Regarding the horrors of the Virginia Tech murders, a staggering array of inanities have been uttered. This will probably continue into the foreseeable future. Among my favorites was a comment over at the HuffPo, made to a Jane Smiley entry, that said right-wingers should acknowledge that "people with guns kill more people than people without guns."
How trite. My response: In a violent confrontation, people with guns save more people than people without guns.
It's a mix of common sense and horrific logic, but killers choose places like schools for their sprees because they know they won't encounter armed resistance. We have enshrined schools as "gun-free zones". We have taken this to logical absurdities. Virginia state law allows citizens, with proper training and background checks, to carry concealed weapons, but Virginia Tech regulations forbade this practice. In California, the law is written in such a way that even a police officer, on campus as a student, cannot bring a firearm onto school grounds.
Since so many are speculating on the efficacy of laws that disarm law-abiding citizens, let us also speculate on how things might have happened at Virginia Tech if someone in Norris Hall had been able to shoot back. It's doubtful if the death toll would have been so high.
This is not just idle speculation. We have an example of what might have happened. In 2002, at the Appalachia Law School in Virginia, someone started going on a killing spree. Armed students interceded and the killer was apprehended. He was stopped and arrested by armed students and faculty, not the police.
Police cannot watch over us day and night in anticipation of some harm that might befall us. Indeed, as a free society we shouldn't want that sort of "protection". The very nature of the Second Amendment is to allow the citizenry to provide for its own defense. Virginia Tech illustrates why.
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