Tragedy

[Jean Lansford]

> M Holmes wrote:
>
> I checked on the web. The students are victims of the federal law which
> makes illegal any gun-carry in educational institutions. It's hardly
> surprising that the nutters pick on these places when the legislation
> guarantees them Safety At Work.

Far more likely that there was some specific grudge against someone on campus or perhaps the university as a whole. The gunman's first target in the room we have the most information about was the professor. Whether because he thought the professor more likely to fight back or for some personal reason, we may never know. The same things are now being said of Cho that were said of the Columbine kids in the first few hours: a loner who no one knows much about despite being a senior.

Almost all of the school shootings in the US have been by students. Of the ones I can recall that weren't, one was a teacher's ex-boyfriend/stalker who started shooting randomly when he couldn't find his intended target, the Nickel Mines shooting was, as far as we know, a grudge shooting, and one was a pedophile who took several high schools girls hostage.

> Compare and contrast with that mall where the would be spree-killer was
> shot at (and possibly shot) by an out-of-state cop exercising his
> concealed-carry rights. The folks who penned and voted for that law have
> blood on their hands too.

The odds that a person with sufficient training to react sensibly would be on a campus like VT are vanishingly small. A military veteran is more likely than a cop or former cop, but veteran's college benefits aren't as good as they once were, and they're tending to community colleges more than universities these days. (My classmates during my recent time in a community college included an ex-Marine and two bounty hunters looking to switch to safer work. I pity anyone who tries to cause trouble around them.) We've now heard of two classrooms that tried to bar the doors with varying degrees of success; that's better than I expected, frankly.

I doubt this will have much effect on gun laws. More money will be poured into enforcing the existing laws, maybe, but there won't be an expansion of concealed carry laws unless there's another charismatic Rambo wannabe (like the chick in Killeen) who can convince lawmakers that he would have saved them all if he'd only had a gun. It'll be a harder sell on the East Coast, though. I was surprised to learn that the shooter was a resident alien. They're not allowed to buy guns here in NC unless something has changed in the past few years, but at least one of the VT guns appears to have been legally purchased.