The dead horse on the living room floor: school shootings and VA Tech.

There’s a dead horse on the living room floor. At least when we think of school security, and the possibility of some nut case coming in and shooting up the place, and the people inside. We are loathe to discuss the dead horse because we don’t want to contemplate the fact that we would have to do something tangible about it. So we simply tiptoe over it and try to ignore its presence. And we pray that others will do the same.

Like an alcoholic refusing to admit that they have a problem because then they’d have to do something about it, we all can see the dead horse, yet no one wants to do anything about it. Meanwhile, it continues to fester. What about future happenings? Future victims?

Well, there’s a problem with this strategy, as Virginia Tech shows us. We can try to ignore dead horses, but they continue to make their presence known to us, and our avoidance of the topic becomes more and more silly and pathetic as time passes, and events illustrate the fallacy of our preconceived notions.

The read dead horse is, of course the sad fact that the VA Tech nutcase had time to chain the doors, reload, and perform many other tasks – including killing as many people as possible – simply because he had no viable opposition. The dead horse is the fact that when nutcases come to our schools looking to make names for themselves, they know that they face no effective opposition.

32 people dead in VA Tech. how many would be alive and walking around today had there been someone – anyone inside that building who could mount effective opposition? The dead horse I refer to is why wasn’t anybody else armed? Why wasn’t there an armed person inside that building who could provide effective protection for the victims, who could only be led like sheep (or horses) to slaughter?

We know that name of that dead horse – the college administration is afraid of guns and had banned them from campus – even by licensed permit holders. Not only that, but they had just successfully defended this policy against a licensed permit holder in court. And not only that, they crowed over their victory, claiming it would make the campus safer. Events have proved that this policy, far from making people safer, actually increased their vulnerability for when the nutcase came.

Guns are banned from public places out of ignorance and propaganda. Those who know the truth know that guns are used far more often to deter crime than to cause it. They know that passing laws, enacting policies, etc. only deter the ‘good guys’, and do nothing to stop the ‘bad guys’. In fact, by publicizing the fact that yours is a ‘gun free’ zone, you effectively invite every nutcase in the vicinity to use your facility, and your people, as targets in his shooting gallery. You guarantee him safety from opposition whilst he continues to kill more and more people. And you take the right to self defense away from the victims.

Read the whole thing.

"JohnHuang2" on the Virginia Tech Massacre

Bad day at Blacksburg (When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns)

Venus Ramey, Miss America 1944, was about to get robbed yet again last week at her south-central Kentucky farm, so she exercised 'gun control' by holding her snub-nosed .38-caliber weapon steady as she shot out the tires of the thief's would-be getaway car, using her walker to steady her aim with each shot. The 82-year-old pistol-packin'-mama then flagged down a passing motorist and calmly held the thief at gunpoint until the Sheriff arrived. (The Sheriff had just finished an urgent call at Donkin' Donuts.) Miss America's farm apparently was not a "gun-free zone." But according to New York Times editorials, people like Ramey would be much safer unarmed. Liberals would love to make all of America a "gun-free zone," just like they'd love to 'fix' American health care by making it one giant Walter Reed system.

The idiocy of "gun control" and 'gun-free' zoning at Virginia Tech helped get 32 of its students and teachers shot to death, so liberals insist the solution is even more gun control. And bigger 'gun-free' zoning. (New libbie slogan: People don't kill people, guns do.)

[snip]

The 'crowning jewel' of deinstitutionalization was John Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act of 1963, then came the "privacy rules" of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which gave us Cho. The psychiatric hospital that treated Cho couldn't legally compare notes with Virginia Tech counselors nor dean without Cho's OK as an outpatient. It's notable that just before the HIPAA Privacy and Security Acts went into effect, the big worry was the cost of compliance. And with its complexity, nobody was ready to shoot from the HIPAA. At Virginia Tech, the cost of compliance consisted of 32 dead students and teachers. Because when guns are outlawed, the only one shooting from the hip is the outlaw. Liberals have blood on their hands.

The Tech Massacre: Va. Tech Gunman Fired 170-Plus Shots

In a previous post I mentioned that the reason that Cho’s rampage probably ended when he ran out of ammunition. Firing 170 shots is not totally determinative, but that’s a lot of bullets and we can probably conclude, absent further evidence showing how much ammo he had left, that the massacre ended on Cho’s initiative, not because of any police or student initiative.

That’s why so-called “gun free zones” are much more likely to result in massacres like the one at Tech. the ability of someone like Cho to shoot and shoot and shoot defenseless victims is reprehensible. And what is particularly reprehensible is that the victims were defenseless on purpose due to a policy set in place by the Tech administration.

But what is infuriating about this article is this:

But they said investigators still don't know why Cho launched the bloody attack on his fellow students at Virginia Tech.

"We talk about possible motives and theories and whatnot, but we don't have any evidence to suggest anything," said State Police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty.

He said investigators had searched computer files, cell phone records and e-mails, and had compiled 500 piece of evidence from Norris Hall alone.

Yet so far, nothing indicated a motive or close link between the 23- year-old loner and his victims, Flaherty said.

This kind of “reporting” makes you want to scream! Cho took the time to make a movie filled with hatred and chock-full of motive. What the hell are the police looking for? Do they think he was just kidding when he made his video and there are hidden reasons for his actions?

In between, a package was mailed to NBC containing Cho's videotaped tirade and written manifesto about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs."

What is it about this case when police and reporters don’t want to take “yes, I hate you and want to kill you” as the answer?

The Will of the Uninformed [Misinformed]

Fox New is frequently accused of spreading falsehoods because a larger number of its audience – compared to other networks - believe that Saddam had something to do with al-Qaida or 9/11.

Jonah Goldberg poses an interesting question:

...if 31 percent of Americans don’t know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29 percent can identify “Scooter” Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15 percent can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader … why do two-thirds of Americans believe that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’ firing of eight U.S. attorneys was “politically motivated?”

Conceding the fact that there is literally nothing that goes on in Washington that is not “politically motivated,” in this case we must assume that people who answered the question in the affirmative believe a crime was committed. But even the Democrats in congress have not made that accusation.

So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn’t pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85 percent who couldn’t name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31 percent of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can’t identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias?

[asks Goldberg]

The answer, dear friends, is that the people who may not be able to associate the name of Dick Cheney with the office of Vice President undoubtedly are victims of the MSM who have spared no expense to make sure that the worst possible inferences of the Democrats in Congress regarding this administration become the conventional wisdom.

As they did in the Duke non-rape case, as they did in the misreporting in the aftermath of Katrina and as they did by giving mass-murderer Cho his posthumous fame.

Peggy Noonan on the Tech shootings: "Where are the Grownups?"

From the Wall Street Journal:

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Sheng-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.
And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.

One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?

Read the whole thing...

Reactions on Arab web sites to the mass murders committed at Virginia Tech

From LGF:

And now, turning to our peace-loving Muslims at an Arabic Islamic forum, I translate some of their ‘condolences’:

Al-Jazeera reported 20 dead and 29 injured. Praise be to Allah.

Praise be to Allah for these calamities hitting America. By the will of Allah, more of this [will happen], following their defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

O Allah, keep America busy with itself, and enamor its people against it.

And on this site, the massacre is being referred to as “The Great Ghazwa of Virginia.” (Ghazwa means ‘raid’ in Arabic, referring to the battles Muhammad and his followers fought against the non-Muslims.)

"Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre and the magnificent reaction of the "Hokie Nation" to this tragedy it may strike a discordant note, but there are people who wonder at the fact that, with few exceptions, the Tech students were passive during the killer's spree. He was not stopped. The killing stopped when he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

His thirty-two dead victims and 15 wounded means that he used at least 47 bullets. Given that handguns are not particularly accurate, my guess is that he used many more bullets than that.

Taking all the emotion away, it's reasonable to assume that he killed himself when he ran out of ammunition.

That's disturbing. Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia is a rural oasis and the largest University in Virginia. No effete bunch of urban liberals they. Yet the students and faculty - with a few notable and heroic examples (Professor Liviu Librescu) - were passive and panic stricken; either waiting to be shot, hiding under desks, or jumping out of windows.

Don't get me wrong, given the choice of jumping out of a window or facing a maniac with a gun, I'll jump out of a window every day. But in the end, the killer was not stopped. He just ran out of ammo. 32 people died and 15 were wounded while the killer's only injury was self inflicted.

In a way, that bothers me.

Mark Steyn talks here about A Culture of Passivity

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

There is - for those who wish to draw comparisons - a difference between the heroes of Flight 93 and the students at VT. The men of 93 knew they had nothing to lose. The VT students did not know this. Their classrooms would not crash, killing them all, and they hoped that they would survive when the shooting stopped. They were not all automatically doomed by passivity as were the passengers on the 9/11 flights. Perhaps that explains it all; a rational, mathematical decision: he can't kill us all because he does not have enough bullets.

And if the wolf takes one of the sheep, the flock still survives. But where are the shepherds? Or did they die with the survivor of the Holocaust?