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Other Op-Eds on Virginia Tech and Guns.

Opinion-Journal

...In any case, there is no connection between recent mass murder events and gun restrictions. As Quebec economist Pierre Lemieux noted yesterday, "Mass killings were rare when guns were easily available, while they have been increasing as guns have become more controlled." The 1996 murders in the Scottish town of Dunblane--17 killed--occurred despite far more restrictive gun laws than America's.

Glenn Reynolds, writing in the New York Daily News.

...Wiles reported that when he told a professor how he felt, the professor responded that she would have felt safer if he had had a gun, too.

What's more, she would have been safer. That's how I feel about my student (one of a few I know who have gun carry permits), as well. She's a responsible adult; I trust her not to use her gun improperly, and if something bad happened, I'd want her to be armed because I trust her to respond appropriately, making the rest of us safer.

Virginia Tech doesn't have that kind of trust in its students (or its faculty, for that matter). Neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses "gun-free," they'll make people safer, when in fact they're only disarming the people who follow rules, law-abiding people who are no danger at all.

David Kopel, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

The bucolic campus of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., would seem to have little in common with the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City. Yet both share an important characteristic, common to the site of almost every other notorious mass murder in recent years: They are "gun-free zones."

No - not a balanced selection. Didn't intend for it to be.

2 Comments

One big difference between the shooting this Monday and the one at Trolley Square. In Utah there was an off duty policeman named Ken Hammond who confronted the shooter, and eventually (with a uniformed policeman) cornered and killed him.
 
There is also this: How can there be balance with the Brady Bunch marching lock step with the anti gun crowd? These people have been nattering for years that if we just ban guns or regulate them to death everyone will be safer. Time and again, that has NOT been proven to be the case. So now we ratchet up the pressure to totally show we are non violent, and have to trust that no one else with an issue won't do this again? After all, we don't have guns so we are harmless. That in and of itself implies a trust...one that was abused horribly. And we are supposed to trust blind and foolish people to say that gun violence begets gun violence? If I recall, the only weapons that day were being used by the shooter. They were not acting on their own. When was it going to end? When he got taken out or ran out of ammunition.