Common Folk Using Common Sense

It was Wednesday, January 16, 2002. In Grundy, Virginia, 43-year-old Peter Odighizuwa went on a wild shooting spree killing three people and critically wounding three others at Appalachian School of Law. Peter had been dismissed from the school on Tuesday for the second time. According to reports, he was upset about his failing grades and dismissal.

The weapon used was a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun, not an “assault weapon” or an automatic weapon or one with a high bullet capacity. Yet it allowed Peter to mercilessly kill three innocent people: L. Anthony Sutin, the dean of the law school, Professor Thomas Blackwell, and a student, Angela Dales. Powder burns on the dean and the professor indicated they were shot at point blank range.

But it could have been far worse.

Former student Jeffery O. Moore testified he heard shots and passed Odighizuwa in a hallway before finding Sutin face-down on the floor, bleeding from the neck. He said Sutin was screaming for help, saying: “Peter shot me!”

This went on for about a minute, Moore said. Before Sutin died, he turned his face to look out the window.

One of the wounded students, Stacey Beans, recalled, “I looked at him and said, ‘Please God … Please don’t shoot me.”‘ She said the bullet entered her chest and exited out her back.

But it could have been far worse.

Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman. “We saw the shooter, stopped at my vehicle and got out my handgun and started to approach Peter,” Tracy Bridges, who helped subdue the shooter with other students, said.

He, together with his fellow students, confronted a gun-wielding murderer in order to save the lives of others. He didn’t have to do this; it wasn’t his job; he wasn’t defending himself; he could have so easily just left the scene and avoided the risk; he could have just called 911, and no one would have condemned him had he done so. But he came back and risked death - with his personal handgun.

If you believe that gun laws will eliminate guns then you must also believe that there is no cocaine in the United States. There can’t be. It is a felony to own even the smallest amount of cocaine under federal law and the laws of all 50 states. Therefore, if you accept the logic of gun control, there cannot be any cocaine. But the fact is that no laws will prevent criminals from owning and using guns any more than any drug laws have prevented criminals from owning and using illegal drugs. The only effect that gun control laws can have is to turn law abiding citizens into defenseless sheep, at the mercy of criminals who don’t care whether or not it is against the law for them to own or use a gun.

No matter what gun laws could possibly have been in effect, the shooter in this case would have been able to buy an illegal gun and used it. It was only because one of the students had access to a gun that the shooter was stopped. If several of the students had been carrying concealed guns, then the shooter may have been stopped sooner, maybe even without the loss of a single life. Notice that the student didn’t even have to fire his handgun; just having it visible was enough to stop a potential massacre.

Unfortunately, the media did not point out that the “intervening” students were armed. A Lexis-Nexis search revealed 88 stories on the topic, of which only two mentioned that either Bridges or Gross were armed. A Westnews search exposed worse results. It revealed 112 stories, of which only two mentioned the armed students. Most news reports pointed out that this situation ended when several students “confronted,” “tackled,” or “intervened.” With media bias like this, it is no wonder that people fail to see the benefits of gun ownership. This was a very public shooting with a lot of media coverage, yet the reporters rarely presented the positive side of firearms. Instead, they preferred to default to the politically correct story portraying guns as something only the bad guy uses.

The one key element in preventing more people from getting murdered on that day was the fact that some of the potential victims had guns and were able to force the shooter to drop his gun. That made all the difference in preventing a real bloody massacre.

By the way: Appalachian School of Law is only about a hour drive from Virginia Tech, the site of another school shooting, this one without any students able to stop a massacre.

Grundy, Peter Odighizuwa, Appalachian School of Law, handgun

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