After saying this:
I heard a spokesman from the National Gun Owners Association say yesterday that if people were allowed to carry concealed weapons wherever they went, it would serve as a deterrent to shooters.
Of course in this situation, the person ultimately turned the gun on himself… so someone please tell me why that argument isn’t complete and utter bullshit?
Hmm, I may only have the chance to take out a few people before somebody takes me out… guess I’ll join a quilting bee instead.
22 Responses to “now i’m really done with It”
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I think there’s actually a grain (no pun intended) of truth to that, but it’s so overwhelmed by other considerations that it’s almost not worth talking about.
I went looking for South Korean news coverage today. The cultural slant is striking:
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/
I’m with you. I don’t know what the answer is. There are so many guns readily available that even tighter gun controls aren’t likely to help much. I wish we’d never interpreted the right to bear arms so liberally 200 years ago.
The last time I checked, a legal handgun owner was 6 times more likely to have his or her gun stolen and used in a crime than they were to successfully use the gun to protect themselves or others.
The idea that a society where one must always be on one’s guard for whether everyone else is packing is admirable is just nuts.
The interesting thing is that the Supreme Court has NEVER interpreted the Second Amendment to support private gun ownership for private use. Other courts have, but not the S.C.
Further, Scotland once had very open laws regarding gun ownership, allowing many to own weapons…and then a violent shooting at a grade school changed the hearts and minds of the people. Handguns are now banned. I’m not saying that we could ever completely eliminate guns, or even handguns…but increased regulation–and as some countries have found, punitive taxation and regulation of bullets and bullet-making materials–would surely make it more difficult for disturbed folks like this tragic young man from doing what he did.
But more than anything, the rhetoric of the gun lobby needs to be challenged.
Just my two cents.
HELL NO!
Imagine the feeling of being on a campus of 30,000 people and knowing that all of them have concealed handguns. Would you feel safer? I don’t think so!
Keith there is no shred of truth in it. As RM said it’s bullshit!
Not Shy wrote”Further, Scotland once had very open laws regarding gun ownership, allowing many to own weapons…and then a violent shooting at a grade school changed the hearts and minds of the people. Handguns are now banned.”
Not sure where you got your info but it makes it sound like that before Dunblane private gunownership was common. It wasn’t . In Scotland almost no-one has had a gun in their private possession in living memory. (The exception is that there are hunting guns for farmers and the shooting bridage( the wealthy landowners who mostly go to Scotland to shoot pheasant in August) but these too must be strictly accounted for.)
In the UK people don’t bear arms, even the police aren’t usually armed. The tightening of the law was about those pistols used in shooting clubs, they are now not stored at home but only in the pistol range (or whatever it is)
Dunblane was a tragedy that the Scots don’t ever want to see repeated. In England most people cannot get a gun even for self defence. But there are illegal guns of course … mostly used in gang “wars”
Also, I highly encourage you all to check out this essay written by Jackson Katz.
http://www.jacksonkatz.com/pub_coverage.html
Concealed handguns *might* deter someone intent on committing a crime and getting away with it with his or her life intact.
But people who are making the “deterrent argument” in the midst of this recent mass murder/SUICIDE come out looking like cheap thugs.
They need to shut the hell up.
The guy yesterday was saying that concealed weapons are legal in his home state of New Hampshire, and the crime rate is low there, as opposed to places like New York, Washington, and LA, which ban handguns.
Yes. Because the ONLY difference between Conway, New Hampshire and Washington DC is the presence of guns.
What.
A Complete.
Jackass.
Thanks, Lukee, for calling my attention to something that I have not heard named in the media about the massacre- it all began as an act of domestic violence, an attack on an ex-girlfriend. The whole thing is so utterly evil.
The guns must go. Isn’t there a case about private handgun ownership slated to come before the Supreme Court soon?
For the record, while I support gun control, the GC advocates I’ve heard the last few days come out sounding heartbreakingly naive.
It’s guns. It’s treatment for the mentally ill. It’s the fragmentation of our community such that people become “loners” (in the unhealthy way) right under our noses. It’s violence against women. It’s EVERYTHING. But we’re not very good at EVERYTHING, are we? We’re good at platitudes and stereotyping.
Like QG, I honestly don’t know what to do. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
Lorna,
Sorry if I had my info wrong. I didn’t mean to insinuate that gun ownership was nearly as common as in the US, but my understanding is that the laws in Scotland were more open until Dunblane and that the increased regulations following the Dunblane massacre have actually worked when many (admittedly in the states) said they wouldn’t.
Keith…I appreciate your awareness of the Korean perspective on this tragedy. My husband is half Korean. He was on the phone all Monday evening with his father (Korean American). The Korean “rumor mill” already knew that the shooter was Korean before the news and/or police announced it. And there is real fear that there will be backlash discrimination.
I was very moved last night to see on a local station (I believe) the coverage of a Korean Congregation that met last night for a prayer vigil. Korean men and women openly weeping for the tragedy.
I am “SO OVER” the heavy presence of guns in our country. I know the problem is very complex but MY GOD when are we going to wake up?
Deterrence? What world do they live in?
While I really, really wish that everyone agreed with my solutions to the world’s problems, reality is that they do not.
I hate guns. I don’t see how allowing students to carry concealed weapons could prevent this.
But, I do know that many of the people who believe that carrying concealed weapons is *good* are operating from the same desire that I am: They are good humans, loving humans and they want a safe world for themselves and their children. They are crying inside just like I am. They truly believe that what they are proposing is a.good.thing. and would make the world safe.
What I see as the big difference between my feelings on guns and their feelings on guns is also the difference between my feelings about whether or not there are intrinsically evil persons in the world and what should be done about it if there are.
Kelley, thanks. I was very interested in the family angle, as well as shaking my head a little about fears of backlash. Americans can’t tell Asian ethnicities apart well enough to foment any kind of backlash–and I don’t think there’s enough of a simmering anti-Asian sentiment in the country to motivate it anyway. If he’d been Pakistani, I’d be worried about my local Sikh population, just because of Middle-Eastern fears and the fact that there are turbans involved. But Asian? I don’t think the Koreans quoted in the paper understand the racial dynamics here.
Or I could be wrong.
Lorna, insisting there’s no shred of truth doesn’t make it so. If anyone, ever, would be deterred by the knowledge that they’d be walking into a room full of armed people, there’s your shred. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that would never happen.
You seem to be ignoring the rest of what I said, which is that that shred is so overwhelmed by other considerations that it’s almost not worth talking about.
I’m left-leaning and in favor of anything that would keep guns out of the hands of the psychotic. But let’s not refuse to acknowledge reality just because we’re mad and hurt.
I agree with RM, though I’d phrase it less kindly: Gun control advocates often sound like children yelling about fairness. They make a lot of sense as long as you ignore the actual world. An armed victim is less attractive, and no one can reasonably claim otherwise.
Let’s also not pretend that if legal guns hadn’t been available, this sociopath wouldn’t have found illegal ones with slightly more effort and much, much less expense.
Easy availability of guns to psychos: Bad.
Banning all access to all guns: Not realistic or even attractive, and I’ll give just one example. A few years ago, I spent a few days in an Eskimo village in Alaska. No cars, no streets, and the only way to get there in the winter is by snowmobile or bush plane. Hunting is like going to the grocery store: You might buy a dozen eggs and a gallon of milk the same day you go out, kill an elk, and drag it back to town on your snowmobile.
Ban those guns?
No, only die-hard vegetarians and anti-gun people could muster that kind of argument, and their view is not as important as the locals’ in this case.
So the question isn’t whether to ban guns, but which guns, under which circumstances, and by what means. However, people don’t have the capacity or patience for that. They want slogans.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that we hate to admit - nothing is going to stop someone who is willing to die in the act of inflicting as much pain as possible. There is only one way to stop someone like that - kill them. Capture them and put them in prison and they will be a threat to the people who can’t get away from them - including the unarmed guards that provide for their families by keeping inmates secure.
However, there is no other method of killing, short of bombing, that would have allowed one person to create so much carnage. There is an inescapable fact that rapid fire guns played an important part in the killer’s ability to inflict pain and death.
I work in universities. I go unarmed. I hope my students are unarmed. It would be impossible for campus security to get word to me by any means other than sending a messenger to the room and telling me. There is no way that anyone in my classroom would take serious the threat from a shooting on the other side of a campus. None. Everything that was done by campus police was proper, from what I can tell.
I also grew up handling guns. I first went hunting when I was maybe eight or nine. I learned: 1) You only point a gun at what you want to shoot; 2) You shoot something until it’s dead; 3) You eat whatever you shoot. I love guns. They are beautiful machines. They can equalize you against any attacker, man or beast - and there are still places where that is a legitimate threat and there is no chance to call for peace officers.
But I live in Jersey City. I would never own a gun here. Any threat to me or mine can be handled quickly with a 911 call. There’s no need. None. A gun isn’t a toy. It’s a weapon. You don’t keep weapons when they aren’t needed. It’s wrong to do so. Morally. Ethically. In every way I can imagine.
Giving more people guns won’t make us safer. It will mean more people get hit by stray bullets. It will mean every single criminal will carry deadly force instead of the minority that does now. It means more people will be injured by accidental discharges (a Sec. Service officer was recently injured accidently at the White House - it happens).
There is no answer because the problem is that such actions are taken by people for whom any amount of laws will not matter. Yes, our society is sick and it produces such people - but it is also the responsibility of a person who is that sick to get help. If you are fantasizing about killing people, you need help. There’s no question about that.
I know this is disjointed. I’ll likely post at my own site about this soon. Obviously I haven’t been able to collect my thoughts sufficiently.
Who says she was his girlfriend? The campus police made a wrong assumption that it was a “domestic” crime and questioned the boy she dated from another school. They were still questioning him when the Norris Hall shootings took place.
This morning’s paper said that a different guy was first victim’s BF, but he was (it seems wrongly) arrested early on which is why administrators thought all was okay. But anyway . . .
Perhaps several gun owners, carrying guns at the time, will have to be victims of a gun crime - or something - for us to wake up. It was humiliating listening to the BBC talk about our gun culture last night.
I’ve been around far too many people who have misplaced everything from cell-phones, to keys, to their wallet. We definitely don’t need to add handguns to this list.
XT, I think you’ve collected your thoughts very well. The only thing you didn’t do was lay out a simple solution–but that’s because there’s not one.
I might own a gun if I had more free time and didn’t live someplace where it’s such a pain to get one, because I really love target shooting. But I wouldn’t keep it in my home–it would stay in a locker at the range.
I’d like to hear a solution that would actually improve the situation, AND that had a chance of being enacted. I don’t claim to have one, but I think one exists. Maybe the community needs a chance to object to each gun purchase in a public forum. I don’t know.
If more and more people had guns, I feel that the chances of people “losing it” and “using it” would be much greater than any detterent.
Not sure if that makes since, but I do feel that if more people had weapons, more people would use weapons in ways that are other than “self defense”.
Handguns are too easy. When I worked for the PD in Texas, I went with an officer to the shooting range and actually fired a few rounds at targets. I knew at that moment I would never, ever want to own a handgun.
I understand the whole hunting thing with rifles, although I’d never kill Bambi or Bambi’s mother, but a handgun is good for nothing but killing people.
And now the shooter at VT is claiming similarity to dying like Jesus Christ…another can of worms opened!
@mamala: too easy indeed.
I’m with Lukee on the point that I sure as hell would’nt want to be walking across a college campus where all the students could be carrying guns freely.
That was a very wise comment indeed.
I am from the area of much suffering this week. Xpatriated Texan made several excellent points of observation. The administration did what they knew to do as soon as they could. In a time of panic such as what was taking place on our Virginia Tech. campus, everyone made the quickest and best decisions they could.
This 23 year old was practically screaming through the years, “Look at me dammit. I am in trouble, and I am your worst nightmare.” However, he was also a creative writer and an English major. Like many creative writers his age, his writing were indeed bizarre to say the least, but he had never acted on anything he had written until the fateful day of April 16th.
I feel most everyone involved with the university is asking themseves, “what, if anything could I have done to help him, or to save others from him?” It is truely so very sad. So much suffering and anguish.
“The Right To Bare Arms”–God, I just don’t know what to think anymore.