Bloody Monday

Mazurland's thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of yesterday's shooting massacre at Virginia Tech. An unimaginable tragedy has occurred. The repercussions among the injured, the families, the students, and the entire community will be profound and lasting.

Predictably, the political issue of gun control has quickly come to the forefront. Within hours of the tragedy, the Press was already asking President Bush about the need for stricter gun control laws. Many liberal websites are buzzing with such demands. But wait. Wasn't the Virginia Tech campus their utopia? No one was allowed to have a gun. In fact, there was even a flurry of publicity about this fact back in January, when a bill which would have allowed students and staff to possess firearms on campus, was defeated. At the time, a college spokesman even gloated that the school would now be safe:

"Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. 'I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.'"

Yes a gun-free oasis had been created. Except, of course, for that one pesky criminal who ignored that law. Now gun control advocates will argue that for full effectiveness, what needs to happen is for our entire nation to become just like that oasis. But we all know it's hard to make the 200 million firearms in the US vanish, especially when the 80 million gun owners have a strongly opposite view. Sure, many current gun owners might agree to turn in their guns if draconian laws were enacted, but many won't. And the least likely to comply would be criminals.

Let's compare yesterday's events to the recent Trolley Square Mall shooting in Salt Lake City. Similar situation: a madman comes armed to the teeth with the sole purpose of killing as many people as possible. The difference is that one of the mall's patrons had a gun. He engaged the perpetrator and bought enough time for the police to arrive. Once the concealed gun was shown, no further innocent deaths occurred.

There are other instances where killing sprees are stopped by legally armed citizens. Like the time a Mississippi high school principal stopped a shooting rampage by a student (who had just killed his mother) using a .45 he kept in his car. Or the time two armed Virginia law students ended a killing spree at their school. You never read about these instances in the news because fewer people died (thankfully), and the stories didn't fit the MSM's agenda. It's estimated that guns are used for defensive purposes more than 2.5 million times/year. You don't hear about that either, because in most of these instances shots were never fired, and when they were, the mere killing of an intruder was not deemed newsworthy.

And then there was the massacre at Luby's cafeteria in 1991. It made headlines because of the number of deaths, but what most non-Mazurlanders don't know is that the rampage was painfully close to being thwarted by a legally owned handgun, just a few yards away, in a customer's car. The gun's owner normally carried the gun in her purse, but like a good citizen, she followed the local ordinance that day, and did not bring it inside. Here is her classic Senate testimony during the assault weapons ban hearings. And who did she blame? She blamed the politicians who made the restrictive laws that prevented her from saving her parents' lives.

I would bet any money that you will see a disproportionately high number of future concealed weapon permit holders among the students who helplessly witnessed yesterday's rampage. The same thing occurred in Utah after the Trolley Square shooting; there are now record numbers of state permit applications there. What is that old saying about a conservative being a liberal who was mugged by reality? Many of these students have just learned to never trust anyone else with their own safety.

We all hope that these horrible episodes remain rare. But, with evidence that some terrorist groups have plans for targeting our vulnerable schools (similar to the Beslan school massacre), we also hope that the right political lessons are learned from this tragedy.

Finally, Michelle Malkin has an e-mail from a student (scroll down) who was in the building where most of the killings occurred. It demonstrates how the action of one student, who decided to protect himself, may have saved several lives.

Comments

[Army of Mom]

Ms. Gratia-Hupp turned that tragedy into a score for Texans with her hard work to get a concealed handgun license put into place here. My husband has had a CHL for several years now and I'll be honest - I feel safer knowing he is armed when we go places.

Kim Du Toit had that same quote on his page. I linked to his before I stumbled over here to see you had it, too.

One more thing I saw, a Reuters story made some comment about 30,000 people killed by guns annually in the US - a number I highly doubt is accurate. Then, it quotes some gun control lobby, but didn't give equal time to an opposing viewpoint to mention that an armed student could have saved lives.

Thanks for posting this. I give you a hat tip on the blog today for the My Humps post. :) Good stuff here and there.

[Chris]

Unfortunately, that same Luby's case was partly responsible for the 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. Of course, it had no effect on crime, but that's not gonna stop the Dems from trying again. My wife used to be uncomfortable with the idea of guns, but when a local double murder occured (unexplained at the time) she asked me to keep one unlocked in our dresser drawer. Now she owns her own.

Whatever the real gun death numbers are, a large percentage of those are criminals killing criminals (drug related). These VT type of random "rampages" are rare. And the criminal gun death numbers are overshadowed by the number of times guns are used for defensive purposes.

Finally, despite what you may be hearing on the news, the worst school massacre in this country was done with dynamite.

[Tom Mazur]

Without getting into the gun debate....I'm surprised that a little red light didn't go off somewhere along the way. Didn't this girl know that her boyfriend was a little whacked and was capable of some sort of revenge. I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but from what I've heard, the kid was on a student visa. My question is this....where did he get all those guns and ammo w/o raising some sort of concern.

[Chris]

He lived here 14 years. Had a green card, but was not a citizen. I believe the green card allowed him to buy a gun (not certain of this), which he did a month earlier.

Why his "issues" weren't recognized seems to always be the question in these cases. Sometimes, after all the details come out, the question becomes "Why didn't someone say something or act?"

[Paul]

You have to have a green card to get a gun. I work with a Chinese guy who is here on a H1-B visa who is itching to get a gun, a 9mm Glock to be specific. We were talking about the massacre this morning and the first thing he asked was, "How he get the gun with a student visa?" We found out later that the Korean guy had a green card. Before we knew he had a green card, we explained to him that if you want a gun, you can get one. It just takes $$.

[Marty]

He was an English major. His creative writing teacher was disturbed by some of his writings. She says a lot of personal stuff comes out in creative writing classes and it's hard to know what is "creative" and what is "whacked". His grades and writings will from this class are being withheld because of privacy reasons.

BTW, I've been watching some of the stories and commentary on this in the world press and on some sites that allow reader commentary. Many readers express heartfelt horror and sympathy for the victims and their families, and leave it at that. Some can't resist using that sentiment as a segue into soapbox time. And of course, they all know it's because of American gun culture that this happened. Never mind that the perpetrator was not American (though he has been here much of his life), and was obviously deranged. Never mind that other mass shootings have happened all over the world, some in places with much stricter gun laws than the US. And even granting that this kind of thing might happen in America more often due to the great availability of guns, it is also true that America is the one country in the world where, once the wheels were in motion, there is the greatest chance of this being prevented.

How is that? Well, even in countries with the most draconian gun laws, this kind of thing can happen, has happened, and will happen again. (Witness what happened in Beslan.) No amount of gun grabbing will stop it. The authorities are never where you need them in such time-critical situations. The perpetrator is wary of the uniformed officer. Ditto, the "well-trained staff members with gun permits" that some schools and employers tout as the responsible answer. (You'd have to staff every floor of every building with such a trained permit holder to make sure this did not happen.) But in America, some ordinary, law abiding citizens make it their business to carry a gun. It's not legal for them to do so everywhere, and this may have been part of the problem in some recent mass shootings. But there have been many cases (Chris mentions just a few), where the presence of one armed and fearless citizen stopped a mass shooting that anywhere else in the world would have played out to the end.

[Chris]

I know my post might be viewed as politicizing the tragedy, and I thought hard about that before publishing.

But I was really reacting to the salvo of calls for stricter gun laws that were in the press, and on the net, within minutes of the shooting. In other words, I chose a defensive posture rather than being passive. Drawing the wrong conclusions (and creating the wrong policies) in the aftermath of this event would only add insult to the already devastating injury.

[The Challenge]

Horrifying, deeply disturbing very sad!

[Ben]

Incidentally, I was talking to my wife about the shootings last night. I have mentioned before that one of the reasons I don't yet own a firearm is that my wife is opposed to having one in the house -- "for safety reasons", of course. A typical fear bred from ignorance and unfamiliarity. Well, that has changed completely. Now she wants a gun, wants firearms training, and wants our daughter, when she's old enough to point and shoot, to have the same training, a CC license, and a nice purse-sized weapon of her own. Not that my wife is in the least bit liberal, but "mugged by reality", indeed. At least the mugging was vicarious.

[Chris]

Wow Ben, that's a pretty impressive turnaround on your wife's part. Even though the VT events were horrific, it usually takes something closer to home to create such dramatic switch. With my wife it was a more gradual process. Guns bad > guns ok (in other words *I* was OK) > I want yours available (after the local murders) > I'll take lessons and get my own.

If you ever have questions, feel free to drop me a note.

[Ben]

Well, I think it was largely her empathic nature. She put herself in the shoes of a mother of one of the slain students, and considered how she would have felt if Isabella had even been on campus then, much less numbered among the victims. It was not completely without my help, of course -- I explained certain issues, and in particular described the aforementioned Luby's incident to her. She's a smart girl, but sometimes vivid, even tragic, illustrations are required for her to make a change of heart.

And besides, I had already swayed her to the point where she was on the Right on the issue everywhere except actually owning a gun. This was just the last step.

[Chris]

BTW Michelle Malkin has a good column today about our society's need to develop a "culture of self defense"; intellectually, spiritually and physically. We have grown to either rely or be force-fed by others in so many areas of society. We are at the mercy of everyone from teachers to criminals, and we're taught to accept it. The article is worth reading.