My latest blog post at Mises.org.
Bill Steigerwald, associate editor, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, puts the horrible Virginia Tech shooting in its almost-forgotten historical context.
On March 18, 1927, Andrew Kehoe, board member of Bath Consolidated Schools, Bath Township, Michigan, carried out a massacre that killed 45, including 38 grade-school children. Though, unlike Cho Seung-Hui, Kehoe used readily available explosives. Yet, it appears that no one called for bans of explosives as Kehoe was recognized as an aberrant and abhorrent madman.
Crazed murders will always be with us, regardless of any imagined government-run police system. Removing the right to bear arms in order to protect against the next lunatic serves no personal security purpose - as Kehoe aptly proves. Yet, removing the right to bear arms does serve to further metastasize governmental power - as was well understood by our Founding Fathers.
3 comments:
Yes crazed murderers may always be with us, but if we use guns to protect ourselves against "the crazy murderers," who's to say we aren't the crazy murderers and the people we protect ourselves from are the innocent victims. In order to protect ourselves, we can ourselves become dangerous to society. Cho Seung-Hui thought he was in the right in doing what he did, even though everyone else thought he was wrong. It was because of the fact that he was able to get weapons that he was able to "defend himself against the crazy people" in his life. Perhaps if Cho Seung-Hui had not had access to firearms, he would have reacted in a different, hopefully less deadly way, making those around him realize he needed help. Many people are not calling for a ban on firearms, just a restriction on how easy it is to obtain them. Both of the instances were tragedies and though tragedies cannot be avoided entirely we can reduce the number and the magnitude of these tragedies simply by making it more difficult to obtain weapons.
If Virginia Tech allowed students/faculty to have concealed weapons on campus and that right was exercised, the outcome would have been much different: 32 people wouldn't have died and several others injured before Cho finally took his own life. People who want to harm others will always find the means.
http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_272613127.shtml
I agree with 5:26. In VTech, as in Columbine, the police do not enter the building until after the killer has committed suicide. The false hope is that the police will save you. Your only true hope is to pray that the killer will not venture your way, or will kill himself before finding you.
Can you imagine waiting to die simply because some do-gooder believes that YOU cannot be trusted with a gun?
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