Another Preventable Massacre

We know little yet about the identity or motive of the shooter today at Virginia Tech.

What we do know is at least 31 students and faculty were methodically murdered, and over two dozen more injured.

CNN is already talking about re-opening the "gun-control debate." They said whenever such a "tragedy" happens, it "lets a little air out of the NRA's balloon" in supporting the second amendment. Their glee was palpable.

Indeed it should re-open the debate, but not in the way CNN thinks.

Someone reporter at the news conference asked why the whole campus wasn't immediately "locked down." The answer was, they can't put police in every room on such a large campus.

Gun-controllers wish to abdicate their own responsibility of protecting themselves to someone else, who can magically make all guns disappear or can magically suddenly appear at the scene of the crime. It's immature thinking.

Clearly, the police cannot always be present. Yet, when a crime of violence happens, who is always guaranteed to be present?

The victim!

Arm the victim, and then the humiliating response of only being able to hide, or play dead, or sit quietly and wait to be executed, turns into at worst death with dignity -- and at best a quick termination of the shooter's rampage.

Indeed, the following bill was killed in committee in Virginia just a year ago:

Jan 21, 2006
HB 1572, which would have allowed handguns on college campuses, died in subcommittee.
By Greg Esposito 381-1675

A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly.

House Bill 1572 didn't get through the House Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety. It died Monday in the subcommittee stage, the first of several hurdles bills must overcome before becoming laws.
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Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

Maybe it makes them feel safe, bit it made them objectively less safe, didn't it?

This wasn't to turn universities into the "wild west", it was about allowing free adults with legal permits maintain their human dignity:

The legislation was designed to prohibit public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun."
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Last spring a Virginia Tech student was disciplined for bringing a handgun to class, despite having a concealed handgun permit. Some gun owners questioned the university's authority, while the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police came out against the presence of guns on campus.

In June, Tech's governing board approved a violence prevention policy reiterating its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus facilities.

OH, what a courageous move, to simply "declare" a "gun-free" zone on campus to increase safety, when of course only the law-abiding with their carefully-obtained permits would follow such a rule!

How many students and faculty at Virginia Tech wished they had a gun today?

How many were feeling safer due to the Virginia Tech "violence prevention policy"?

Successful self-defense with a gun is rarely reported nationally, but you hear of every single misdeed with a gun, giving a false impression of their relative frequencies. One anecdote for lovers of such from 1997 (since that is the preferred mode of "proof" of the anti-gunners):

Woodham drove his mother's car to his high school, wearing a long coat to hide his rifle. When he entered the school, he began firing rampantly, killing his ex-girlfriend Christina Menefee and her friend Lydia Dew, and wounding 7 others before Joel Myrick, the assistant principal, retrieved a pistol from the glove compartment of his truck and subdued Woodham.

The actual stats are, more guns, less crime. One simple indicator is the per capita number of guns has steadily increased in this country, yet both accidents and homicides have generally trended down over the last few decades. If guns, rather than evil people, caused crime, one would expect a positive correlation rather than a negative one.

As Belmont Club astutely notes,

The anti-gun control people are probably going to say that if only guns were banned in the Commonwealth of Virginia, or better yet, in all of America, or still better in the whole world, that this tragedy would never have happened. But on the other hand, 2nd Amendment proponents will argue that such an extensive massacre would never have taken place if only an armed student had been there to resist.

Gun control as a strategy for prohibiting violence only works if it is universal, just as disarmanent is valid protection against aggression only if it is global. What Virginia Tech achieved, in creating its "gun-free zone" was to create a bubble of vulnerability in an armed society.
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The weakness with forcing a reliance on someone to save your life by disabling your ability to save your own is that it rejects subsidiarity, which is the idea that problems should be handled as locally as possible. In this case, the central authority, Virginia Tech, responded belatedly to events.

Furthermore, I would argue that violence didn't just spring to life when the gun was invented. Even if all guns were magically eliminated, the strong could always still brutalize and slaughter the weak, the old, the very young, the disabled, with nothing more than a wooden club.

The only defense against such subjugators is the gun, one of the greatest and most fundamental equalizers of human rights in all of history.

Aren't "progressives" supposed to be for equality?

I guess they can't stand it that rednecks like to opine about The Great Equalizer,

God created men; Colonel Colt made them equal.

Indeed, some progressives are so uncomfortable with this idea that the wikipedia entry for Great Equalizer specifically elucidating that phrase is being considered for deletion by the editors, and charges of anti-gun sentiment being behind the motion for deletion have already been made:

I still suspect a connection between the anti-gun stance of the editor suggesting it, and the prematurity and censorship-orientation of the suggestion. Especially since even the rationale used -- that there are other usages beside that of firearms -- would more strongly suggest adding to the article, not deleting it entirely.

Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, Winston! We have always been at war with East Asia!