It lessens the horror not one iota and I take no pride in a prescience borne of long experience, but I will not be surprised in the least that the wacko who gunned down 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus this morning before killing himself was a white male armed with street legal weapons who was not part of a well-regulated militia but had a head full of problems.
It is probable that no gun law would have prevented the rampage at the Blacksburg, Virginia, university, so let’s dispose with the It Could Have Been Prevented fiction right away.
Although it’s a piece of cake to buy every weapon used in recent mass shootings in Virginia and most other states — including the .9mm handgun and .22-caliber pistol the Virginia Tech shooter apparently used — he probably had no criminal record that might have alerted authorities to him. And as experience shows, head cases have a way of getting weapons no matter how tough local laws are.
Face it, after years of head banging by gun-control advocates on the federal, state and municipal levels, the U.S. remains pretty much one big Wild West town when it comes to the sale, possession and use of guns.
Pro-gun advocates use the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as their fig leaf. What the Constitution doesn’t say is that the rights of gun owners trump the rights of everyone else, currently those dead and wounded Virginia Tech students.
It is my view that for all intents and purposes, gun control is dead (pun intended) in America.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.
For breaking news on the massacre, click here and here. For Virginia Tech’s response, including a statement from its president, click here.