I can understand how well meaning people will flail about in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity, saying stupid things about banning guns. After all, all of us would like very much to stop this sort of thing from ever happening again. And since you can’t control people (no matter how much the left wants to) the next ‘controllable’ thing is an inanimate object, via which you can then, supposedly, control people. Not.
Once normal people sit down and have time to think about the issue, the argument that more gun control is the answer becomes absurd on its face. After all, Virginia Tech is a gun-free zone. Except, of course, the insane criminal who murdered 32 people didn’t care about that, anymore than he cared about the fact that it’s also illegal to murder people. Cho was also forbidden from owning a gun because of the court declaration that he was an ‘imminent threat to others’ and mentally unstable. But Kaine’s state doesn’t yet make that information available to gun shop owners.
Va. Gov. Ponders Tightening Gun Laws
The Virginia Tech massacre might boost efforts to require stringent background checks of buyers at gun shows, but state lawmakers probably do not have an appetite for any broad bans, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said Thursday.
At gun shows, collectors and other firearms aficionados can sell and trade weapons without checking the seller’s history. Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 students and faculty members before committing suicide, bought his guns legally [that’s not true. Cho’s adjudicated mental state made that purchase illegal–ed.] through gun shops.
Efforts to tighten the gun-show law die perennially in Virginia’s Republican-run, pro-gun General Assembly.
“I’ve always supported closing the gun-show loophole. It’s just the enforcement of existing law: Felons shouldn’t have a gun,” the Democrat told The Associated Press.
Newsflash for Governor Kaine: Cho was not a felon nor did he get his gun at a gun show. If guns are going to be the thing we respond to because of this (as opposed to allowing the mentally deranged to wander around our campuses), the real issue, the real lesson, is the fact that wherever guns are banned (like Washington, DC, London, and Virginia Tech), murder becomes an epidemic and violent crime in general rises exponentially. Only the armed law-abiding can stop felons determined to do harm (again) or the never-arrested strangely quiet men who stalk women, and finally act on their murder fantasies.
The state of Tennessee, as an example, understands this and took action.
Ann Coulter also has a column out today about the ongoing debate about the cause of the VTech massacre, and takes issue with the ‘mental health’ exception for buying a gun. I like that rule. If you’re certifiably nuts, then you shouldn’t have a gun.
Stupidity, thy name is pandering politician.
Instead of controlling guns we should better control the flow of pertinent information. Perhaps the gun shop owner should have been privy to the fact that Cho was a dangerously mentally ill individual on the brink of being committed.
Prvy to the fact, that is.
I think Ann makes a good point but I agree with you, nutjobs like Cho should not be allowed to legally purchase a gun. That doesn’t mean they will not get them illegally, it just means they can’t walk into a gun store and get one with the blessings of the FBI. There are a lot of people walking around who should be institutionalized but we don’t do that anymore because it’s not politically correct.