Second Amendment

No, I didn't receive a memo ordering me to write about today's horrific massacre: (32 Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus - New York Times). These are just how the blogger personality type responds to tragedy. Some cry, some pray, most blog.

Naturally, this type of incident makes we bloggy types revisit the issue of guns in America and the interpretation of the second amendment. Just as all the anti-gun types look at this and say 'were there no easy access to guns, this type of thing wouldn't happen.' While pro-gun people see this as a perfect example of how having a whole mess of students with concealed weapons would have put a stop to this right then and there.

Look. Common sense and burning passion can only carry one so far in this type of debate. Let's get factual. Has there been a case where a civilian carrying a concealed handgun managed to subdue some mass murdering wacko? Israel doesn't count because almost everyone who packs heat also served in the army. What Michelle Malkin would want, doubtless, is for Virginia Tech freshmen to be able to tote around sidearms. So, again, any case where this worked?

We anti-gun types see the pro-gun people as not getting the point. If crazy wackos have a tough time getting guns and still manage to go on rampages every year or so, what would happen when we made getting guns EVEN EASIER?

Often, the two sides of a debate will disagree because they envision different cases in their heads. I use the example, often, of welfare. Conservatives see welfare as a way to perpetuate irresponsible crack-smoking single-mom baby machines while liberals see welfare as a way to protect noble hard-working people wronged by the system.

So too with guns. Conservatives - who in the previous example show a contempt for the majority of the country that is in financial difficulty - somehow believe that the people who can't handle the responsibility of a job will handle the responsibility of a gun.

Guns are one issue where liberals feel people are less capable, less responsible, than conservatives do. Weird, no?

But, the gun wackos will respond, who will defend you when the Islamic communists knock on your schoolroom door? The answer is the police. We liberals - and urban moderates - live in tightly packed city streets with thousands of neighbors. We don't everyone to have guns and we need to have a large, swift moving police force to protect us as a result. [This urban-rural split is the only decent argument I've heard to defend gun ownership; the same crime that would have police respond in 10 minutes in a city would be impossible to duplicate in a rural area.]

If you want to know how the Styx analyzes the current data on the Virginia massacre, it's because of a breakdown of the police. Not the police themselves, but because the moron of a school president didn't think of enforcing the law. If you see the above story, there was a first shooting at 7:15 am (killing 2) and then a second set at 9:45 am (killing 30+) from the same guy. Ample time to send in SWAT and lock down the campus. But that didn't happen. Why? As the above NYTimes story quotes:

"[School President] Mr. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first incident was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a 'domestic' dispute. 'We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,' he said."

I'm going to perform a anthropology trick here: what type of person would describe some guy killing two people on a college campus as a 'domestic dispute' that doesn't require even a minimal enough police presence to arrest the murderer? The president is defending his decision to let a murderer run amok on campus because, hey, it was just a minor dispute.

I would say that this is the attitude of a gun owner. Virginia is gun country. Look at Democrat James Webb - caught sneaking a gun (unapologetically) into the Senate.

If this was a northern school, I believe they would've shut it down. And while this is a hearsay/circumstantial proof, I see no way of explaining the idiotic behavior of the Virginia Tech president … unless he was a Bush appointee.