VA Tech and 'an American particularity'

Shootings

by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker | April 30, 2007

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia's governor, Tim Kaine, said, "People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it's about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere."

If the facts weren't so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor's deeply American belief that "healing" can take place magically, without the intervening practice called "treating." The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of "narcissism," violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, were tightened—it's now against the law for any private citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since. In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far from sufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple of subsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with far fewer dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeat incident.

So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularity about guns. The arc is apparent. Forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blacksburg, Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harder to obtain. In fact, while campus killings continued—Columbine being the most notorious, the shooting in the one-room Amish schoolhouse among the most recent—weapons have got more lethal, and, in states like Virginia, where the N.R.A. is powerful, no harder to buy.

Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neither relieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Making it more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, a rational way to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nations with tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gun violence. (If you work hard, you can find a statistical exception hiding in a corner, but exceptions are just that. Some people who smoke their whole lives don't get lung cancer, while some people who never smoke do; still, the best way not to get lung cancer is not to smoke.)

It's true that in renewing the expired ban on assault weapons we can't guarantee that someone won't shoot people with a semi-automatic pistol, and that by controlling semi-automatic pistols we can't reduce the chances of someone killing people with a rifle. But the point of lawmaking is not to act as precisely as possible, in order to punish the latest crime; it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order to prevent the next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho's weapons, are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and it's not easy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.)

Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we'll live with the risk. There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register. Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why.

No soul searching after VA Tech rampage

A brutal truth: Massacre is just part of everyday life in America

By Rupert Cornwell
April 18, 2007 | Independent Online

It is as if we are on autopilot. The ghastly tragedy swamps the news to the exclusion of all else. There are the heartbreaking stories of a university shattered and of the dozens of victims, their mostly young lives cut short so senselessly. We listen to the grief-stricken remarks of the President, and follow the breathless investigation of the perpetrator's background, his history of mental illness. We share the anguished second guessing about whether his murderous rampage could have been prevented. Yet everything is playing to a script we know by heart.
Virginia Tech, of course, is the worst incident of its kind in US history - and at one level, you would gain the impression from American television that Cho Seung-Hui has literally stopped the world.

He hasn't of course. On Tuesday, in what passes for a relatively quiet news day in Iraq, wire services reported the deaths of 56 people in violence across the country: some of them gunned down, some killed by a suicide bomber, some discovered as decomposed or decapitated corpses. But we heard not a word of that, nor of the trial in absentia in Italy of a US soldier accused of shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent, nor of the report that North Korea may be about to shut down a key nuclear reactor (which would be very big news indeed if true.) And somebody shot dead the Mayor of Nagasaki. But who cares? Instead, nothing but Virginia Tech.

Yet, however exceptional the event, there is something formulaic, even routine, about the coverage. There is no soul searching, no wondering what might be wrong with a society where such things happen so frequently. You hear no new arguments, for deep down there is nothing new to be said.
No detail of the tragedy is too tiny to recount; from where Cho went to high school to the thoughts of the postman who delivered mail, to where the family lived in the Virginia suburb of Centreville (and never met him). Yet America is showing scant sign of addressing the far bigger issue - of whether it is finally time to get serious about gun control.

"Today is the time to focus on the families, the school and the community," Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said. But, she added, "we must allow the facts of the case to unfold before we talk about policy." Reasonable enough. But if not now, in the white heat of stunned national outrage, when?

For public anger can force unexpected change. Over the course of a long career as a loud-mouthed talk radio host, Don Imus must have made hundreds of offensive remarks. Last week, he made what seemed just another one, about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Astonishingly, public tolerance at last snapped. In three days, Imus was out on his ear.

Might not Virginia Tech be the Rutgers University joke for the gun lobby, the moment when violence-drenched America says enough is enough? Alas no. Yes, there will be debate, just as after similar awful incidents in recent years, from Columbine High School to the murder of the five Amish schoolgirls last October in Pennsylvania.

But the underlying mood is of disillusioned resignation. So President Bush formulaically speaks of a "day of sadness for our entire nation," and how Americans are "asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected." It is less certain, however, that a President from gun-toting Texas, who has pursued the conservative vote his entire career, will try to mobilise temporal political forces to render comfort from the Almighty unnecessary.

Keep coming to our world-class universities, was the message to foreign students from Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman yesterday. Virginia Tech was "an aberration". As Donald Rumsfeld infamously remarked of the anarchy of post-invasion Iraq, "Stuff happens".

School shootings happen year in, year out, like tornados in the Midwest in springtime and hurricanes in the south in summer. There will be pressure to step up security procedures on campuses. But that, I confidently predict, will be it. Some even urge more guns, not less. The shooting was proof that "gun bans are the problem, and that Americans should have the rights to defend themselves", according to The Gun Owners of America, a firearms lobbying group. In the meantime, the mighty media river rolls on, washing everything else away. And copycats watch, and wait to choose their moment.

The massacre at Virginia Tech is alarming, not just because of its scale, or that the authorities missed warning signs about Cho Seung-Hui, or that he found it so easy to carry out his terrible mission. The biggest worry is the "copy cat" risk - or rather virtual certainty - that some other student who's feeling depressed or victimised and wondering if life's worth while, will see what happened at Blackburg. And then he'll decide that he too might as well go out with a bang (or more exactly, as many deadly bangs as possible).

The question is not whether, but where, when and how a new outrage will happen. Not, thankfully, at St Edward's University in Austin, Texas, or at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, nor at the University of Oklahoma. The first two received bomb threats yesterday and briefly evacuated their campus. At the third, someone was reportedly seen with a weapon. All three scares were unfounded. But sooner or later, the scare will be real, and more people will die because of America's inability to strip the glamour from guns.

Insane stupidity: More students should be armed!?

There's stupid, there's insane, and then there's insanely stupid.

I hesitate to circulate this asinine crap (see below), because it is so ridiculous, so beyond the pale, that to even debate it lends it more credibility than it deserves, which is zero. But fact is, this article is just one example of dozens of op-eds floating around conservative web sites and newspapers after the VA Tech shooting rampage. And their unanimous -- and ridiculous -- "answer" to gun violence is: more guns.

Think about it. Parents are worried enough about their kids already. What if they knew that all of their kids' fellow students were packing heat? What if they knew the smallest argument or misunderstanding could result not in a fist fight and a black eye, but a deadly shootout? What if they knew their kid's school-assigned dormmate kept a loaded gun in his sock drawer?

Most of the kids on college campuses aren't even allowed to drink a beer, for crapsakes – and conservatives want to hand them Glocks and semi-automatic rifles!

I honestly don't know who's crazier, Seung Hui Cho, or the gun nuts advocating his right, as a law-abiding citizen, to carry firearms on a college campus.

Wanted: A Culture of Self-Defense

By Michelle Malkin
April 18, 2007 | Human Events

There's no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated dorms, politically correct academic departments and designated "safe spaces" to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions -- while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University's anti-Minuteman Project protesters).

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

Yesterday morning, as news was breaking about the carnage at Virginia Tech, a reader e-mailed me a news story from last January. State legislators in Virginia had attempted to pass a bill that would have eased handgun restrictions on college campuses. Opposed by outspoken, anti-gun activists and Virginia Tech administrators, that bill failed.

Is it too early to ask: "What if?" What if that bill had passed? What if just one student in one of those classrooms had been in lawful possession of a concealed weapon for the purpose of self-defense?

If it wasn't too early for Keystone Katie Couric to be jumping all over campus security yesterday for what they woulda/coulda/shoulda done in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and if it isn't too early for The New York Times editorial board to be publishing its knee-jerk call for more gun control, it darned well isn't too early for me to raise questions about how the unrepentant anti-gun lobbying of college officials may have put students at risk.

The back story: Virginia Tech had punished a student for bringing a handgun to class last spring -- despite the fact that the student had a valid concealed handgun permit. The bill would have barred public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit . . . from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun." After the proposal died in subcommittee, the school's governing board reiterated its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus buildings.

Late last summer, a shooting near campus prompted students to clamor again for loosening campus rules against armed self-defense. Virginia Tech officials turned up their noses. In response to student Bradford Wiles's campus newspaper op-ed piece in support of concealed carry on campus, Virginia Tech Associate Vice President Larry Hincker scoffed:

"[I]t is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles. . . . The editors of this page must have printed this commentary if for no other reason than malicious compliance. Surely, they scratched their heads saying, 'I can't believe he really wants to say that.' Wiles tells us that he didn't feel safe with the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting him. He even implies that he needed his sidearm to protect himself . . ."

The nerve!

Hincker continued: "The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We've seen that fear here, and we don't want to see it again. . . . Guns don't belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same."

Who's scratching his head now, Mr. Hincker?

Some high-handed commentators insist it's premature or unseemly to examine the impact of school rules discouraging students from carrying arms on campus. Pundit Andrew Sullivan complained that it was "creepy" to highlight reader e-mails calling attention to Virginia Tech's restrictions on student self-defense -- even as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rushed to capitalize on the massacre to sign up new members and gather e-mail addresses for Million Mom March chapters. "We are outraged by the increase in gun violence in America, especially the recent shooting at Virginia Tech," reads the online petition. "Add your name to the growing list of people who are saying: 'Enough Is Enough!'"

Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense -- mind, spirit and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.

Chief: The War on Craziness?

It's the Guns, Stupid
By Chief
April 18, 2007

There's a scene in Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" in which the protagonist starves his pet rat, and then introduces it to the vagina of a naked, hogtied abductee. I shouldn't need to connect the dots between the rat's hunger, and the resulting gore. In any event, if ever there's been a piece of "disturbing" writing, one that should set off our collective alarm bells about the mental state of its author, this scene might be it.

"Richard McBeef" the largely incoherent one-act play by Seung Hui Cho, does not strike me as particularly "disturbing", and yet, that's what credulous, pop-eyed commentators are calling it: they're saying that this infantile drivel somehow anticipates or signals the shooting spree that Mr. Cho would eventually unleash upon the campus of Virginia Tech; they're saying, "all the signs were there, in his writing."

Bullshit! None of the circumstances of the slaughter are anticipated by Mr. Cho's "plays." No guns are mentioned in either of his on-line plays, no college campus, no bicycle chains to lock his prospective victims in an engineering building--not a single detail of either work heralds the events of Monday morning. Whatever these plays might be expressing, in terms of Mr. Cho's mental state, is extremely incohate, and could not possibly be interpreted as a warning sign that he would, someday, in the not too distant future, go on a killing rampage.

As many of you know, I have worked with crazy people for most of my adult life. The crucial thing to understand about crazy people is that they often say things that are beyond interpretation. Whatever it is that they think they mean, usually means nothing to you, their sane, impartial interlocutor. "Do you happen to know the name of the cemetery Vincent Price is buried in in California?" I was once asked by a squirrelly, super-secretive client of mine when I was working in St. Vincent's Hospital. This question, when it was put to me, did sort of raise the hackles on the back of my neck, if only because it offered such a startlingly incisive glimpse into the nature of this particular client's delusion. But I did not alert the authorites (in anticipation of said client going to California in order to exhume Mr. Price's remains) because CRAZY PEOPLE SAY ALL MANNER OF MEANINGLESS SHIT! Asking me, in furtive whisper, if I knew where Vincent Price was buried didn't necessarily signal anything about anything. It was just a lot of weird bullshit, and I'm proud to report that I treated it as such--by pretending to ignore it.

"Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" deserve, and continue to deserve, similarly dismissive treatment. They don't tell us anything about Mr. Cho other than he was a messed-up little guy, and God knows, the world is bulging at the seams with messed-up little guys. Just as it is beyond stupid to prosecute a war on terror or a war on drugs, it is even more wrongheaded to prosecute a war upon quiet, messed-up little guys. There isn't anything a civil, open society can do to protect itself against an individual's psychosis. Attempting to institute a well-meant "hug your local psycho" program might make us feel generally better about ourselves, but it won't do a thing in terms of staving off some poor loner's break with reality. Sorry, do-gooders, but craziness always trumps hugs and asking the weird guy if he wants to tag along with you and your friends.

Crazy people are everywhere, and, perhaps regrettably, they will continue to be everywhere. The idea that the ramblings of crazy little guy roaming the world should prompt a police investigation is beyond stupid. The reality is, had Mr. Cho not had such easy, legal access to handguns, none of this would have happened. Insanity is not on trial here--unless you consider America's love affair with firearms insane. In short, if you want to prevent another rampage, you have to reverse the NRA's mantra: Guns do kill people. They just do.

Letter to Uncle T: Guns, 2nd Amend. & VA Tech

On 4/18 I responded to Uncle T.:

Look, in my conservative days I used to worry about that, too, but... I'll take my chances with a homegrown Hitler, with over 80 deaths a day from firearms. Anyway, our military is becoming so sophisticated and heavily armed nowadays, that if the U.S. Gov't really wanted to oppress its citizens, we would have a hard time stopping them, even if we were all armed to the teeth. (Look at Waco and David Koresh: they didn't stand a chance.) If you follow your argument to its logical conclusion, then you should advocate a continual "arms race" between citizens on the one hand, and the government on the other, so that government can never be too strong to oppress the people. If you really believe that's what gun ownership is for, then you should advocate the people's right to own bazookas, tanks, fighter jets, and small nuclear weapons, in case we ever need them to fight a tyrannical USG.

Basically, the "What if King George comes back?" argument brings up a really unlikely possibility, when the likelier results of gun ownership (daily murder, suicide) are real and actual. You've got to play the percentages and do what's best for the most people in the long run.

That crazy kid at VA Tech would not have been able to kill 33 people that day without guns, period. In no other country do they have these shooting rampage attacks on a weekly basis, only in America, the only place where it's so easy to get guns & ammo. The connection is obvious. It's not a knee-jerk reaction, it's a logical, common sense reaction. To stop gun killings, take away the guns. If this kid had used radioactive polonium to poison his fellow students (like that guy Litvinenko in London), your logical reaction would be: We need to restrict access to polonium, because it's so dangerous in the wrong hands. Guns are not any different. They're just too dangerous.

Finally, keep in mind that their purpose is to kill -- unlike other things which we license, like cars, boats, etc. Killing is what guns are made for, and that's what they do.

On 04/18 Uncle T. wrote to me:

Okay, if there is gun control and you have an authoritative, arrogant, closed minded President, like Bush, and whose Administration wants to empower the Republican party forever, who is in control of all military forces, and there is no possibility of resistance as the people have no guns, how do you stop such a person. No its not the 18th century but recent history of Hitler, Tiananmen Square, Kent State, Rodney King shows the fallacy of gun control and giving the govt absolute power. The only reason that you consider gun control is that the 2nd Amendment has worked so well over the last 200 + years that you now take it for granted and assume that no one in govt, in the US, will abuse power. Surely, you don’t believe that no one in govt abuses power.

The best solution is to treat guns like automobiles and require serial numbers, titles and licenses, with prior training for ownership.

P.S. Outlawing guns for civilians will just require those who have an evil intent to just change their methods, Just like terrorists have changed their methods the more different military maneuvers have been able stop them. Legislation has never stopped evil.

Outlawing gun ownership is a feel-good, knee jerk reaction to evil but, in practice, new legislation would accomplish nothing as the method of the evil doer will just change.

Rush on VA Tech shooting rampage

"[O]n any given day about 80 people are killed by firearms, the vast majority by murder or suicide. Gun violence may cost $2.3bn (£1.2bn) each year in medical expenses…"

And Rush wants to tell us "This is not what America is"? Like it or not, this is what America is! The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Drive-By Media Template Agenda: Blame America, 2nd Amendment

April 17, 2007 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

"This doesn't happen every day in this country. This is not what America is. This event does not provide a microcosm of the evils and horrors of American society. So you have this kid that went nuts here for whatever reason, in a suicide note, railing against "rich kids and the debauchery of society," and wait 'til the Drive-Bys pick up on that and start extrapolating that into the other templates that exist in their newsrooms as to what's wrong with American society. I don't know what his grievance was against "rich kids." I have no clue and we won't know until the details of this note are spelled out. The Drive-Bys are all talking about the "healing" that we all must go through now, and that this is a tragedy. As I say, you can say it's a tragedy, and I may be splitting hairs here, but, as I say, a tragedy is when a tornado runs through town and flattens a building and 30 people die. This is pure evil on parade, or insanity. It's self-contained within the mind and the body of the shooter. It was a sick, evil act, very much like that of a suicide bomber. It was an evil, driven nut who had a couple of guns, and we have to face that head on and deal with that, not hide under our covers in fear and blame and guilt and start asking, "What's wrong with America?"

[…]

"There is no gun control law that could have stopped him, and anybody with an IQ of a pencil eraser or higher understands this. As I watched some of this last night, I felt a bubbling, effervescent resentment here at the constant insertion of this liberal political agenda into these tragedies, and to practically every other story that they cover. No time for the families to mourn, no time for the nation to mourn. We've already got stories from the Drive-Bys about how great Bill Clinton was at being mourner-in-chief, citing his brilliant speech after the Oklahoma City bombing, and implying that when Bush goes down there today, he's just not going to pull it off as well as Clinton. Now, what the hell is that about, if not pushing a political agenda and propaganda? Two audio sound bites here, and this is to remind you of a point I made before the half hour break, and that is all this talk of the Drive-Bys are all for gun control, and Howard Fineman out there saying, "It's going to ignite a massive debate." It's Democrats who have to run as opposed to gun control in order to win elections these days. Gore tried it in 2000. Kerry tried it in 2004. "

Alternative explanations to VA Tech massacre don't cut the mustard (NRO)

Below are responses at the conservative NationalReview.com to the VA Tech shooting rampage. Alternative explanations are given, most notably (and conveniently) "inexplicable evil," but all these pundits carefully avoid the obvious: How "evil" combined with easy access to guns is a potently lethal combination.

Wake up! Write your Congressmen and demand action. We can't stick our heads in the sand, or pretend we're in the 18^th century fighting King George, anymore.

___________________________________________________

Virginia Tech Massacre

SYMPOSIUM: Fr. Thomas Berg, Matthew Franck, Anne Hendershott, and Michael Pakaluk look at evil. "Comprehending the Incomprehensible " 04/17 2:52 PM

NANCY FRENCH: There are no answers to be found in the details. "The Search for Good News " 04/17 11:30 AM

JOHN O'SULLIVAN: How can a murderer be "dispassionate"? "Radical Evil " 04/17 2:08 PM

JACK DUNPHY: Blame the killer, not the school's administrators and police. "Misplaced Anger " 04/17 7:05 AM

PETER WOOD: Why schools? Why so often schools? "Higher Mayhem" 04/17 7:00 AM

ELI LEHRER: We need to rethink campus security. "Good Security vs. Bad Police Work" 04/16 6:03 PM

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