VT shooting

I imagine my readers (if I have any) are horrified by the violent and murderous events at Virginia Technical University, as I am. I pray that the Blessed Virgin and all the angels and saints will join us in praying for everyone affected by these terrible crimes.

Of course, there is political fallout to come. Some has started already. The calls for even more stringent controls on the right to keep and bear arms have already started, never mind that we have no idea how many laws were broken by the shooter in obtaining his weapon.

When these things happen I always think what a pity it is that there wasn't someone present with a "permit to carry" who could have disabled this guy before he killed so many people.

Someone on one of my favorite boards had this to say, and I agree completely. I would be very much surprised if VT did not forbid all concealed carry on their campus except by law enforcement, regardless of Virginia's laws on the matter. (edit: Virginia Tech forbids ALL firearms on campus, except for law enforcement.)

You will find, if you look, that Israel has not had problems with people shooting up schools for decades. It was at one point a favored tactic of the PLO: give some willing martyr an AK-47 with a full magazine and send him to murder a bunch of school kids. It was cheap -- an AK-47 goes for about $50 on the black market -- and a bunch of dead school kids was a fabulous event with big headlines. But the Arab terrorists stopped. Why?

Because Prime Minister Golda Mier allowed faculty and retirees to draw weapons for concealed carry from government armories. And they started hanging out at schools, and shooting up the willing martyrs who showed up with their fully loaded AK-47s. Casualties for these incidents dropped to low single digits, and deaths even lower than that. And it was at that point that martyrs went from using AK-47s, which are cheap and widely available, to car bombs, which are expensive and hard to make.

We could enact the same policy: encourage faculty and retirees who qualify for concealed carry to keep and bear arms on campus, to respond quickly to the murderous and psychotic who threaten our children. In fact, we already do so on airplanes, though there it is limited to the crew of the craft, who must qualify as Federal Flight Deck Officers.