Posted on 04/23/2008 2:10:11 PM PDT by neverdem
There are two types of "gun nuts," those who will say, "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands," and those who insist on bringing their Mossberg 590 shotgun to heaven once the rapture comes.
Gun enthusiasts are an interesting crowd. They are our fathers and uncles, our neighbors and friends and often times they are our elected officials. Though there are many things wrong in this country, gun nuts often hold the gun rights issue as the No. 1 concern when heading to the polls to vote. They often have a pettiness toward their love of guns, too - using "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" as their MySpace profile song even though there are about two dozen better Beatles songs to choose from. And that's just the beginning of their pettiness.
But what has always irritated me most about many gun nuts is their audacity to use tragedies such as the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres to promote their causes for fewer restrictions on carrying handguns in public.
President Paul Zingg agrees.
"Yes, students have right to protect themselves," he said. "Do I think they should carry handguns? No."
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech school shootings, a tragedy that occurred when a gunman shot and killed 32 people and then himself in a shooting rampage. As we commemorate this tragedy, we will probably hear twisted logic from gun rights groups such as the National Rifle Association to promote the idea of allowing students and professors to carry concealed handguns on campus.
They use Virginia Tech as fodder for what could have happened if more people were packing heat the day gunman Seung-Hui Cho shot so many people. Their logic goes something like this: If more students were armed on the day these events occurred, there would have been a bystander in the crowd who would have ridden in on a white stallion, weapons blazing, and valiantly stopped the gunman in his tracks. But disregard that this fairy tale fantasy relies on outside factors. One: This white knight would need the accuracy and the courage to perform such a feat. Two: The superhero would have to be miraculously standing within 100 feet or so of the gunman to be able to take him down. Three: This courageous gun owner would have to do all this without getting killed.
No evidence supports the idea that if someone in those tragedies had a gun the damage would have been prevented or minimized, Zingg said.
Gun advocates might counter by saying, "Well if he'd known more people had guns it may have prevented him from doing it." Are you kidding me? Did you see that videotape he sent NBC saying why he did it? That guy was crazy. He knew he was going to die that day and wanted to take out as many people as he could before he did it.
The bottom line is: Students and professors should not be allowed to have guns on campus. This myth that "an armed society is a polite society" is unproven and silly. I say, "an armed society is a paranoid and pompous society." Having to watch your manners and hope your gun is bigger than everyone else's is not an appealing way to go through life.
As for guns on campus, it's unsafe and unnecessary. Just because Second Amendment nuts want a Glock tucked in their pants 24/7 to overcome some mental insecurity, doesn't mean I should have to feel uncomfortable knowing a shot could accidentally go off while the teacher is lecturing.
Zingg said the key to safety on campus is "caring and vigilance for one another" and greater visibility of law enforcement. I agree.
The campus community needs to have more appreciation for University Police and respect officers "as not being rent-a-cops, because they're not," he said.
Living in a country that gives its citizens the right to bear arms has advantages and disadvantages, but arming students and professors isn't logical - it's ideological - and won't stop massacres such as Virginia Tech from happening again.
Mike Murphy can be reached at opinioneditor@theorion.com
Or the law students who retrieved their guns from their cars and “subdued” another VA shooter. Or the MS? principal who used his own gun to stop a school shooter. Or the students who undoubtedly saved lives by firing on the TX clocktower shooter and forced him to take cover rather than fire freely? Or to have bothered reading John Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime and looked at the data behind it?
The author is too stupid to remember the Colorado Springs Church with the female named Jeanne with a concealed carry license stopped the bad guy before he could kill more than two, IIRC. I can’t remember her last name, but it looked Arabic.”
My guns have killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile.
Is this fool going to tell us we all have to walk?????
There are crazy people in the world. Sometimes they are recognized by those connected to them, and sometimes they are not.
The killer at VT was known to have problems, and had been under the care of a shrink prior to his killing all the students. He should have had stronger restraint from those who knew him best. Unfortunately, he didn’t get that kind of restraint.
If someone is crazy enough and wants to do lots of damage or even just a little damage, they will find a way to do it. Knives, baseball bats, setting fires, careening a speeding car onto the sidewalk..I could go on and on.
Perhaps if there were more guns and competant people owning them, there would be more deterrant for the crazies.
I believe that the shrinks of the world have misled the populace into believing that “everyone can be fixed if they just get enough billable hours with the shrink”. Not going to happen. I also believe that some of the craziest persons walking around are total nut jobs themselves, while being licensed as shrinks.
Thank you. Can I get half-credit?
the kid’s shaggy inside and out...
While the gun nuts sit around and BS about their guns and morals the US has rotted away with $50 Trillion in unfunded entitlements.
Its discussing what the Republican party has degenerated into and what they have allowed to happen to the country.
Only difference between conservatives and liberals is how they want the government to run our lives because both depend on the government for everything.
John
The Gun is Civilization
by Marko Kloos of the
Munchkin Wrangler blog
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat—it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed.
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation...and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.
I can guarantee you that if I had bee at Virginia tech that I would not have hesitated to kill that psychopath!!!!! There were vets there who had years of experience bearing arms in a combat situation. The stupid laws that left the “fish in the barrel” totally unarmed did nothing but insure the death of many innocent should. Even when the campus police showed up they were empty handed because they were not allowed to have firearms either. the laws that you seem to like so much got many many people killed that day.
I don't own a Mossberg 590 shotgun. Will I get a free one under Hillary/Obama share the wealth socialism?
“But what has always irritated me most about many gun nuts is their audacity to use tragedies such as the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres to promote their causes for fewer restrictions on carrying handguns in public.”
The term “anti-gun nut” should be used more often.
More concealed carry weapons in the hands of responsible citizens will lower crime every time. Those are the facts.
I know, don’t bother him with pesky facts!
Gun grabbers watch too many movies. The CCP holder doesn’t have to hit the shooter from 100 feet. That would be a good shot. He needs to “get the heads ducking down range”. After the first return shot, the perp has to worry about the good guy and the fun is over. The perp has to find cover rather than continuing to shoot people.
Oh, I believe those that qualify for the first are already prepared for the second, as the gun is already in their clutch, simply dragging it along is prolly Ok for most gatekeepers.
Man is an obvious butthole.
This kid is a left wing college student. Go to the link and you can leave a comment (I did). He is way out of his league on this issue because he clearly has no actual knowledge of guns or the people who support concealed carry.
Mr Murphy:
I have no intention of letting you force my fellow citizens to be slaughtered because you lack any confidence in your fellow man.
I trust my fellow armed citizen to be honest, trustworthy and responsible.
You are afraid of not only allowing my fellow citizens to be armed, but your fear also forces campus security to be unarmed.
Your fear results in the police arriving to “mop up” after a gunman has wreaked his/her havok unopposed.
Your fear sends young children onto their knees, watching their classmates being executed next to them, waiting their turn at the barrel of the perpetrator.
Armed predators and your fear are the problems, Mr Murphy, not the concept of armed citizens taking control of their own fate.
Erik Latranyi
I thought this was from The Onion.
By definition there are no tragedies where a gun carrying citizen stopped the maniac. The tragedies were AVOIDED when the citizen stopped the maniac BEFORE it became a tragedy.
Liberals are incapable of simple reasoning.
And that’s just the beginning of their pettiness?
I thought about the Pearl MS and Appalachian Law School incidents, bit I figured those are a little in the past. Colorado Springs happened last December. No doubt he was studying hard for school except for stories about college shootings. Church shootings don't count. He's prolly a journalism major. It's an easy name to remember, Mike Murphy. Here's his mugg.
I first thought the story was from The Onion.
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