The right to bear arms in Virginia

By Tim Redmond

I'm surprised that this hasn't gotten more attention: Immediately after hearing of the horror at Virginia Tech, President Bush express his condolences for the victims -- then made a point of commenting about "the right to bear arms."

The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed. Certainly, bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting ... is against the law and something someone should be held accountable for," [a Bush spokesperson] said

According to the New York Post, the shooter, Cho Seung Hui, had every legal right to buy the weapons he used in the state of Virginia.

He was a disturbed kid, by all accounts, and nobody will ever be able to figure out exactly what made him go off and kill 33 people, including himself. But if the country wasn't so obsessed with the right to buy and use weapons of mass murder, like automatic handguns, it's very likely he never would have had the tools to carry out the massacre.

The main reason so many people die of handgun shootings is that these weapons are far too easily available. And that is in part the fault of President G.W. Bush.

Comments (3)

paularocks

Perhaps president Bush's example of using war-like solutions for addressing problems can be in part to blame for the Virginia Tech shootings, but I am not inclined to agree that it was the mere availability of guns that encouraged Cho to kill his peers. He is an adult after all, which is a fact that the media seems to be down playing. I keep reading preventative strategies that involve "contacting parents." I can't believe that we're skirting the fact that college students are under increasing amounts of pressure as more and more (young) adults are pursuing higher education in order to compete in an increasingly specialized job market. Cho was mentally ill- maybe that is a fact that the admissions board should take into account. Sadly I think that the inappropriate use of guns is comparable to the inappropriate use of drugs: restrictive laws are not going to make the problem go away. We are becoming increasingly desensitized to the sacred aspects of humanity by the overwhelming wealth of information that is now available to us. Maybe we should be working on content rather than breadth.

Posted by paularocks | April 18, 2007 11:03 AM

amosmag

In the aftermath of the deaths of 33 Virginia Tech students, some defend unlimited gun ownership with the old argument, “It’s the price of freedom.”
Freedom for whom? Gun dealers? Gun buyers? Nut cases who want to kill innocent people?
What about freedom for the 33 dead students? What about freedom for the families of the deceased who will be prisoners of their grief for the rest of their lives? Must one American’s freedom come at the expense of another’s death?
According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 16,611 homicides in the U.S. in 2004, the latest year shown on the CDC website. Of this total, 11,250 were firearms homicides.
And a look through the Statistical Abstract of the United States shows that more than 1,000,000 people were murdered in America between 1900 and 2000.
To get this figure, I extracted the number of homicides per year from the abstract and arrayed the data on a spreadsheet. I’ve forgotten the numbers (lost the spreadsheet), but I recall one general conclusion that the data along with other information illustrated:
We’ve had more American deaths by homicide than American deaths in all of the wars the U.S. has fought since the beginning of the U.S. in 1789. A substantial number of those were undoubtedly deaths by firearm.
Those who advocate the unlimited ownership of guns have other arguments in favor of the deaths of innocent victims. One of the more interesting is the assertion that these deaths could have been prevented if someone, a student or a professor perhaps, had been carrying a gun. In this scenario, he or she could have shot the gunman and all would have been well.
Besides ignoring many other variables, such as an ordinary person having the presence of mind to think straight and act deliberately when someone is shooting at them, the argument is logically invalid since it compares a past event to a remotely contingent possibility (if only, then blah blah), a most ludicrous approach to informed discussion.
In fact this argument is kind of like the old snake bite argument. To protect yourself from the possibility of another snake bite, carry a couple of concealed snakes.

Posted by amosmag | April 18, 2007 11:47 AM

James Chapman:

Banning firearms in the U.S. would be great,for the criminals,then they wouldnt even have to wonder if a home was defended by a armed homeowner,they could come right on in with their guns drawn and do anything they wanted,criminals dont follow the law.I guess the homeowner could call the cops if he or she had a warning or enough time,but criminals dont give warnings and the police cant be held resposible for not showing up in time and protecting you,there is a court case that says that,though I dont remember the name of the case,Im armed and have a very good chance without the police,maybe if a teacher or even a student at VA tech had have been armed things may have been different, but banning arms from law abiding citizens would be wrong, unconstitutional and stupid.By the way it was a semi-automatic pistol,its illegal to have a fully automatic weapon of any kind without a dificult to get permit.Why dont we put the blame for these horible acts where it really belongs and I beleive that to be the destruction of the family unit caused by a immoral media and a government that thinks they can run our lives and raise our children better than we.If you choose not to protect yourself with a firearm more power to you and good luck,but dont blame the law abiding citizen who do, for criminals and their actions.

Posted by James Chapman | May 14, 2008 09:53 PM

The right to bear arms in Virginia

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