings in Norris Hall could have been prevented with adequate campus security and warnings. The issue at question should be the shoddy campus security and an administration's apparent complacency in the face of red flags; campus officials issued only an e-mail warning to students after the first two victims were found murdered.
Virginia Tech's administration is not unique.
UC Berkeley's own stance on security is laughable, in the face of a locus of crime around People's Park. Vagrancy exists as a catalyst for crime, yet is permitted to continue. Admittedly, muggings and university shootings are on separate planes, but the complacency about student safety is the same. Unfortunately, it takes a tragedy before bureaucratic and disconnected administrations get serious about student safety.
Despite the fact that the Virginia Tech administration could have done more to secure the campus, gun-control advocates nonetheless spuriously seized the opportunity to make the Second Amendment the primary culprit. However, existing gun-control laws outlawed the killer from having guns. Even <em>The New York Times</em> pointed out that existing laws "made the killer ineligible to purchase guns" since law "prohibits anyone who has been 'adjudicated as a mental defective ...' from buying a gun." The killer slipped through existing statues because enforcement of such laws is spotty. Local mental-health records are often not synchronized with national records, which let killer Seung-Hui Cho slip through.
Gun-control advocates shouldn't be championing more legislation, but instead should be focusing their efforts on enforcing existing laws. Even if one philosophically supports additional gun-control laws, they would only serve to stretch existing enforcement budgets thinner, and result in a net decrease in enforcement.
Yet reasons to oppose gun control aren't just pragmatic. Freedom is often confused as the philosophical justification for the Second Amendment. However, the philosophical base for the right to bear arms is much more profound. Such a right empowers individuals to defend themselves, so they don't have to leap out of windows when threatened by mentally defective maniacs. It gives individuals the ability to defend themselves when a government or administration does not take the adequate steps to protect them. During the rampage, students were at the mercy of the killer and the Virginia Tech administration. Were even one mentally stable student, instructor, or janitor armed, the outcome would have likely been much different.
Far from demonstrating a need for extensive gun control, the Virginia Tech tragedy demonstrated the dangers of relying heavily on a bureaucratic entity for protection. It's true that enforcement of existing laws could have helped prevent the tragedy, and a more vigilant administration could have prevented two deaths from turning into 32. The underlying lesson to take from the tragedy, however, is markedly different. At the end of the day, neither a university administration nor government can ever be trusted to safeguard an individual's safety, because such amorphous bodies lack the direct accountability to do so.
The university president and security force may lose their jobs over the tragedy, and that may compel future officers to be vigilant. Yet the students who barricaded themselves into classrooms won't forget that they owe their lives to their own abilities to save themselves, not to a university administration, police force, or government.
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Original Source: California Patriot Online
<a href="http://californiapatriot.org/magazine/issue/8/8/editorial">http://californiapatriot.org/magazine/issue/8/8/editorial</a>
Licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License</a>.
California Patriot
2007-08-05
Brent Jesiek
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License
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'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's important to recognize that this horrific incident didn'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'm not holding my breath since it'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've been classified as mentally unstable and an imminent threat to yourself or others by doctors and a court- then you'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't stop him from buying deadly weapons. He had also been referred to Virginia Tech's counseling service after he wrote disturbing violent plays about killing people. Through a loophole in the law, Cho wasn'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't formally get committed and left a short time afterwards.
Next, how about a law that says that if you've been accused of stalking people, you don'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'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's hard to tell whether they did it or not.
Here'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're not allowed to sell any more guns? Call it the "five-strikes-and-you'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's reputation for being easy to get guns at?
Another thing that's gotten criticism recently is Virginia Tech's reaction to the shootings, including their lack of prompt action to warn students. I won'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'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'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's okay, but what about people in classrooms who weren'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'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'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's closet (purely hypothetical) and there's a gunman on the loose, the last thing that'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'm no expert. To me, this isn'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't thought of yet) can't just be implemented in Virginia- they have to be put in place nationwide. There'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 '99, and I'll be damned if we don'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
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'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'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' 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'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'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 'rush to judgment' 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'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'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?
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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.
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