Here’s an article that demonstrates the vapidity of thought of those who oppose self defense on campus (and anywhere else):
In April 2007, he was a student at Virginia Tech when his girlfriend and several other people he knew there were gunned down in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Thirty-two people died, plus the gunman.
There were times when Woods thought that maybe he should get a gun.
“Then I learned pretty fast that wouldn’t solve anything,” said Woods, who is now a graduate student at UT. “The idea that somebody could stop a school shooting with a gun is impossible. It’s reactive, not preventative.”
Huh?
How did he “learn” that at all, let alone “pretty fast”? Who provided the lesson? Was it in graduate school at UT?
And what’s wrong with “reactive” as a fall back when “preventative” doesn’t work (as it clearly didn’t in Blacksburg)? Particularly when “preventative” seems to consist of putting up “unarmed victims heregun-free zone” signs?
Whatever he learned, or how fast he learned it, he didn’t learn it from these students, who disarmed a gunman up the road from his school back in 2002.
Opponents say that if guns are allowed on campus, students and faculty will live in fear of classmates and colleagues, not knowing who might pull a gun over a drunken dorm argument or a poor grade.
Note, they have difficulty finding any actual examples of this to justify their bizarre paranoia. And they don’t seem to live in fear of the psychopaths among them who ignore the “gun-free zone” signs, who are the only ones with guns under their setup.
Woods, who wore a maroon “Virginia Tech Class of 2007” T-shirt during an interview, said he hasn’t heard from any survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting who supports guns on campus.
And therefore, since he hasn’t heard of any, none must exist. Great logic, that.
He figures a classroom shooting would be too sudden to stop, even if a student or teacher had a gun.
How he “figures” that, just as how he “learned it pretty fast,” remains unexplained.
“Everything happens too quickly,” Woods said. “You either play dead or you are dead.”
Really? Tell it to this woman.
Idiot.
[Monday morning update]
If I am in possession of my faculties, I will refuse to go into a nursing home unless it is a “shall issue” nursing home. I would at least want some of the staff to be armed.
[Update after the Instalanche]
If there are any new readers here, you might want to check out the rest of the blog. I have some thoughts on the president’s south Asian speech affectations, press coverage of the Fargo floods, whether or not there is really nothing that we can do about the North Korean launch, and who controls the means of production.
> In each case, the shooters were considered to be harmless all the way up to the fateful day. The factions of good people vs. rampaging lunatics are not always rigid. There are crossovers.
Actually, the lines are quite rigid. The folks doing the killing are the lunatics. The fact that they weren’t lunatics the day before doesn’t change that.
The disarmament policies aren’t stopping the lunatics. Instead, they’re protecting the lunatics from any response during the time when said response would do any good.
Does GK really believe that a potential lunatic says “Hmm, schools are a gun-free zone so I’m not going to go lunatic.”? If not, perhaps he’ll tell us how gun-free zones stop lunatics.
“Why did this guy just lie down and wait to die?”
The elephant in the room vis-a-vis the gun control debate is the role of religious beliefs, which Volokh Conspiracy discussed a few months back. If your religion holds any violence, or at least any killing, self-defense or no, as a mortal sin, then lying down and waiting (hoping?) for God to call you home is a no-brainer. Furthermore, you have a vested interest in imposing your moral stance on society at large – what better way to insulate yourself from the real-world consequences of your beliefs?
Having a suitable handgun makes that classroom a bunker rather than a tomb.
>If your religion holds any violence, or at least any >killing, self-defense or no, as a mortal sin, then >lying down and waiting (hoping?) for God to call >you home is a no-brainer.
Then why are the two largest groups of Medal of Honor winners Irish and Latinos?
>>Then why are the two largest groups of Medal of Honor >>winners Irish and Latinos?
Maybe because they’re mostly Catholic, the religion that invented the concept of just war??
How can anyone with an adult IQ believe “Gun Free” zones make anyone safer? Where do most “crazies” go when they decide to off a bunch of innocents? Churches… schools… malls… all places where the crazy is least likely to encounter anyone willing or able to stop them. When is the last time a wacko picked a gun show as a great location to go shoot a bunch of people? How about “never?” Which leads me to conclude that these mass murderers may be crazy but they aren’t stupid.
With that said, the likelihood of having to defend against a deranged mass murderer is much more remote than having to face a carjacker or armed robber… I was robbed at gunpoint at a Burger King once… this was in Texas before concealed carry was permitted and I had to sit quietly while one of the thugs kicked a small boy in the head and shot one of the employees… I dare say if the same thing happened today… the perp would be DRT. (dead right there)
I was talking to a deputy sheriff recently at a local gun show… he and his wife, also a LEO, advise all their friends to arm themselves (legally)…
By the way, for you bed wetting, liberal, anti-gun, anti-self defense, just let me sit here and let you shoot me types… go to a gun show sometime… it’s simply amazing how courteous and civilized the crowd is. I have NEVER seen so much as one rude word exchanged. Which reminds me of the saying, “A well armed society is a polite society.”
TO: M. Albritton, et al.
RE: Heh
I’m reminded of that old, true adage….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[God made men. Colt made men equal.]
GK says: My only problem is, how do we know who snaps when?
Again, doesn’t matter. The shooter at VaTech snapped and brought his weapons on campus. So, the bad guy had access to weapons and snapped, then killed a lot of people that were forced to be unarmed. If the campus were CCW legal, I believe he would not have killed so many. People snap all the time, but they seem to go to kill in places where they can’t be opposed. They usually also wind up killing themselves after they kill others. CCW legal area, he’ll just get to the end stage a lot quicker. I’m not saying that killing is justified, or even the right thing to do, but if the victims can’t do anything but be victims, isn’t that just as bad?
— unknown
It’s not unknown (at least to me and many of my readers). It’s Robert Anson Heinlein.
TO: Rand Simberg
RE: Attribution
Robert A. Heinlein?
Great! Thanks….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. Was that from his novel about everyone, except certain pacifists, packed ‘heat’….in the form of laser pistol?
Speaking of Robert Heinlein and the Second Amendment, he had a lot of trouble with his editor at Scribners back when he was writing young adult novels. One is set in a frontier society on Mars, and the editor strenuously objected the the protagonist carrying a sidearm–it would send a bad message to our young readers.
Oh–and that novel was published in the mid-1950’s, which reminds us that liberal freedom-stealing fools have been doing their mischief for a long time.
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms2.blogspot.com/2009/04/re-mindless.html
iconoclast said:
There is a bit of good news on this subject for the future. Decentralized digital fabrication has already rendered gun control completely obsolete.
> There is a bit of good news on this subject for the future. Decentralized digital fabrication has already rendered gun control completely obsolete.
Digital printing doesn’t (yet) handle strong-enough materials.
In addition, gunpowder and primers are still necessary.