I'm strapped for time this morning. LewRockwell today has a good article with a slightly-different angle on gun control and VPI. Generous excerpt:
Back in early 2006, a plan in the Virginia legislature to allow for concealed carry on the state's college campuses failed in subcommittee. A representative of Virginia Tech said that the bill's defeat would make “parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”
Perhaps it did make a lot of people feel safer. But the indisputable fact, which everyone should recognize by now, is that criminals don't follow the law. Someone who is not going to obey laws against murder is not going to flinch at a law forbidding the carrying of weapons. And the notion that a gun law can eliminate weapons is just a fantasy, as any liberal who understands the failure of the drug war should by now see. Indeed, all these weapons prohibitions ever do is disarm those who are willing to follow the law, leaving them defenseless against criminals willing to break the law. Gun control rendered these students helpless, even as it did nothing to stop the killer.
The mentality of dependence that the leviathan state encourages with its wars, welfare state, gun control and public schools has also made would-be victims feel helpless whenever confronted by an actual threat. Today, Americans generally trust the state to protect them. But this trust is completely misplaced. In 1999, when two students slaughtered a dozen of their schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine, the Swat Team hesitated for a crucial period of time before storming the building ”“ even as a student held a sign in the window declaring that a victim was bleeding to death within. On 9/11, the hijacked victims who heroically fought back stopped one plane from causing much more damage than it did, but on all four planes the passengers and pilots had been disarmed and thus were at a disadvantage against a handful of fanatics with boxcutters. There were also individual heroes at Virginia Tech, who worked to save lives despite being at the disadvantage of a criminal willing to break the law.
Now let me be clear. I do not wish to understate the horror of what any victim of such savage violent crimes go through. But the startling common thread throughout these massacres is the degree to which the government has claimed total control and promised total security. Public high schools and many colleges have long been deemed gun-free zones, as if this actually protects anyone.
This analysis, incidentally, is in the tradition of Nock's fundamental observation that where state power increases, social power decreases, which I previously summarized:
State power comes at the price of social power. If the state will take care of something, then people won't. As social power collapses, so does society. This is Nock's best insight, and upon two minutes' reflection, is so obviously true that I'm kind of embarrassed I'd never articulated the thought before. For years I've lamented that the welfare state kills charity, but I never reached the larger point: an increasing state gradually kills all social endeavors. (You ever wonder why the social fabric of Russia is in complete tatters?)
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Front pages from around the world on the VT shooting spree.
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How long are those snakes? Austrian officials fed up with motorists stopping to urinate by the roadside have put up fake snake warnings to scare them into using toilets.
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Crap! Just when I thought it was safe to stop wearing my aluminum foil hat: Adolf Hilter was a member of demonic UFO cult worshipping cabals, and was an apparent UFO contactee.
