The only thing more shocking and reprehensible than the cold-blooded murder of 33 Virginia Tech students last week was the immediate politicizing of this horrific event by Democrat sharpshooters and their allies in the liberal media. Many have chosen to use this tragic act as yet another excuse to dredge up all the old gun control arguments instead of looking at the real causes of a deranged shooter being able to snuff out these innocent lives.
First of all he was, in fact, deranged. I refuse to even use his name and provide the fame, glorification or add in any way to the publicity he sought. Guns are not inherently evil, anymore than box cutters are and I don’t recall anyone trying to legislate away the right to own a box cutter, even after the hijacking of aircraft with that item on 9/11. It’s not the implement but the user of that implement that presents the evil. With enough motivation any object can be turned into a lethal weapon. In fact, crimes are stopped with guns about five times as frequently as crimes are commited with guns. I know of no such statistic for box cutters, knives or hatchets. Most of us can obtain or use these items freely and their possession isn’t even guaranteed by our Constitution.
It was a failure of people, including the killer, not an availability of guns that allowed this to happen. Let me say for the record that, while I support second amendment rights, I am not advocating hands-off gun control. The facts in this instance show the shooter had a diagnosed history of mental illness, including physician documentation of his danger to others as well as himself. Yet nothing was done by either school or civil officials to monitor his actions or remove him from the campus. All of his classmates said he was strangely quiet and withdrawn, yet none of them brought this to the attention of authorities. His writings in class were bizarre but neither teacher nor student raised a red warning flag. He stalked and threatened two girls, yet remained free to wander about, plan and finally execute his bloody act. If he couldn’t buy a gun he surely would have found some other method of implementation. There are plenty of guns for sale illegally and, in fact, this is the more usual source of arms for someone intending to commit a crime. Most murderers don’t go down to the local police department, fill out paperwork and go through a waiting period.
Blame guns, school officials, other students, civil authorities, video games, doctors at the mental facility [where he was briefly committed], the laws that kept his privacy or the ones which allowed him to return to Virginia Tech as a ticking human time bomb; blame anything or anyone you like. The simple fact is he was a sick individual who slipped through the proverbial cracks. Then do we simply dismiss it? Of course not; we must learn from it. What can we do to prevent this kind of thing in the future? Probably nothing. But we can discourage the frequency of such incidents by withholding the publicity that seems to accompany them, by being more aware of and reporting aberrant behavior and by more strictly enforcing weapons laws already on the books. A little more concern for public safety and a little less P.C. might not be a bad idea either. If everyone had been more concerned about this desparate individual’s danger potential and less concerned about his ethnicity or about hurting his self image, 33 young people might still be walking the campus of Virginia Tech. His self-image was already about as low as it could go and we don’t need to relinquish second amendment rights merely to satisfy the agenda driven needs of a political party.
R.S.F.
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