Posted on 04/23/2007 7:36:17 AM PDT by presidio9
Not since 9/11 can I remember a worse week than the one we have just experienced.
This week the death toll in Iraq went even higher; hundreds died as the government prepared to send more American troops into the war zone. Yet I don't remember even a casual conversation about that as the unimaginable tragedy unfolded at Virginia Tech.
Reporters love to cover big stories, but there was no joy in our Washington bureau which carried the biggest part of the load in covering the Virginia Tech horror — for our people, there was only revulsion and a sense of duty that such things must be covered.
It was what happened in the days and hours after the shooting that I found most depressing. In the wake of 9/11, people demanded action. This time it was different.
This time, public officials reacted with despair, even resignation — despair that no one seems to know what to do, resignation that these things are going to happen from time to time as long as guns are available to the mentally deranged, and because powerful forces oppose tightening the gun laws, there is just not much that can be done about it.
This is an enormously complicated subject. There is no magic quick fix, including more gun laws. But Virginia Tech must have shown us one thing: The current safeguards are not working, and unless something changes, it IS only a matter of time until what we saw — or something worse — happens again. The question that keeps running in my mind is: As a people, are we prepared to accept that?
Time for the jackass Scheiffer to be issued his drool cup and bib. Bob’s greatest daily challenge is staying within close proximity to a restroom.
He might have done what nut in Norristown Pa did a few years back.
Bought a black powder revolver through mail order.
Killed and wounded a few folks before it was over.
Perfectly legal!
I'm sure that Dan RaTHer can "produce" the documents that support this conclusion.
Admit it Bob, there was no joy because NBC got the tapes and pics from Cho.
This time, public officials reacted with despair, even resignation — despair that no one seems to know what to do, resignation that these things are going to happen from time to time as long as guns are available to the mentally deranged, and because powerful forces oppose tightening the gun laws, there is just not much that can be done about it.
Bob, we know what to do. Do away with gun free zones and allow armed citizens to defend themselves and others. I'd like to know what 'powerful forces' are opposed to keeping guns out of the hands of psychopaths!
This is an enormously complicated subject. There is no magic quick fix, including more gun laws. But Virginia Tech must have shown us one thing: The current safeguards are not working, and unless something changes, it IS only a matter of time until what we saw — or something worse — happens again. The question that keeps running in my mind is: As a people, are we prepared to accept that?
Current safeguards? Oh, you mean disarming the campus and having tens of thousands of people rely on a couple of hundred cops for protection? How did that work out?
We have the right to bear arms. This is hogwash.
Other constitutional and substantive individual rights exercised by and for Cho made his massacre possible which are never mentioned. His right of privacy kept the fact of his mental illness from those who could act on it; his right against unreasonable search and seizure allowed him to hide firearms in his dorm, where they were prohibited by law; his right of free speech permitted him to communicate his violent nature but prevented those who could act from doing so, lest his right to speak freely be ‘chilled’. And yet, no one talks about curtailing those rights for all of us to protect the few. Civil rights organizations tell us that the toll in blood for protection of our rights against search and seizure, privacy and free speech is an acceptable cost for our civil liberties. But the Second Amendment is never included in that discussion. The Bill of Rights is not a menu from which we can pick and choose, and any guarantee of our forefathers that can be repealed by the whim of a minority in our society sets the standard for treatment of the others, and endangers them all.
If we find out a clerical error is the reason that the background check did not flag this individual, then let’s fix the clerical error and move on.
No gun law is going to deter or stop a criminal with a vicious appetite for mass murder. Therefore, citizens of these great states should be aware and prepared to fight for their lives when necessary. The government shall not infringe on the citizen’s right to keep and bear arms if that is the tool they should freely choose to aid them in the defense of their lives when and if they should need to.
History shows us that murderous rampages that consume numerous victims seem to happen in the most unlikely places and always take the victims by complete surprise. Therefore, we should never allow ourselves to be “completely” surprised.
...no joy in our Washington bureau which carried the biggest part of the load...
That’s right Bob, it’s all about you
What we need is not more gun control. We need more nut control.
VTech was aware that there were problmes with Cho. In one of his classes, students were so afraid of him, they skipped class. The school ended up teaching him one-on-one. But they couldn’t kick him out. Other students with mental illnesses have sued colleges under the Americans with Disabilities Act for the right to remain in college in spite of their mental illness ....and won.
Neither the college nor Cho’s doctors could tell his parents about any mental health problems. Once he is over 18, his parents have no more rights than anyone else to that information. This is true even if he is a dependent and they are providing all of his support.
The current laws relating to mental illness not only result in more people homeless and on the street. They make it harder for others to make sure that the mentally ill person gets the help he needs.
You're right about that. It was Dan Rather who published demonstrably fabricated information as fact. The story was damaging and untrue. Is CBS ready for more speech control?
I'm thinking they would see such a suggestion as preposterous. But CBSers don't complain about efforts for proposed curbs on bloggers and don't consider internet reporters as legitimate journalists. Apparently only "their" amendment is worthy of exuberant protection. And only among those whose opinions are sufficiently appropriate.
Inevitable without a more rational approach to mental illness. This young man’s mental state was known to many people in authority, yet no one offered to help. Where is the nanny society when you need it? The liberals are all to self absorbed to step forward and offer help when it is really needed.
We need to ban the media from making these guys into a cause of celebration. They are doing it for the notoriety, and the media are giving it to them.
....says Bob Scheifer, calling for more gun laws.
The Democratic Party leadership is "realistic" in the sense of understanding that if it weren't for the votes they lost by being on the wrong side of the gun issue, Al Gore would be president.
No Bob, it’s not complicated. This is the standard boilerplate response on very simple, straightforward issues, as a matter of fact. Disarm the law abiding and you get what we got. More money, more gun control - we’ll get MORE of what we already got.
Any more questions Bob, you be sure to ask.
“History shows us that murderous rampages that consume numerous victims seem to happen in the most unlikely places and always take the victims by complete surprise. Therefore, we should never allow ourselves to be “completely” surprised.”
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
“Gun Free Zones” aka “Free Fire Zones for Perps” seem to me to be a very likely venue for future mass slaughters. Steyn’s article highlights this with his local (New England) experience.
Let’s be realistic about reality
April 22, 2007
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had
identified the problem: ‘’What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls
over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such
unbearable loss.’’
According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local
radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to
‘’fear guns.’’
Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the
perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up
a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab.
And at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to
the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all
stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the
drama department, she modified her decisive action to “permit the use of
obviously fake weapons” such as plastic swords.
But it’s not just the danger of overly realistic plastic swords in
college plays that we face today. In yet another of his
not-ready-for-prime-time speeches, Barack Obama started out deploring
the violence of Virginia Tech as yet another example of the pervasive
violence of our society: the violence of Iraq, the violence of Darfur,
the violence of . . . er, hang on, give him a minute. Ah, yes,
outsourcing: ‘’the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the
rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another
country.” And let’s not forget the violence of radio hosts: ‘’There’s
also another kind of violence, though, that we’re going to have to think
about. It’s not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we
perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news,
obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed
at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my
daughters.’’
I’ve had some mail in recent days from people who claimed I’d insulted
the dead of Virginia Tech. Obviously, I regret I didn’t show the
exquisite taste and sensitivity of Sen. Obama and compare getting shot
in the head to an Imus one-liner. Does he mean it? I doubt whether even
he knows. When something savage and unexpected happens, it’s easiest to
retreat to our tropes and bugbears or, in the senator’s case, a speech
on the previous week’s “big news.” Perhaps I’m guilty of the same. But
then Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutes of learning
on the planet, announces that it’s no longer safe to expose
twentysomething men and women to ‘’Henry V’’ unless you cry God for
Harry, England and St. George while brandishing a bright pink and purple
plastic sword from the local kindergarten. Except, of course, that the
local kindergarten long since banned plastic swords under its own “zero
tolerance” policy.
I think we have a problem in our culture not with “realistic weapons”
but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already “fear
guns,” at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban
them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a
“gun-free zone,” formally and proudly designated as such by the college
administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It
was a “gun-free zone” except for those belonging to the guy who wanted
to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed
by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years
ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed
up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him
down until the cops arrived.
But you can’t do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has
created a “Gun-Free School Zone.” Or, to be more accurate, they’ve
created a sign that says “Gun-Free School Zone.” And, like a loopy
medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would
make it so. The “gun-free zone” turned out to be a fraud — not just
because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in
the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students
a profoundly deluded view of the world.
*I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in
part because it has a high rate of gun ownership.* We do have the
occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated
loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill
somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a
remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door,
and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled
funny so he picked up his Glock and told ‘em to get lost. So they
concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an
environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was
sick of environmentalists and chased ‘em away. *Eventually they figured
they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New
Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid
leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots
worked it out: Where’s the nearest place around here where you’re most
likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all
means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the
Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of
well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing
stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified
precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area.* To promote
vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale
props department policy, it signals to everyone that you’re not in the
real world.
The “gun-free zone” fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a
symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the
Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of
critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin
wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against
physical self-defense with “the erosion of intellectual self-defense,”
and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket
of speech codes and “safe spaces” that’s the very opposite of the
principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university
life was founded. And so we “fear guns,” and “verbal violence,” and
excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ‘’The
Three Musketeers.’’ What kind of functioning society can emerge from
such a cocoon?
At least in terms of the campus policy.
This is laughable that they can’t see that the campus didn’t allow guns in the 1st place, so it’s irrelevent.
They’re RIGHT - the campus policy DIDN’T work in this case. The policy was “no guns”.
The nutcase got a gun off campus and brought it in without ever getting caught. Maybe if they want to ban student guns there, they should make security check over every entrant into the campus. That’s the only way it might work against a nut like this.
(Personally, I am for campus bans on undergrad student guns generally, because I think stupid accidents from immature students are far more likely than a wacko acting out.)
I wonder if CBS studios has armed guards?
They seem very willing to condemn the rest of us to the failed security of “gun free” zones.
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