[Washington Post] Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday that he is considering an executive order to make sure that gun sellers have more information about the mental health of potential buyers, a move that would have kept Seung Hui Cho from purchasing the handguns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech last week.

A court had found Cho to be dangerously mentally ill, but that information was not available in the computer systems used by the outlets that sold Cho the guns. Kaine's proposal would ensure that such mental health information be in the database.
Because Cho had voluntarily introduced himself to therapy, rather than it being court ordered, he was exempt from a law that would have prohibited him to legally purchase a firearm. (Although, again, it begs the question if one willing to murder 32 people wouldn't have simply found a way to illegally purchase a firearm).

I'm not against closing the loophole that allowed Cho's access, and most reasonable people wouldn't be, but it's legally convoluted and nonetheless interesting that Democrats are all for protecting privacy and medical records (see: HIPPA) except when it comes to opposing something they like even less - such as the 2nd Amendment, or say, attacking Rush Limbaugh by trolling for an alleged but never charged crime. Then it's just fine to thumb through someone's private records.

Got that? To recap: allowing the government to search the medical records of al Qaeda suspects: bad. Allowing the government to search the medical records of someone either purchasing a gun or hosting a conservative talk-radio show: okay.

Everyone's clear now, right?

Labels: 4th Amendment, gun control, Privacy, VA Tech

Just so there are no misunderstandings with these "Fighting Back" posts from the past few days, I am certainly not suggesting that any students who were able to escape - such as those who were told to flee by the Israeli teacher barring the door - were in any way acting cowardly, etc.

That would be a silly and hollow charge for someone to make.

Cho had semi-automatic weapons (with a minimum 15 shots in the Glock alone, per clip). Five grown men could have bum rushed Cho and been unsuccessful (or perhaps so, but that's not the point). We have no idea as to how long Cho had been practicing his shooting. For all we know he may have been an excellent marksman.

There are some reports - I don't know whether confirmed or not - whereby Cho may have ordered several students into a line, facing a wall, for execution. In those circumstances where the student has no chance to escape we have to teach our youth to fight back. Perhaps some tried. We may never know.

But this is about mentality and conditioning. The three of four hijacked planes on 9-11 weren't filled with those to afraid to act. It's simply that the passengers in the fourth plane, United FLT 93, had enough time to gather their wits, realize they had no alternatives and organize a plan. I don't know about you but since that day I haven't boarded an airplane without first studying the faces around me, saying a quick prayer for safety, and thinking to myself what I would do should hijackers appear. One has to at least be prepared so they have an inkling of ideas regarding fight versus flight.

Going forward, as the NBC article a few posts below (yesterday) states, people should try to learn from this terror, whether in an office building or school yard, and condition themselves as to what to do the next time, if the next time be thrust upon them.

And sadly, there's going to be a next time.

Labels: self-defense, VA Tech

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
-- Cho Seung-Hui, whiney punk and murderer of 32 persons with far more promising futures than this loser.

An FBI profiler told Bill Bennett's morning show today that Cho was most likely clinically psychotic. No doubt. But boy, listening to Cho's "multimedia manifesto" he sounds just like Osama bin Laden or any other run of the mill, chip on the shoulder, crybaby, self-pitying Islamiwacko terrorist attempting to excuse mass murder.

Curiosities about the "Ishmael Ax" tattoo and war alias aside, such as Jerry Bower's opinion below, it's improbable that Cho was himself an Islamic guided terrorist, although perhaps a closet sympathizer.

But either way it certainly sounds as though he took a page out of militant Islam's "lack of personal responsibility" murder-propaganda playbook.

Labels: VA Tech

Jerry Bower wonders if any of us learned anything during Sunday school.

First it was Johnny Muhammad, now it was Cho Sueng Hui aka Ismail Ax. Precisely how many mass shooters have to turn out to have adopted Muslim names before we get it?

...This morning I read that the Virginia Tech shooter died with the name Ismail Ax written in red ink on his arm. The mainstream press doesn't seem to have a clue as to what this might mean. To quote Indiana Jones, "Didn't any of you guys go to Sunday School?"

...In the 7th Century, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, re-wrote the story, claiming that Ismail was the true faithful descendant of Abraham and that it was he, not Isaac, who God told Abraham to sacrifice. Ismail was the one saved. For Muslims, Ismail (not Isaac) was the true 'Son of Sacrifice.' In the original version of the story, Abraham used a knife, in some of the later Muslim versions, he used an Ax.


Flash forward 1,400 years: a sullen, angry young man who rages against rich people and apparently against Christians, writes a play in which a mother and son try to kill his step-father, but in the end the boy (age about 13, the age many think Ismail was when he was exiled) is murdered by the step-father with 'a deadly blow'. Father issues? Yeah, I think so.


Cho Sueng-hui cum Ismail Ax hated the American society to which he had been brought 15 years earlier. His play McBeef (a poor pun from an English Lit major on Macbeth) is one endless screed against the corruption of American culture. A cheesy re-telling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it involves a young man abused by his step-father, a former NFL football player. The son, throws epithets at his father calling him a 'Catholic priest'. And makes derisive comments about McDonalds. It seems that none of the foundational structures of Western Civilization, Christianity, capitalism, family, are spared his rage. In other words, he really meant what he said in his last words: "you (that is us, America) made me do this."

Labels: VA Tech

Just as the passengers of United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, taught all future travelers that the time may come where they must fight back in the face of death, I think the Virginia Tech shootings will serve as a watershed moment for our youth (and even for those in the corporate atmosphere who also are occasionally victims of the crazed gunman) to demonstrate that the rules have changed and in the end one can only rely on themselves to fight for their own life.

True, it is so much easier said than done. I pray I never must know just how much so. But in the face of incomprehensible horror one must summon all their inner courage to even have a chance to survive.

It's nice to see some of the mainstream media understand and relate this notion:

Schools need to teach students to be aggressive
Security analyst tells TODAY how schools should prepare for attacks
By Mike Celizic
TODAYshow.com contributor
TODAY
Updated: 12:05 p.m. ET April 18, 2007

Cowering under a desk and waiting for help to come is no longer an option. American schools must teach their students to respond aggressively to attacks by people bent on mayhem.

"I would hope that the administrators and folks that are making the decisions would understand that it’s difficult to negotiate with a bullet," security consultant Allen Hill told TODAY. "A person that comes into your facility with a gun intends to kill and do you harm."

The founder of Response Options, a Texas-based security company, said, "Get past this paralysis of fear over liability issues. Our country is so litigious and concerned about doing the wrong thing and about doing the politically correct thing that we don’t do anything."

That only helps people like Cho Seung Hui. "The bad guys are counting on Americans to sit still and do nothing," Hill said.

Students and others need to realize that they do have options, Hill said.

The "bad guys" plan their attacks. Schools need to plan and rehearse their defenses and responses just as aggressively.

"The training should be just as intense and be taken just as seriously as the bad guy takes their mission to kill," he said.

At Virginia Tech, Cho Seung Hui walked into classrooms and simply shot people. There are reports that he even lined up victims to shoot them one by one. But in one Norris Hall classroom, student Zach Petkewicz led his classmates in barricading the door, saving all inside.

Petkewicz’ response was instinctive, prompted by "adrenaline and fear."

Hill’s company teaches acting from knowledge and a well-rehearsed plan.

"Once the bad guy’s inside, how hard is it to hit a non-moving target?" Hill observed.

"Get up and move," he advised. "Do whatever it takes to create chaos and mayhem. Disrupt them. Make them go into a protective mode themselves. We feel that we can become actively aggressive for our own benefit, whether that’s actively running out of the classroom, having to face the gunman and take him down, breaking out windows and escaping that way."

You can’t wait for something to happen and then try to form a response, he said. It’s got to be done in advance.

Security systems are passive, he said. But those under attack can be active.

Said Hill: "There are things that you can do to take the initiative away from the bad guy, to disrupt their plan and to create a situation that’s winnable for you."

Labels: self-defense, VA Tech

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Labels: gun control, VA Tech

In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him from carrying a gun on the premises and began shooting people who moments earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.

Fortunately, someone else -- off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth Hammond -- also did not comply with the mall's rules. After hearing "popping" sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire on the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other innocent bystanders from getting hurt. He bought time for the local police to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.

At Virginia Tech's sprawling campus in southwestern Va., the local police arrived at the engineering building a few minutes after the start of the murder spree, and after a few critical minutes, broke through the doors that Cho Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From what we know now, Cho committed suicide when he realized he'd soon be confronted by the police. But by then, 30 people had been murdered.

But let's take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that would have ended the "gun-free zones" in Virginia's public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the General Assembly's action "because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." In an August 2006 editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: "Guns don't belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same."

Actually, Virginia Tech's policy only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns. Virginia Tech's policy bans all guns on campus (except for police and the university's own security guards); even faculty members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.

Virginia Tech thus went out of its way to prevent what happened at a Pearl, Miss., high school in 1997, where assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a handgun from his car and apprehended a school shooter. Or what happened at Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, when a mass murder was stopped by two students with law-enforcement experience, one of whom retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. Or in Edinboro, Pa., a few days after the Pearl event, when a school attack ended after a nearby merchant used a shotgun to force the attacker to desist. Law-abiding citizens routinely defend themselves with firearms. Annually, Americans drive-off home invaders a half-million times, according to a 1997 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Utah, there is no "gun-free schools" exception to the licensed carry law. In K-12 schools and in universities, teachers and other adults can and do legally carry concealed guns. In Utah, there has never been a Columbine-style attack on a school. Nor has there been any of the incidents predicted by self-defense opponents -- such as a teacher drawing a gun on a disrespectful student, or a student stealing a teacher's gun.

Israel uses armed teachers as part of a successful program to deter terrorist attacks on schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are following the Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism.
-- David Kopel, co-author of the law school textbook, "Gun Control and Gun Rights" (NYU Press).

Labels: gun control, VA Tech

[Mark Steyn] They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Point two: The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn’t meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

Labels: gun control, VA Tech

Latest from Michelle Malkin:

As news was breaking about the carnage at Virginia Tech, a reader e-mailed me a news story from last January. State legislators in Virginia had attempted to pass a bill that would have eased handgun restrictions on college campuses. Opposed by outspoken, anti-gun activists and Virginia Tech administrators, that bill failed.

Is it too early to ask: "What if?" What if that bill had passed? What if just one student in one of those classrooms had been in lawful possession of a concealed weapon for the purpose of self-defense?

If it wasn't too early for Keystone Katie Couric to be jumping all over campus security yesterday for what they woulda/coulda/shoulda done in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and if it isn't too early for the New York Times editorial board to be publishing its knee-jerk call for more gun control, it darned well isn't too early for me to raise questions about how the unrepentant anti-gun lobbying of college officials may have put students at risk.

The back story: Virginia Tech had punished a student for bringing a handgun to class last spring—despite the fact that the student had a valid concealed handgun permit. The bill would have barred public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun." After the proposal died in subcommittee, the school's governing board reiterated its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus buildings.

Late last summer, a shooting near campus prompted students to clamor again for loosening campus rules against armed self-defense. Virginia Tech officials turned up their noses. In response to student Bradford Wiles's campus newspaper op-ed piece in support of concealed carry on campus, Virginia Tech associate vice president Larry Hincker scoffed:

"[I]t is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles…The editors of this page must have printed this commentary if for no other reason than malicious compliance. Surely, they scratched their heads saying, 'I can't believe he really wants to say that.' Wiles tells us that he didn't feel safe with the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting him. He even implies that he needed his sidearm to protect himself."

The nerve!

Hincker continued: "The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We've seen that fear here, and we don't want to see it again…Guns don't belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same."

Who's scratching his head now, Mr. Hincker?

Some high-handed commentators insist it's premature or unseemly to examine the impact of school rules discouraging students from carrying arms on campus. Pundit Andrew Sullivan complained that it was "creepy" to highlight reader e-mails calling attention to the Virginia Tech's restrictions on student self-defense—even as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rushed to capitalize on the massacre to sign up new members and gather e-mail addresses for Million Mom March chapters. "We are outraged by the increase in gun violence in America, especially the recent shooting at Virginia Tech," reads the online petition. "Add your name to the growing list of people who are saying 'Enough Is Enough!'"

Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense—mind, spirit, and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.

Labels: gun control, VA Tech

[Chicago Tribune] Calling the fatal shootings "a horrible tragedy for the commonwealth, this community and the nation," Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine this evening angrily denounced gun lobbyists who have said the murders might not have happened if more students were armed.

"People who want to take this 24 hours after the event and make it their political hobbyhorse— I have nothing but loathing,'' he said during a news conference.

Oh really, governor? Does that go for the New York Times as well, who were so eager to push the issue of gun control they didn't even wait until Tuesday morning, instead releasing their Tuesday ban-the-guns editorial a night early, just hours after the shooting?

Does it go for Newsweeks' Howard Fineman, who lamented within 24 hours of the shooting that the state of Virginia's supposed "paper-thin control measures, based primarily on an "instacheck" system [which are] designed to insure that a potential gun purchaser does not have a criminal record"? (Oh, and news flash for Mr. Fineman, Cho Seung-Hui had no such records and acquired the guns legally; but then again I guess guys like Fineman haven't stopped to consider that a person willing to kill 32 people might be willing to acquire a gun illegally, eh?)

My mid-day Monday ABC News' blog, The Blotter, was already pursuing the gun control agenda with the shameless title "Lapse of Federal Law Allows Sale of Large Ammo Clips," that rhetorically questioned if the shooter, unknown at the time, might have used High capacity ammo clips. You'll find no false outrage from Mr. Kaine on that, will you? ABC News further falsely reminded its viewers that due to the Republican Congress, such clips "became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons." It of course implies that the ban prevented the sale of such clips when in fact the bill had only banned the further manufacture of such clips. Regardless, gun aficionados I know have asserted that one can simply carry more clips, which take about a second to reload. It's simply not significant, yet ABC News was willing to anger public opinion with inaccurate facts.

It seems to me the vast majority of those using the shootings to further their "political hobbyhorse" are made of the same political cloth as Virginia's Democrat governor.

Labels: gun control, VA Tech

One of the best and most concise comments made about the horrific shootings at Va Tech came from columnist Michelle Malkin, who stated in a news interview, and this isn't an exact quote, "There is no regulatory answer to the shooting."

Immediately following something like this people tend to overlook the obvious answer, instead preferring process and regulation changes, usually through government enforcement (See: gun control, response times, so on). But the answer is before us the whole time -- someone willing to die in order to kill cannot be stopped by laws or processes.

Along those lines, the below excerpt is by Jack Dunphy, anonymous pen name for an officer in the LAPD, commenting on the knee-jerk reaction to blame the local police:

Let us suppose that the police had indeed shut down the school at 7:30 A.M., just after the first shooting. The Virginia Tech campus has scores of buildings spread across 2,600 acres, and there are 26,000 students enrolled there. There aren't enough police officers in the entire state of Virginia to seal the campus off completely. But even if it had been shut down, then what? How long does it stay shut down, and how do you know when it's safe to open it up? Do you strip search every last person on campus before letting them leave? And if the suspect is contained within one of the buildings, what's to prevent him from killing the people he's contained with?

The rush to blame the school's administration and police is a reflection of a society that believes any and all misfortune can be averted by the proper application of government will. At this very moment, politicians in Richmond, Va., and Washington, D.C., are exerting their tiny brains trying to be the first to propose legislation that will "prevent the next tragedy." The number of laws the killer broke on Monday will probably run to more than 20, but there are those who actually believe he might have been deterred by a few more strokes of a legislative pen. I can't put it any more simply than this: There are evil people in the world, and no amount of laws will make them any less so.
Truth is, every day there are crimes of passion where a disturbed and sick soul murders their ex-lover but do not then go on rampages, murdering strangers. Monday, at 7:30 A.M. in Blacksburg, there was no reason for local authorities to suspect that the murderer of Emily Jane Hilscher and Ryan Clark intended to kill another 30 people two hours later at a facility across the campus. There was no reason to suspect that Cho Seung-Hui had not done what other criminals of passion do every week across America.

Labels: gun control, VA Tech

Labels: gun control, VA Tech