Comments (15)

• Dennis

  “It resolves some serious problems in terms of preventing the wrong people from getting firearms,”

  Why not extend this reasoning to politicians and government employees, many, if not most, of whom revel in stealing and compromising the economic and civil liberties of others, all backed up by the point of a gun. Furthermore, governments are by far the biggest mass murderers of their own citizens, not to mention the citizens of other countries.

  Published: April 21, 2007 2:49 PM

• kurtbattais

  So why not let universities dispel from their premises anyone who in the past has been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility? It wouldn't surprise me if there were actually some state or federal law that does not allow for this.

  Published: April 21, 2007 3:21 PM

• W Baker

  @kurtbattais

  "So why not let universities dispel from their premises anyone who in the past has been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility?"

  In my experience this policy would preclude a small, but significant, proportion of the faculty! No joke...!

  Published: April 21, 2007 7:29 PM

• MikeE

  The fact that he shot someone shows he has contempt for the law in itself. Any murderer or violent criminal isn't abiding by natural laws, let alone criminal laws - gun laws aren't going to make this any difference.

  Hence why gun control doesn't work.

  Published: April 22, 2007 2:09 AM

• TLWP Sam

  This reminds me of the joke of:

  "Do you know where you were when the murder took place"?

  "No I don't Your Honour".

  "Do you know what the penalty for perjury is"?

  "Yes Your Honour and it's all lot better than the penalty for murder"!

  Published: April 22, 2007 3:32 AM

• Keith

  "So why not let universities dispel from their premises anyone who in the past has been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility? It wouldn't surprise me if there were actually some state or federal law that does not allow for this."

  This, along with the "horror" that the school wasn't allowed to "even tell the parents", are some of the stupidest things I think I've heard since the VA Tech event (and you could put the need for more gun control in there too). I wonder how many of the "why didn't they tell the parents" crowd are against the laws that require parents be notified of pregnancies/abortions? The killer was an adult!

  How long until we criminalize mental illness? Don't get me wrong, I opposs the idea of mental illness as a defense for criminal activity, but that isn't what we're talking about. They want to make mental illness virtually illegal. Who decides who is "mentally defective"? (I love that term!) What fine bureaucrat gets that duty? Can you tell which ones will snap and begin killing and which ones won't? What will be the incentive to even decide? If we really want to be safe, we'll just have to declare all of them a threat. It will be easy. We can start with pharmacy records. Whose ever gotten a prescription for prosac, zoloft, xanax, etc., gets flagged and is required to come in for a little interview. How about all teachers being required to report any student exhibiting "strange" behavior. You know, loners, quit or shy, bad attitude, wierd cloths, whatever. We need to identify these people early you know. What about muslims, jews, athiests, homosexuals, socialists, capitalists, etc.? Come on, we've done it in the past (blacks, japanese, communists, etc.), so why not now?

  We can't wait around for these people to actually do something bad. We need to act before it happens. What are we waiting for?

  Published: April 22, 2007 9:52 AM

• D. Saul Weiner

  Here is an excerpt of an article by Dr. Peter Breggin, a critic of psychiatric drugs:

  "The violence unleashed on the Virginia Tech campus should not lead to calls for more mental health screening, more mental health interventions, or more drugs. Instead, the violent rampage should confirm that psychiatric interventions don't prevent violence and instead they can cause it. Early on, Cho should have been confronted by the police and by university administrators with the reality that his behavior was unacceptable and he should have been suspended. In other words, he should have been treated as a criminal who was stalking women, and as an obviously threatening individual, not as a potential mental patient. These measures might have confronted him with sufficient reality to nip his violence in the bud and more certainly would have removed him from the circumstances that the he found intolerably stimulating, while also removing him from so many targets of opportunity."

  The whole article can be found at:

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/the-real-mental-health-l_b_46327.html

  Published: April 22, 2007 10:12 AM

• Steven Smith

  Fascinating how the spectacularly violent actions of at least 1--initial reports cited an armed duo--severely disturbed man are being used by the elite run mass propaganda media & rapacious opportunistic governments at all levels in America to push several agendas: 1, of course universal civilian gun control, prohibition & even confiscation; 2, what veteran anti-communist Kenneth Goff back in the late 1940s called psycho-politics & the communistic mental health racket; 3, more explicitly police statist unitary security meant to serve regime not civil-popular interest & 4, subjection of the entire over whelmingly sane, respectable, law abiding & productive populace to these measures absent any logical, rational, reasonable or other wise justifiable basis of suspicion, far less solid grounds of legal complaint by even a single putative prospective victim.

  The airy dismissal by all but a hard core of old rightists of conspiracist hypotheses about events such as the Virginia Polytechnic Institute massacre gives a free pass to the real perpetrators: the intelligence community, military-industrial complex, allopathic drug cartels, communistic mental health racket, any other institution with a vested interest in a nascent domestic police state & all the lemming like people who parrot the elites' exculpatory line that practically paranoid vocal negativists such as myself constrain them to plot tyranny because I & my fellows in re-action have spent several generations poisoning the well of public discourse by accusing them of plotting tyranny.

  If Ronald Reagan could be, as documented, authenticated & proved to the satisfaction of myself & at least a trace of perceptive Americans to have been a LIFE LONG communist by intrepid investigators Myron Fagan, Kent Steffgen & Alan Stang & STILL manage to fool enough people after 1950 he had abandoned hard leftism for hard rightism sufficiently well to become first, governor of California in 1967 as a start to 2 full terms & implement a fabian socialist agenda that included state income tax with-holding THEN in the teeth of what the California Republican Assembly, the most arch conservative state wide Republican party organization, published on him in 1975 just after his gubenatorial exauguration become in 1981 president as a start to 2 full terms & implement an explicitly communist agenda apparently only I, Alan Stang & Charlotte Iserbyt can see without having it described in detail by some one else, I dare NOT doubt the VPI massacre was a government black operation meant to meet several inter-locked elite aims. I expect to persuade no one as I got absolutely no reply from any LewRockwell.com writer who posted on Reagan's legacy when I e-mailed him on Reagan's verifiable subversion.

  Bottom line: there is no place in a constitutional republic for a military-industrial complex, allopathic drug cartel, intelligence community, communistic mental health racket or any like institution to take a poor troubled youth & make him a massacring tool for elite aims & interests. That this point has yet to be plainly cited by any one but myself so far does much to prove to my satisfaction the conspiracy to enslave America works--most of you resolutely dis-believe it can possibly exist given only the unviable criterion of the messengers' perceived objectionability!

  Published: April 22, 2007 12:00 PM

• kurt

  Keith, I'm not saying that the government should prescribe how universities deal with mental health cases. But universities should be allowed to create their own rules on how to deal with such situations.

  Published: April 22, 2007 8:49 PM

• Ryan

  The universities shouldn't be funded by the state. That's the problem.

  Published: April 22, 2007 11:28 PM

• nick gray

  I do not believe that this was all part of a conspiracy, because we don't need a conspiracy to explain it. Also, if it was part of a conspiracy, shouldn't the newspapers have all been calling for more gun control, as soon as the murders took place? Our Australian papers were all for you to be more like us, despite the evidence that VT had forbidden its' students to carry weapons! Never mind the facts, look at that beautiful theory!
  In line with Statist needs for a powerful centralising ideology, we are all being declared victims of our genes. As victims, we'll all be eligible for compensation from the center. Without guns, we'll also be victims of crimes, but will be provided for from the center. It all ties together.
  The way to escape is to embrace your differences, even mental ones! (I do not suffer from insanity- I ENJOY it!) Don't let THEM (The Hegemonic Empire-Makers) turn this crime into a red-tape bargain day! Tell them you're a Hindu who insists on being as well-armed as Kali!

  Published: April 23, 2007 12:43 AM

• Brad

  That's great to limit "the wrong people" from owning firearms, that is until the noose tightens.

  This is a pitched battle between two definitions of freedom and "preserving rights" of the individual. In a Statist, Socialist education system steeped in egalitarianism and inclusion, the likes of Cho get to as they please and little can be done to exclude them because of the broadcast nature of the institution. So he stays whereas in a freemarket, his presence, if not desired, certainly would have forced his exclusion. The State can't exclude nearly as easily without being seen to be trouncing on individual liberty (through this paradigm).

  Next, there is the debate as to who is qualified to own guns. There is little doubt that those who seek gun control are likely to have very strict definitions as to who is worthy, so there is another group who fight such sentiments calling on freedom and individualism.

  Both are fighting for purported individual rights. The one system perhaps would allow for people to be their own first line of defense and pure freedom of association, the other forces association by bending the market to Statist desires, gives a pass to those who would be excluded, and disarms people.

  And then these very people who amalgamate brew number two are the ones to disarm people more as a response.

  It seems to me that maximum freedom is to leave people who are different alone, choose not associate with them, and allow people to have the power to settle any issue that comes their way. Freedom is immediate. Freedom isn't putting someone in a box because they're different. Freedom isn't taking away someone's ability to defend themselves 'cuz that's what the authorities are for. Freedom is risk. People should have the ability to mitigate that risk for themselves.

  There is risk in who you associate with. In the long and medium term you can choose your associations (or should be allowed to) and when a sudden desire to break an association presents itself (like someone shooting at you) you should have the ability handle that happenstance.

  In shortened terms, break the Socialist Education paradigm and allow people to protect themselves in the immediate short run.

  Published: April 23, 2007 9:01 AM

• Mike

  I can't believe no one has referred to this article by John R. Lott, Jr. about an earlier shooting incident at another Virginia school that was stopped by students with guns, and the responses to it by the press.
  "Why, for instance, does the torrential coverage of public shooting sprees fail to acknowledge when such attacks are aborted by citizens with guns? In January 2002, a shooting left three dead at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. The event made international headlines and produced more calls for gun control.

  Yet one critical fact was missing from virtually all the news coverage: The attack was stopped by two students who had guns in their cars.

  The fast responses of Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges undoubtedly saved many lives. Mikael was outside the law school returning from lunch when Peter Odighizuwa started shooting. Tracy was in a classroom waiting for class to start. When the shots rang out, chaos erupted. Mikael and Tracy were prepared to do something more constructive: Both immediately ran to their cars and got their guns, then approached the shooter from different sides. Thus confronted, the attacker threw his gun down.

  Isn’t it remarkable that out of 208 news stories (from a Nexis-Lexis search) in the week after the event, just four mentioned that the students who stopped the shooter had guns? A typical description of the event in the Washington Post. "Three students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived." New York’s Newsday noted only that the attacker was "restrained by students." Many stories mentioned the law-enforcement or military backgrounds of these student heroes, but virtually all of the media, in discussing how the killer was stopped, said things such as: "students tackled the man while he was still armed" "students tackled the gunman" the attacker "dropped his gun after being confronted by students, who then tackled him to the ground" or "students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, who dropped his weapon"

  Published: April 24, 2007 11:50 AM

• Amy

  Being involuntarily committed to a mental health facility does not necessary mean an individual is a threat to others. A person can be PEC'd (Physician emergency commitment) if he threatens or attempts suicide. This could be a temporary condition arising from deep depression and can be treated. Really, there was no way to predict that the VA Tech killer was going to go on a murderous rampage without a crystal ball. As far as gun control - the criminals will always have guns or really anyone who wants one and doesn't mind getting it illegally. I maintain that anyone in that classroom with a gun and an opportunity could have stopped this mad man in his tracks. Law abiding individuals would have used the gun for no other purpose than self defense or defense of another person and that is proper. Law abiding persons having guns is a great deterent to criminals. We all should have the right to bear arms to protect ourselves from predators - animal and human.

  Published: April 27, 2007 1:22 PM

• TLWP Sam

  This reminds me of Plato's pessimistic saying: the good do not need laws to do the right thing, whereas the evil will just find ways around the laws.

  Published: April 27, 2007 9:15 PM