- If students or faculty members were allowed to have guns on campus, could someone have been able to stop the gunman?
- Should the average person be allowed to carry protection?
- How many lives would have been saved if any one person had possessed the skill, training and tools to confront the gunman?
Senator Dianne Feinstein said that shootings like these are enabled by the ease with which people procure weapons in this country. But it also could be said that this tragedy could have been stopped if the students and faculty had been able to carry personal protection themselves instead of being forced, by policy, to remain unarmed, where a person who uses physical force in self defense on school grounds is punished at the same level as the aggressor.
The Virginia Tech killer was a psycho. He was mentally disturbed. Not only was he mentally disturbed, with suicidal thoughts, but the university knew it. One professor had expelled the killer from her classroom. At one point he was sent to a mental health facility. Something tells me that threatening Cho Seung-Hui with expulsion for carrying a weapon was not going to deter him from committing a massacre. From the school’s University Policies for Student Life:
Unauthorized possession, storage, or control of firearms and weapons on university property is prohibited, including storing weapons in vehicles on campus as well as in the residence halls.
Firearms are defined as any gun, rifle, pistol, or handgun designed to fire bullets, BBs, pellets, or shots (including paint balls), regardless of the propellant used. Other weapons are defined as any instrument of combat or any object not designed as an instrument of combat but carried for the purpose of inflicting or threatening bodily injury. Examples include but are not limited to knives with fixed blades or pocket knives with blades longer than 4 inches, razors, metal knuckles, blackjacks, hatchets, bows and arrows, nun chukkas, foils, or any explosive or incendiary device. Possession of realistic replicas of weapons on campus is prohibited. Students who store weapons in residence hall rooms, who brandish weapons, or who use a weapon in a reckless manner may face disciplinary action, which may include suspension or dismissal from the university.
Oh my, this rigid rule really worked this time, didn’t it? Mass killings are rare when guns were easily available, while they have been increasing as guns have become more controlled.” And why not? The murderer knows that he doesn’t have to fear a victim with a gun. Virginia Tech, after all, was a “gun free zone.”
Last year Virginia legislators considered a bill that would have overridden policies at public universities that prohibit students and faculty members with concealed handgun permits from bringing their weapons onto campus. After the bill died in committee, The Roanoke Times reported, Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker welcomed its defeat, saying, “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.” But the university’s gun ban not only did nothing to protect people at the school; it left them defenseless as a cold-blooded gunman methodically killed 32 of them over the course of two and a half hours.
Cho used a Walther P22 .22 caliber pistol and a Glock 19 9mm pistol, neither of them especially powerful or exotic. The victims were prevented by law and policy from carrying any weapon. But had just one of the students, maybe one of the victims, also been carrying a Walther P22 or a Glock 19 then maybe more people would have been alive today.
You are never ever going to get the guns out of the hands of those who want to use them for carnage. Never. So why then do we demand to disarm the victims? In all the years of press releases and statements from the Brady anti-gun organization there has never been one single gun control plan presented that would take the guns out of the hands of criminals. This is the irony of gun control: only law abiding people are going to abide by gun control laws; criminals are not.
Make no mistake about it – Cho killed a lot of innocent people, his gun didn’t. Were it not for Cho’s chosen behavior those two guns would still be sitting in a drawer somewhere. And had someone other than Cho been allowed to carry a gun for personal protection maybe we wouldn’t be burying so many innocent victims.
“We can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year,” Virginia Tech campus police chief Wendell Flinchum said after the shootings. Given the reality that police cannot be everywhere, it is unconscionable to disarm people who want to defend themselves.
Also, did you know that both houses of the Virginia legislature unanimously passed legislation within the past year or so that barred Virginia colleges and universities from expelling a student on the basis of mental instability? Did you know that Virginia colleges and universities were also banned from suspending or expelling a student because of an attempted suicide or the expression of suicidal thoughts? That’s right, Virginia doesn’t want to appear “insensitive” to those with a dangerous mental disorder.
Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, Walther P22, Glock 19
