My post from yesterday, Politicizing Tragedy, is drawing a great deal of comment at the Forum. Gun control, not surprisingly, is at the forefront. Meanwhile, Blog of the Week Or Two Armavirumque notes that Europeans have fingered an unlikely suspect in the Virginia Tech murders:
If you are a sophisticated European, you see things in a more nuanced, complex way. Sub specie Europae Mr. Seung-Hui is not only, or maybe not even, the person responsible; he is also a victim of, of . . . Well, of American society for one thing. It seems almost too good to be true, but it is true: Spiegel has the European scoop on who really killed those poor people in Virginia. Maybe Mr. Seung-Hui pulled the trigger, but perhaps the person more deeply responsible is . . . Charlton Heston.
Glenn Reynolds offers what strikes me as a saner perspective in the New York Daily News:
If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.
In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school’s vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In February’s Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.
Police can’t be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it’s usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they’re armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.
By the way, speaking of the Forum, both the Forum and Power Line News have been experiencing slow load times of late. Through the technical genius of Joe Malchow, some issues in the sites’ coding have been corrected, and they both are much snappier now. So if you’ve been deterred by slow loads, please give them another try.
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