MASSACRE AT VIRGINIA
TECH
Yes, it's a wake-up call. But for what?
2006: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
enforces a ban against firearms on campus to make it safer,
in fact, as one school official put it, so that students
can be “free from fear.”
2007: Lunatic shoots 48 people at Virginia Tech.
Conscientious law-abiding citizens who are studying,
teaching, visiting, and working on the VPISU campus,
including those with concealed-carry permits, respected the
ban today and consequently were unable to subdue the
shooter.
16 April 2007. Here we go again. Tempers will flare
once more in the decades-old debate over the Second
Amendment. Once more we’ll compare numbers of people
killed each year by Chevrolets and Toyotas with the numbers
killed by Glocks and Winchesters. The Chevrolets
score higher, but we don’t ban them or raise the age at
which one can operate them or sue the manufacturer for
creating something so deadly. We’ll make those
perennial threats against the manufacturers of guns.
Cars kill more people on and off college campuses than
guns. And the victims of automobile violence
generally look more gruesome to emergency response
teams. We prohibit everyone from bringing guns onto
college campuses but we only prohibit freshmen from
bringing cars on campus.
Because we are a society deeply concerned for the civil
liberties of lunatics, assuring that they are free to
refuse confinement and treatment, we have few ways to
prevent them from becoming deadly with incendiary
accelerants, automobiles, blades, nasty chemicals, and of
course firearms. We blame the guns for killing, not
the people holding them. As Larry the Cable Guy has
said, if the guns are to blame, then I can blame all my
mistakes in school on my pencil.
But we won’t use logic to analyze the problem. We’ll
go on emotion. We will blame the guns, which are not
sacred, because the lunatics who misuse them, just like the
criminals who drink and drive, are untouchable.
The President said today that a school should be a
sanctuary, meaning, I suppose, a safe haven. The only
sanctuaries – the only places where one is arguably safe
from assault by an armed lunatic or criminal – are found
inside buildings that have body-scanning equipment to
disarm everyone entering.
If the law forces me to disarm in certain areas, then I
want an x-ray or metal detector to disarm everyone else
entering a closed space with me as well. That’s what
makes it a safe haven. Everywhere else, and let’s
emphasize the everywhere part, we are all better served if
some unknown and unknowable number of citizens are quietly,
legally carrying something concealed that can immobilize
and if necessary kill a rampaging murderer.
(Among the thirty-three states with “shall-issue” concealed
carry laws, there are over three million Americans with
concealed carry permits. That number alone, without
estimating the numbers in the remaining states, says that
on average one out of a hundred Americans could be packing
heat, or about one in 70 adults. That's the
proportion in Virginia. Actually, the odds are better
in some places than others. In Utah and Idaho it's
one in 25 adults, in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and South
Dakota it's one in 15 adults, while in the crime-free
states of New York and Massachusetts, where the Second
Amendment is outlawed, concealed carry is extremely
restricted. In Alaska and Vermont, where the right to
keep and bear arms is not infringed because someone there
DID read the Constitution, there are no statistics, but
some Alaskans themselves have estimated a percentage of one
in four adults is armed with a firearm at any one time.)
Demanding that the world become less brutal by banning
weapons when and where they are most needed is
foolhardy. The world is a brutal place. More
precisely, humans are a brutal species, not because
rational citizens carry weapons, but because they are
thwarted in doing so and therefore those with the intent to
commit great harm can do their damage largely unimpeded.
I hope the Virginia Tech massacre is a wake-up call to
responsible people to arm themselves. Not so that we
can have war in the streets – notice I used the word
“responsible” – but so those set on wreaking havoc can
count on one intended victim out of ten, rather than one in
a hundred or fewer, stepping up to stop the carnage.
If those with the will to carry responsibly had been
respected in their right to do so instead of demonized at
Virginia Tech, it is improbable that such a massacre would
have happened there today.
I can see where it’s going to go, though. Politicians
will find it impossible to argue that the solution to gun
violence is to relax gun restrictions. They will be
afraid to support the logic in that answer. Their
solution will be to create even larger pools of sitting
ducks. Why is it, for instance, that people intent on
mass murder don’t enter military bases and start
shooting? They may be lunatics, but they’re not
idiots.
And it will get worse for those who do still carry
concealed in places where it is not yet forbidden.
Instead of congratulating a hero who stops a shooting
spree, we will probably step up prosecution of those who
deprive a depraved individual of civil liberties and a fair
trial simply because that depraved individual is shooting
people. We will persist in enabling more Columbine
and Virginia Tech disasters because the only target we can
settle on as a society will be our own foot.
I’m very sorry for the victims of the Blacksburg
massacre. The agony among the victims’ families and
in the college community must be indescribable. I
hope, probably in vain, that this demonstrates the truth:
We don’t create safe havens, free from fear, by declaring a
certain setting a weapon-free zone. It’s not
enforceable against the very individual who it is most
definitely intended to ban, who is the most to be
feared. And indeed it only makes him more effective.
2007
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