Since drug-abuse IS currently outlawed in the U.S., then all those who abuse drugs are, from a technical standpoint, doing so illegally.

The only comparison I could make between guns and drugs, is to say that, regardless of the legal status of a chemical substance, a determined addict will always find access to it.

Similarly, a gun ban will do nothing to stop a determined killer whose aim is to shoot someone.

Show me a person dumb enough to buy into the arguments for gun control (the hard-core, gun-banning variety – background checks and waiting periods are another discussion for another day)…

Disarming prisoners and kids who want to own guns against their parents’ wishes is just common sense. I’m not too keen on the Hughes Amendment, but like background checks and waiting periods, that’s another discussion for another day. Then again, the original post was from five days ago, so I guess today is another day…

Are you defining gun control advocates to be those opposed to any form of restriction on gun ownership and usage?

If so, I must be retarded as I would prefer to not see prisoners having access to guns, nor do I wish for my pre-teen daughter to be able to buy a gun without my approval, nor do I think it a terrible idea that the general populations doesn’t have ready access to machine guns.

And, fwiw, for me, the issue for Va Tech is not that they declared themselves to be ‘gun free’, it is that they did absolutely nothing to make sure that was the case. If they were serious about keeping their students safe from guns, they would have had metal detectors at all entrances to campus, dorms and classrooms, they would have conducted random searches of dorm rooms, backpacks and cars parked in campus parking lots, and so on… and they would have brushed aside any and all privacy concerns in the process. Maybe they would have caught or deterred the killer, maybe not, but in giving only lip service to the concept of having the campus being gun free, they did a big disservice to their students.

First, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of the Vtch students would have been packing heat at the time of the shootings?

No, but it doesn’t take more than a tiny fraction to take down one shooter. All it takes is one.

My guess is that the Vtech shooting would have gone down the same way absent the legislation. In fact, it would have really sucked to be somebody who did happen to bring their gun to school that day, but was a few buildings away. What would you do in that situation?

Probably the same thing that kids a few buildings away did without guns, which is nothing, except that I might have stood guard near a doorway in case Cho entered my building next. Taking him down in the building where he was would have been the job of the rare (but hopefully not nonexistent) armed student or professor in his building. The ex-Israeli Holocaust survivor would have been a better than average bet. He is a dead hero without a gun, but probably would be a live hero today if he had had one.

When you think about it, arming citizens isn’t really a sure-fire solution to rampaging campus shooters.

There are no “sure-fire” solutions to anything. Allowing law-abiding students who qualify for a concealed carry permit to carry on campus would not have guaranteed that anyone would have stopped Cho, but not allowing anyone but Cho to be armed pretty well did guarantee the opposite result. The most likely scenario, if the law had passed, would have been for last week’s incident to go down more or less like the Appalachian Law School incident did – 2 or 3 innocent deaths before the killer was stopped in his tracks by an armed student or teacher. No one would be celebrating the result, but it sure as hell would have been better than what did happen instead.

First, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of the Vtch students would have been packing heat at the time of the shootings? In theory, large numbers of sane, law-abiding citizens carrying guns would be able to fight crimes in progress. But how many would there really be. I do think that the possibility that any law abiding citizen COULD be packing heat also probably deters violent crime by making it more risky, but that’s a bit different than predicting the success rate of actual citizen crime-fighters.

The fact that VTech was a “gun-free zone” doesn’t mean that there were very many people itching to carry guns, but leaving them at home because the signs told them to. If more than 1 percent of the Vtech students had a handgun that they would take to class with them if allowed, then perhaps there was a chance Cho would have been brought down before he was done — but do we know that? How many students bring guns to class on a regular basis *even in non gun-free zones*?

My guess is that the Vtech shooting would have gone down the same way absent the legislation. In fact, it would have really sucked to be somebody who did happen to bring their gun to school that day, but was a few buildings away. What would you do in that situation?

Think about it: You brought a gun to school that day, and you hear gunfire crackling in the next building. You know there’s a shooter. You also know that SWAT teams are descending on campus in an angry swarm. Do you attempt to find and shoot the shooter, and then convince the police that you’re the sane one — you just killed the real bad guy? Or do you live the rest of your life wondering what you could have done if you’d just had the guts?

What if there are more than one of you, in different buildings, and you both decide to go after the shooter. You run in the direction of the gunfire, and see each other, each carrying guns. Do you shoot? The other guy has a handgun, but is he the shooter, or just another John Wayne, like you? How do you know?

Worse yet, what if some John Wayne comes in just on time to see YOU shoot the shooter? Does he start asking you questions about whether you’re a good guy, or does he just pop a cap in you? We could end up with an interesting “Reservoir Dogs” type of scenario.

When you think about it, arming citizens isn’t really a sure-fire solution to rampaging campus shooters. It’s nice to think that we might have had another chance to kill this guy, before he shot himself, but we might just have added to the body count, and piled accidental tragedy on top of the intentional tragedy.

Again, that’s not to say that I think it’s better to ban all guns; just that I wouldn’t feel much safer from the (extremely rare, as in much more than lightning-strike rare) people like Cho if I knew that, say, five percent of my fellow students were packing heat. I’d be more worried about accidental discharge, crossfire, misidentification, etc.

Geeze — put that way it sounds like a feature, not a bug.