VT Shootings: Fate Written in Blood
The first shots rang out at 7:15am in the one of the dormitories at Virginia Tech. Two people died. Several were wounded.
No one was warned and the police didn’t think to shut down the school and the students continued to naively go about their daily routine, when the peaceful reverie was shattered more than two hours later at 9:50am.
In the engineering building a gunman opened fire, killing 30 students before he took his own life.
Fear could be sensed in the corridors as students took cover. Some barricaded themselves in classrooms. Survivors reported seeing the gunman come back to clean up and take the lives of people whom had been missed the first time. Others reported seeing and hearing shots as they sought refuge, but a common element that all the survivors and students share is that there was no warning of a gunman on campus after the first incident, which was initially deemed to be an isolated domestic issue.
This opens the door for many questions…
- Why didn’t the police shut down the campus and increase presence?
- Why didn’t the school send out notifications about the initial attack?
- Why was the gunman allowed to walk free after the first incident?
- Why was a student on a visa; a South Korean citizen, not an American citizen provided with the rights guaranteed in the 2nd amendment?
There are many other questions that are swimming around, but it seems like the most trying point is the existence of the second amendment, which gives American citizens gun rights.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Hold on a minute, it doesn’t explicitly state that anyone can have guns, so why are the firearms readily available to anyone who wants it? Are there militias forming in the US now, or is this a remnant of the Colonial days when the colonists made this declaration to protect themselves against British invaders?
Homer: TV said that…? But I have to have a gun! It’s in the Constitution!
Lisa: Dad! The Second Amendment is just a remnant from revolutionary days. It has no meaning today!
Homer: You couldn’t be more wrong, Lisa. If I didn’t have this gun, the King of England could just walk in here any time he wants, and start shoving you around. [pushing Lisa] Do you want that? [pushing her harder] Huh? Do you?
Lisa: [quietly indignant] No…
The gun lobby will no doubt be saying that despite that a gun was used to do the 33 killings that a gun cannot without human intervention kill a person. But, regardless if human interaction required, the gun is the tool used to do the killings and the gun killed those people and the person who did the shootings used the gun to kill.
Aside from that political agenda, the other that has come up is that of Jack Thompson who would love nothing more than to ban all violent video games. Luckily his penchant for grade-A ignorance and notoriety for the pursuit of frivolous litigations has completely discredited him in the eyes of the court.  In a standard anti-game tirade, he has declare, well before the identity of the gunman was known that the cause of the shootings was violent video games.
If violent video games cause people to go on murderous rampages, then how does it explain the actions of:
- Adolf Hitler?
- Josef Stalin?
- Pol Pot?
- Julius Caesar
- Queen Mary 1st?
- Elizabeth Borden?
- John Wilkes Booth?
- Lee Harvey Oswald?
- … et cetera; ad nauseum…
It’s “lawyers” like him that discredit the rest of the American Bar Association and gives it a bad name as an organisation and discredits it as a viable organisation of attorneys who are there to serve America either as prosecution or defence.
At the end of the day, nothing will have changed however. The gun lobby will still be defending guns and people will be pointing fingers and nothing will be done to prevent another tragedy like this until a politician’s child gets hurt. Only when the elite feel the burn will something happen. Until then they will only pretend to understand the pain of the victims and their families (secondary victims).
The families will grieve; so will the community but nothing will come of this other than more meaningless crime statistics because politicians weren’t the ones affected by this directly.
Virginia massacre gunman is named
Stumble It!
April 17th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people.
April 17th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
But a gun can misfire if its safety lock isn’t on. Of course, it takes human intervention for the gun to kill many people.
A person with a knife will kill fewer people than with a gun because a gun can be automatic, a knife isn’t.