What's great about America is that if you want to go on a killing spree, all you need is a plane ticket and a box cutter (9/11), a Ryder truck, 5,000 pounds of fertilizer and fuel oil (Oklahoma City Bombing), or a whole lot of people with machetes (Rwandan genocide). A person with homocidal tendencies will use whatever tools happen to available to them. If guns are not an option, then bombs, if not bombs, then poisonous gas.
Did the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protect the 32 innocent Americans gunned down this week? Or did the long-since-antiquated law fail them, and render them nothing more than breathing target practice for a pissed-off civilian?
The Second Amendment might have, had it not been usurped by the state of Virginia. Virginia Tech is a "gun free zone" meaning that law-abiding citizens aren't permitted to carry guns in the area. Unfortunately, as I've harped on so many times, criminals, by definition, have no respect for the law, hence, they will carry guns in a "gun-free zone" in spite of the law. Had someone had a gun besides Cho, maybe he would have been stopped before the body count reached 30.
The second reaction is that the shootings could have been prevented by more stringent gun control laws, i.e. the banning of nonservice civilian handguns. This is to me the most sensible and inevitable conclusion one can make in the wake of such a bloodbath.
How much more stringent can you make gun control laws beyond a "gun-free zone"?
The fact is, last time I checked, we weren't (yet) living in a police state, yet we are apparently a nation of laws, although one of them regularly kills nearly 30,000 of its own people (roughly half are homicides and half suicides) every year, compared to only 163 firearm-related deaths in the United Kingdom in 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and British government figures.
The police state will happen much more quickly when only the police possess the most efficient means to deal in violence, but I digress into rhetoric. While it is true that according to the last CDC statistics that people died in incidents that involved firearm was around 30,000 in 1998, automobiles killed 41,000 people in the same year. And the 163 number of firearm-related deaths in the UK is disingenuous and misleading. The number of homicides in the UK has risen since their ban on firearms in civilian hands.
Thirty-two bright young college kids are dead because of two devices that were designed to kill them. It's time we shot down the Second Amendment. Our lives depend on it, just as theirs did.
32 people died because they crossed the path of a psychopath who planned, prepared for, and executed a killing spree before finishing with himself. But we really should ban guns because no one was murdered before those nasty things came along, right?
You should send that post to him. If you hurry you may even be able to catch him before his afternoon bong hits