Replies

“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.”

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“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?