Va. Tech Shooting

[erdogs]

The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England's firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld." Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.

Nearly five centuries of growing civility ended in 1954. Violent crime has been climbing ever since. Last December, London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.

[cityboi]

Well they are saying he killed all those people because of the way people treat him throughout his life. He was picked on in high school because of his "shyness" and "strangeness" and when he had to read sentences the whole class would laugh at him and say "go back to china". Students would push him to the ground and laugh at him. That does some to a person's self esteem. Now this by no means excuses what he did but now we know why he did it.

[dgreco]

i dont know if anyone has read what other schools are doing, but I think Florida State is doing a pretty cool thing. They are getting everyones phones and incase of any emergencies they are gonig to text the students. This is the quickest, easiest and most efficient way according to the school. I agree completely I think it may happen at a lot more schools pretty soon.

[GRDadof3]

Not to get off-topic, but the non-stop media coverage of this is nauseating and annoying. I'm sure with all this coverage, many people missed the fact that 164 Iraqis were killed in coordinated bombings yesterday. Many civilians, at a market and at a hospital. Please tell me this story is winding down (no disrespect to the students, faculty and families involved).

[dgreco]

Not to get off-topic, but the non-stop media coverage of this is nauseating and annoying. I'm sure with all this coverage, many people missed the fact that 164 Iraqis were killed in coordinated bombings yesterday. Many civilians, at a market and at a hospital. Please tell me this story is winding down (no disrespect to the students, faculty and families involved).

[Lowerdeck]

Not to get off-topic, but the non-stop media coverage of this is nauseating and annoying. I'm sure with all this coverage, many people missed the fact that 164 Iraqis were killed in coordinated bombings yesterday. Many civilians, at a market and at a hospital. Please tell me this story is winding down (no disrespect to the students, faculty and families involved).

[Cadeho]

The only connections I have with VT are, I'm in Virginia, I have a cousin who's there now, I have friends who went there, and I applied there. Maybe the media is saturating the air with it, but it is still huge news and historical. It reopens and opens debates that perhaps should be discussed. In a perfect society, we wouldn't have this. We need to talk, study, strategize, and implement something to help prevent such horrors for the future.

Iraq is an on-going nightmare that I feel not even my great grands will see the end. I feel the world is going crazy with all the deadly events going on. I did not miss the news of the large number of people killed in Iraq yesterday. The news is slowly turning back to other news as days go by.

As far as the gun debate, I don't understand why some people don't realize the historical context behind the amendment. It's an amendment and not a commandment. We've moved beyond the need to gather a militia in case the British come back. But maybe we should arm everyone at age 18 if they pass a strict mental evaluation and other qualifiers. They say it's a safer society if everyone equally draws a gun.

[monsoon]

Not to get off-topic, but the non-stop media coverage of this is nauseating and annoying. I'm sure with all this coverage, many people missed the fact that 164 Iraqis were killed in coordinated bombings yesterday. Many civilians, at a market and at a hospital. Please tell me this story is winding down (no disrespect to the students, faculty and families involved).

[Snowguy716]

To those that are convinced that video games has something to do with these crimes:

Is our society really more violent? Do you have statistics to prove it? No. Because you can't compare the U.S to Europe in this regard because we have no idea how many potential killers live in Europe and can't kill because they don't have access to guns. How many people die needlessly every year in the United States because perpetrators have easy access to firearms?

Some of you talk about enforcing the death penalty. It's been pretty much proven that the death penalty doesn't deter crimes. States without the death penalty actually have lower crime rates than states that do have the death penalty. Texas puts more people to death by far than any other state and yet still has a relatively high violent crime rate.

I find your way of thinking wrong, because this is what I understand it as:

1.) We don't need more gun control. We need to enforce and increase punishments to deter crimes.

2.) We don't need gun control. He wanted to kill, he would have done it anyway. You're negating point 1 with point 2 and throwing in gun control for $hits and giggles.

But then there's this: He killed himself. He's gone and there will be no punishment for this atrocity. The only way to prevent this from happening would have been to take the means away from the perpetrator BEFORE the crime happened. So, we can do it a few different ways: We can give psych evaluations to everyone and pick out the high risk ones. We could ban guns in schools/university/public places (we already do in most cases) and install metal detectors and security guards at great cost to consumers/tax payers. Or we could take away hand guns and ban all guns except hunting rifles. It is possible that this shooting could have happened if Cho had a hunting rifle, but he would more likely have been spotted walking across campus with a hunting rifle, and it would have been very very difficult to kill 30 people with a hunting rifle. The beauty of compromise: You still get to hunt and gun crime goes down because it is no longer the question of "Well... does he legally have that gun or did he just steal it/buy it off the black market?", but a more definitive question: "What the hell is he doing with a (non-rifle) gun? It's illegal, arrest him now!"

I don't like the idea of taking all hand guns away, because I believe most people that own them are responsible and would never commit a crime with them. But you can't just look at things like what happened at Virginia Tech and talk about "more punishment" and "better enforcement" because sure.. you can torture the guy and burn him to death in a vat of acid for the crime after it has been committed if you want to... but now there are innocent people dead that could still have been living had the assailant not had a gun. There really is no justifiable reason to have a hand gun or other non-hunting gun if nobody else has them. If an assailant has to get close enough to stab you or abduct you, you are close enough to spray him in the face with mace... and it's much easier to aim mace than a gun.

And as a last thought:

The idea that if more people carried guns, this wouldn't have happened is a very very very shortsighted solution, in my opinion. A lawmaker from Wisconsin threw up the idea that we should give teachers guns after the Amish school shootings and shooting in Wisconsin.

First of all: Guns have NO place in a classroom, no matter what.

Secondly: Good. So now we just have X more guns for deranged students to have easy access to if they, for whatever reason, have the desire to start shooting people.

I don't want to read the headline "Student steals teacher's gun and shoots 30 before being shot by another teacher."

[UptownNewOrleans]

Well they are saying he killed all those people because of the way people treat him throughout his life. He was picked on in high school because of his "shyness" and "strangeness" and when he had to read sentences the whole class would laugh at him and say "go back to china". Students would push him to the ground and laugh at him. That does some to a person's self esteem. Now this by no means excuses what he did but now we know why he did it.

[erdogs]

Is our society really more violent? Do you have statistics to prove it? No. Because you can't compare the U.S to Europe in this regard because we have no idea how many potential killers live in Europe and can't kill because they don't have access to guns. How many people die needlessly every year in the United States because perpetrators have easy access to firearms?

[Snowguy716]

I don't necessarily want to take hand guns away... but I do think crime rates involving guns would drop if we were to ban them. People that shoot others don't go around nervous because the person they want just might have a gun as well.

Another reason I don't buy the "if more people had guns, this wouldn't have happened" argument is because it is unrealistic. Unless you pass a law that requires people to carry guns with them, not enough people would buy guns and carry them with in order to deter crimes.

I support gun control measures that seek to make it harder for criminals to get guns. That's why we should have a waiting period of a week or so (so you can cool down if you're enraged and are looking to shoot someone) as well as registration rules that require yearly registration of the gun with police. It should be illegal to inadvertently lose possession of your gun, just like losing control of your vehicle is crime. ( If you are a gun owner and somebody steels your gun and then goes at shoots somebody, it is at least partially your fault for not keeping your gun in a safe place. Regulations could be more relaxed for hunting rifles.

We could also set up a national database and tie a serial number to each gun. It should be illegal to have the gun loaded when it is not on your person, and you should have to show ID and the gun to buy bullets. If a criminal does steel your gun and tries to buy bullets, it could easily be determined that the gun does not belong to that person and the robber would have to work much harder to get bullets.

This is the same thinking that many states have had when they passed laws that put sudafed behind the counter. The number of meth labs has plummeted, because now you have to show a picture ID and give a signature to get it.. and even then you are limited to 2 boxes, and pharmacists are encouraged to alert the authorities if someone seems suspicious or comes back often to get more sudafed.

There really should be a mixed approach. Banning guns is unfair to those that are law abiding gun owners, while allowing unfettered access to firearms will likely result in more shootings.

[Pillsbury]

^ You sum it up well.

[Cadeho]

Most other times, one bad apple spoils the barrel for the other apples, but not with the gun issue.

[Miesian Corners]

Don't get me wrong, what happened down there is really really bad. It's an embarassment that things like that happen in this world. Those people had no reason to die. But um, the fact that EVERYONE is talking about it ALL THE TIME is really getting on my nerves. I don't go to VT, I don't know anyone who did, and everyone who's talking about it has next to no connection with VT either. I'd like to just go on with my own life.

[Lowerdeck]

Are you suggesting we stop talking about it? I don't have any connection to Iraq except for the fact the President of my country decided to send American troops there under the guise of a (non-existent) threat, but should that mean I have no right to voice my opinion?

I am in complete agreement that the media are out of control in terms of coverage, but getting on with one's own life is something that 33 people in Blacksburg, Virginia will never have the chance to do.