At Virginia Tech, as usual, nobody else had a gun

So far, 22 people are dead and another 21 wounded in the attack launched by one gunman reportedly armed with two 9mm pistols and extra magazines at the campus of Virginia Tech on 4/16/07.

Virginia is one of the many states with “Shall Issue” concealed gun laws, which means that if a citizen who has not been convicted of a felony or domestic violence, and they are not judged mentally unstable, the law requires they be issued a concealed gun permit upon request.

But nobody in range of the gunman, other than late-arriving police, had a gun. To make it even more senseless and inexcusable, this is the second recent firearms attack at Virginia Tech.

The gunman in the second incident is dead, and I suspect he got tired of waiting for the cops so he did it himself.

I don’t know the policy at Virginia Tech, but I’ll bet there is a no-gun policy on campus, which means everybody there were just sitting ducks, fleeing for their lives or hiding. It is reported some students jumped from second story windows and ran to safety.

To be certain, there will be yet another call for gun control over this incident, which translates as follows: The citizens who are afraid of guns and don’t want to have them, will try to impose their will on everybody else, making us all sitting ducks for the next gunman to slaughter.

In their mindless quest for non-violence, these well-meaning folks actually envision a nation with such stringent gun bans that nobody will have a gun. But that is never going to happen in the United States, because there are too many guns and there is absolutely no way to vacuum them all up by passing laws to make them go away. We can’t make even the slightest dent in the amount of illegal drugs smuggled into this nation, so there is no way we’ll ever completely eliminate the availability of guns to people who should not have them.

In the world of reality and clear thinking, the only way to fight fire in the hands of criminals, is to have equal fire to stop them.

I was recently talking to a Chicago Police Captain on other business, and Chicago, like the District of Columbia and New York City, have virtual bans on possessing handguns. I asked this 25-year veteran Captain if there was any shortage of handguns on Chicago streets, and he laughed at the absurdity of my question. In the case of Chicago, the law-abiding generally don’t have handguns, while the violent criminals mostly do.

The United States District Court, which has jurisdiction in the District of Columbia, recently ruled the D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional on the basis that it clearly violates the citizens’ right to bear arms under Article II of the Bill of Rights. Of course, that decision is being appealed to the full court on the laughable basis that the ruling will increase violent crime. There are few places in the United States that have a higher violent crime rate involving handguns than the District of Columbia, so it is doubtful it could get much worse.

And what excuse does the anti-gun crowd come up with to explain why their gun ban doesn’t work? They blame guns coming in from neighboring states with more liberal gun laws. If the entire United States enacted a strict gun ban, the same people would blame guns being smuggled in from other nations. Again, we can’t seem to stem the flow of illegal drugs into this nation, but these bright thinkers will still insist a complete gun ban would reduce gun violence. It follows the same line of thinking of committed Communists, who insist Communism and Socialism will work, but it just hasn’t been done right yet.

The problem is human nature, which is and always has been a constant we have to deal with, but these “progressive” thinkers always seem to leave that out of the equation.

So getting back to this tragedy in Virginia in which 22 students died and another 21 were injured, many of those undoubtedly in critical condition, the one thing the anti-gun crowd will never admit is that one student with a concealed handgun in the right place at the right time could have saved some -- or all of them.

But as usual, nobody but the responding cops had guns. The only option the students trapped on that campus could do was run, hide, jump…or get shot. In a state with a liberal concealed handgun law, not one of those students were able to fight back with the same means the killer had, and that is what I find inexcusable.

If you live in a state that has a Shall Issue concealed gun law, and if you have obtained a gun permit, for Heaven’s sake carry the gun! Here in Oregon, we have the same Shall Issue laws on the books, but far too many of those who obtain the permits do not carry the gun on their person. Women carry the guns primarily in their purse, and the men often have the gun concealed out in the glove compartment of their car. In the real world, if you need a gun to defend yourself and others, you’ll need to access it immediately. A gun in your car parked outside is about as useless as a broken leg.

Carl F. Worden, 2007 April 16

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