Media Spins Va.-Tech Tragedy for Gun Control?!

Chris Field's e-mail address is at the bottom of this article. I invite all sane people to write him and tell him just what a big $%&!@ he is.

Of course gun control advocates are going to "take advantage" of this latest preventable shooting rampage! After all, it's just another example – after dozens of other rampage shootings, year after year – of what we've been arguing for years: Any benefits from gun ownership are HUGELY outweighed by the harm that the easy availability of lethal firearms and ammunition poses for innocent Americans.

What's more, this author and other conservative pundits have the balls to argue that this tragedy could have been prevented by – get this! – allowing "law abiding" VA Tech students to carry firearms on campus. Excuse me, but this Cho Seung-hui was a law-abiding student… up until he murdered 33 people yesterday. So... they're telling us that even more guns on college campuses is the answer?! What the f%#!? What do they want to VA Tech to be, the OK-Corral or a hallowed place of learning?!

Ridiculously, Fields demands a "time out" for collective grief, instead of starting the inevitable debate about gun control now , while the senselessness and waste of these killings are fresh in our minds. Nice try, jackass. But the rational mind sees events like these and immediately goes to the source of the problem: the abundance of firearms in our society. The rational mind, sharpened by disaster, immediately seeks out and finds the source of the problem. The rational mind demands honest appraisal. And angry citizens demand justice. Who's going to give us straight answers? Who's going to make sure this doesn't happen again? The f-ing NRA? George Bush?

All you right-thinking people, send this Chris Fields an e-mail and tell him where to stick it. And then write your Congressmen and Senators and tell them that you want strict gun control everywhere, no exceptions.

It aint 1776 anymore, kids. The only King George we've got is in the White House -- and he hates gun control. Fat lot of good that's done us!

Media Spins Va.-Tech Tragedy for Gun Control

By Chris Field
April 17, 2007 | Human Events

Even a national tragedy like the shooting massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech will not delay the New York Times and congressional gun-control advocates in their quest to push their liberal agenda.

In the New York Times lead editorial today, which was likely written mere hours after the nation's worst gun rampage in history and before the bodies had cooled, the gray lady is calling for more gun control. (In fact, the editorial was probably already largely written a long time ago, they just needed the "where," "when" and number of victims.)

The Times didn't have the sensibility to wait even 24 hours before calling for more gun control. From the editorial titled (not surprisingly) "Eight Years After Columbine":

Yesterday's mass shooting at Virginia Tech -- the worst in American history -- is another horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain. Not much is known about the gunman, who killed himself, or about his motives or how he got his weapons, so it is premature to draw too many lessons from this tragedy. But it seems a safe bet that in one way or another, this will turn out to be another instance in which an unstable or criminally minded individual had no trouble arming himself and harming defenseless people. [...]

Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

Besides the audacity of using this tragedy to immediately push their liberal agenda, the Times editorialists failed to mentioned that there is a complete gun ban on the campus of Virginia Tech, and that ban didn't stop the shooter.

In fact, the VT gun ban was the subject of an excellent op-ed by Bradford Wiles, a Virginia Tech graduate student, in the Roanoke Times last year. Wiles, who had been evacuated Aug. 21, 2006, from the VT Squires Student Center with several other students when the campus was shut down as police searched for an escaped inmate who had reportedly killed a sheriff's deputy and a hospital guard, pleaded with readers "to work with me to allow my most basic right of self-defense, and eliminate my entrusting my safety and the safety of my classmates to the government."

And lest you think the New York Times is the only perpetrator of this offense, Congressional Quarterly reported last night on gun-control advocates in Congress who see this as their chance:

Gun control advocates in Congress quickly cited the Virginia Tech shootings as evidence of the need for tighter firearm restrictions. "I believe this will reignite the dormant effort to pass common-sense gun regulations in this nation," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Monday. The California Democrat has led efforts to renew the expired ban on so-called assault weapons (PL 103-322). [...]

Even Congress' leading gun control advocate, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., conceded that efforts to renew the assault weapons ban and limit high-capacity ammunition clips stood little chance of passage.

But on Monday, McCarthy and her staff were more optimistic.

"We're going to be stepping it up in light of this," said George Burke, a spokesman for McCarthy, whose husband was killed and son was severely wounded by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.

McCarthy introduced legislation in February (HR 1022) that would reauthorize the assault weapons ban.

"It has been more than a decade since meaningful legislation that would prevent gun violence has been signed into law," McCarthy said in a statement Monday. "This pattern must change. For too long Congress has stood idle while gun violence continues to take its toll. The unfortunate situation in Virginia could have been avoided if Congressional leaders stood up to the gun lobby.

There's time for these debates the in days and weeks to come -- and rest assured, those debates will happen. But the anti-gun crowd needn't be "more optimistic" in the wake of such a tragedy. They ought to be heartbroken like the rest of America they claim to represent.

He can be contacted at Chris.Field@humaneventsonline.com