Reflecting on Virginia Tech

Amazingly enough, I had just turned my focus to firearms a few days ago with my posting about self-defense. Now we are suddenly in the midst of another national gun control debate over the murders at Virginia Tech. As I watched the cable news shows that night struggling to fill the time with interviews of people who had no actual knowledge or connection to the incident, it was clear that the focus was once again placing the blame on guns and the government. After spending quite some time reading through the internet media coverage as well as a number of Blog discussions, it is now confirmed that is exactly where this is going. The stories range from blaming President Bush and the Republican Party as well as the National Rifle Association all the way to blaming the guns themselves. We’ve been here before and the American society didn’t learn anything the last time either. The focus always turns away from blaming the murderer to blaming the government and the inanimate mechanical device.

The headlines are all using “Deadliest Day”, “Bloodbath”, “Shooting Spree”, “Rampage”, and similarly charged descriptions to label the wounding of 14 and murder of 32 unarmed, innocent, young adults at this college campus. The incident concluded with the murderer taking the cowardly way out by committing suicide. If only he had done that act first, none of us would have even heard about it. Not that I want to belittle these deaths, but on this same day there were about 119 people killed in automobile accidents in the United States, based on DOT statistics. Of course, that happens every day, so we turn a blind eye to that form of bloodbath on our country’s streets.

But let’s lay out a few things that appear to be factual at the moment, remembering that we are very early in the investigation and information is subject to change. We have a young man going to college that has no criminal record. He legally purchased a firearm over a month ago and another one at least two months ago. Of course he passed the background check and there was nothing that would have raised suspicion. In fact, I would argue that at the time of the purchase, he may not have had any intention of committing murder. Since he is dead, we will never know. But if he did make the purchase knowing that he was going to be a murderer, then there is nothing that could have stopped him. From all accounts he would be a cold and calculating criminal that carefully planned this thing and had the patience to set it up over a period of time. Given that, if he were not able to walk into a gun shop and legally purchase a firearm, he probably would have obtained one illegally through black market or theft. In the absence of firearms, he has a variety of other weapons to choose from including explosives or even edged weapons. Did we forget that it was the use of small razor knives that ultimately resulted in the death of nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001?

The event at Virginia Tech is nothing short of domestic Terrorism. Like other large scale attacks on the easy prey of schools and churches in recent years, this too will serve to terrorize the entire nation. The extremists on the Left will distribute their talking points and develop the catch phrases needed to mobilize the masses and pressure the government to “do something”. Of course there is nothing the government can do, but there will be a hand full of knee-jerk laws proposed, always forgetting that laws are only followed by the honest people leaving them at a greater disadvantage against the criminals, who by their very nature don’t care a lick about what new laws are made.

In referring back to my last article on self defense, it is very important to understand that even a single properly prepared and armed citizen in the area could have stopped this murderer in the early stages of the event and saved many lives. However, this school is a “Gun Free” zone, meaning that law-abiding victims are prohibited from being armed while on campus. Criminals love these “Gun Free” zones because they know their victims will not have the means to defend themselves. The one thing that violent criminals fear is a victim who fights back. Virginia has a concealed carry law; however schools are one of the places that the good people are specifically prohibited from carrying. In one article I read, this school boasts that it has caught eight people with firearms on the campus over the last few years. All of them were otherwise legally carried and by all accounts the owners had no intention of doing harm, but were simply exercising their right to bear arms for self defense under Virginia law. Maybe if one of those folks had been in the building, this guy wouldn’t have made it to such a high body count.

Now I have read and heard comments from a number of pro-gun folks who claim that any person with a gun could have stopped this, but I have to disagree somewhat. Only a person who is mentally and physically prepared to risk their own life in the face of evil would have stood a chance here. I am comfortable in saying this because of the number of deaths involved. Statistically, only about 15% of the people shot with a handgun actually die. The 9mm is a rather poor performing handgun round and I would have expected a much lower number of deaths and higher number of injuries from an untrained shooter. His second gun is reported to be a .22 rim fire, which is the worst choice for use against another human. Given the high death rate here, this guy achieved exceptional performance, which leads me to think he has spent some time training how to use the gun effectively against a human target. We also do not know what kind of ammunition he was using. If he was using some +P loads and a bullet with good “stopping power” like several of the available law enforcement or self defense ammunitions, this would increase the damage done by the bullet. The typical round nose full-metal jacketed target bullet would not have performed well outside of close range head shots or multiple upper chest hits. The report from the gun shop is that he bought only one box of “training” ammo. Most likely he used that for training and obtained other ammo for doing his murdering, but I am of course wildly speculating on this.

All this means is that this murderer planned ahead and was both mentally and physically prepared to kill many people. He obviously aimed and was accurate with most of the shots he fired. Since he waited over two hours between the initial shooting and the follow up mass attack, he would have had time to calm down from the first incident and finalize his plan for the second attack. He was probably not over-excited or panicked and since he had already taken two lives and was now planning on taking his own, he was in a mental state that could be compared to that of a professional athlete as he takes the field focused and mentally invincible. Someone reacting to deadly force will have to deal with the body’s fight or flight mechanism which dumps a lot of adrenaline into the system. A typical young adult in a quiet learning environment suddenly faced with this situation would be lucky to hit the broad side of a barn with a handgun in reaction, unless they were well-trained. The bottom line is that if you want to defend yourself, you must prepare for it ahead of time, and the mental aspect cannot be overemphasized.

I fully expect the folks at Handgun Control, Inc and other Leftists to try and pin this on the expiration of the 94 Clinton Gun Ban and the failure of Bush to renew it. Everything is blamed on Bush, from the weather to your personal health, none of which is in his control. Fact is, that gun ban had no effect on crime, before, during, or after its existence. The guns used in the Virginia Tech shooting were not part of that law. They are going to try to argue the magazine capacity issue again, as magazines were restricted to 10 rounds under that law. The Glock 19 reportedly used in this case has a standard capacity of 15 rounds, but we don’t know what kind of magazines he was using. This is all pretty much meaningless when the shooter is going after unarmed victims. I can teach a non-shooter in a matter of minutes to perform magazine changes on a Glock pistol in less than 6 seconds. With some dedicated practice, most people can get this time down to under 3 seconds quite easily. A pocket full of 10 round magazines in the right hands has just as much firepower as a pocket full of 15 round magazines. It’s not the gun or the magazines that are to blame for the number of deaths here.

Who is to blame? The murderer, of course. Could this have been prevented? Maybe. There are already reports from teachers that they have raised “red flags” with this student over the last couple years. Concerns were reported up the chain, but nothing significant was done. From these early reports, it sounds like there was adequate concern that this student was troubled and possibly violent. According to a couple of his prior roommates, he was also known to obsessively stalk several women at the college. Yet little, if anything, was done to fully identify and correct his developing problems. What we have here is the classic Catch 22. If you single him out before he does anything criminal, you are violating his civil rights. If you wait until you have firm evidence that he needs mental help, you have dead people. It is a clash between two huge lobby powers in this country with those who really need help stuck in the middle and the innocents in close proximity are being killed.

On one side, there is the people’s right to bear arms. This is a very important right that is one of the roots of a free society. History has proven time and again that when the people are disarmed, crime increases, and the government becomes corrupt and the people become subjects and lose many more freedoms in the process. America has millions of firearms in private possession. It is quite impossible to remove them from circulation. Imposing new laws will only affect the law abiding people and will have no impact on the criminal possession. Removing guns from all the good people only increases the number of unarmed victims for the evil people to prey upon.

The other power here is the civil rights and privacy advocates. This camp generally feels that the individual is more important than the masses. One person claims to be offended over a Christmas display, so everyone else’s right to view it is removed. One person is offended that they were searched at the airport because they are a young Islamic male of Middle Eastern decent, so we must search little old ladies instead and let these guys through uninhibited. And this includes the reciprocal; one self-proclaimed artist makes a sick and twisted pornographic sculpture and the rest of society is forced to view it and pay for it with a government grant. One guy has a perverted sexuality and the rest of us are forced to accept it as normal and allow him to openly display it. The list of examples goes on and on, but the common thread is on the individual over the society and it is forced upon all of us through litigation.

If you have a troubled individual, such as our murderer at Virginia Tech, that was identified as such by many individuals over a period of years, you would think we might want to single out this person and get them some psychological help. If they are confirmed as having a mental health issue, then it should be mandatory that treatment is received. With the new national background database in place and operational for screening firearms purchases, why would we not want to add the ability to deny purchase to folks with confirmed mental health issues? This guy could have been on such a list for at least two years, and could have been going through counseling during that time. Perhaps he could have been successfully treated prior to the point where he snapped and took it upon himself to kill a bunch of people.

The problem is, when you single out someone like that, these civil rights and privacy groups jump up and down about profiling or violation of rights. But, every time we have a workplace violence incident involving an individual taking out a bunch of co-workers or classmates in this fashion, there are always people who knew that there was something wrong with that person. But we never do anything to be proactive in getting these people the help they need before they do something violent. Those who coward out with suicide leave us with many unanswered questions, but those who snapped, murdered, and were caught are usually found to have serious mental health problems and are sent to mental institutions instead of prison. But, try to send someone in for mental problems before they have actually killed a bunch of people and you have a hoard of greasy criminal lawyers flocking in to get these psychos released back into society. This is the problem that the media and the politicians need to be working on. But this is a very complicated issue that is hard to solve, and our government officials are too lazy and frightened to take it on. After all, they have a mansion and tropical vacations to pay for and if they take the high road on such issues, they may end up losing their jobs in the next election, right?

Do we need to blame the college administration and the police for not shutting down the campus following the first shooting that morning? Well, let’s think back to all the times where there has been an apparent domestic shooting that is followed by the murderer going on a “search and destroy” mission afterward. I can’t think of a single one, and Google can’t find one either. So, while you sit there and Monday morning quarterback the police and school’s reaction to an isolated domestic shooting, try not to forget that no one, anywhere, had any reason to believe that they still had a murderer on the loose on campus. In fact, as is the standard reaction of the police these days, they assumed that it was the boyfriend of the first murdered girl who did it and they successfully hunted him down and had taken him into custody for questioning prior to the second wave of murders. Only after the fact do we know that they were on the wrong trail, but there is no way the police or the school could have known this at the time. No one saw the actual suspect at or leaving the scene of the first murders, so no one would have even had the thought to look for him.

In the coming days and weeks, expect a lot of knee-jerk over-reaction in our schools and colleges nation wide. This is why I call this domestic terrorism. Fear and panic will overtake the public. People who cannot deal with the fear will actually leave school. We are already seeing reports of people leaving Virginia Tech. This is the wrong response to this incident. The best thing you can do is buck up and face your fears. Talk things over with friends, family, and if need be, with counselors and psychologists. Then take some action to put your own personal safety back in your own hands by learning what to do during a violent encounter. Take a physical self-defense class. Take a martial arts class. If it suits you, go learn how to use a firearm. As I’ve said before, carrying a gun is not for everyone, but if you have the desire and are willing to learn the skill, by all means, go do it. Honor the memory of the lives that were taken from us by being a good person and vowing to do your part to stop the evil amongst us.

God Speed Virginia Tech.