Shooting at Virginia Tech

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Duck duck, I'm sorry but you are very much mistaken, and following that particular mistake leads to genocides, as has been demonstrated seven or eight times in the last century. Armed populations do not suffer genocides because they can kill off the Einsatzkommandos before they can have sufficient effect -- it took the available might of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS plus the Romanian Iron Guard and Gestapo an entire month to reduce the Warsaw Ghetto. Now imagine the likely outcome of the Final Solution if every Jew in Europe had had a Mauser Kar-98 and two hundred rounds of ready ammunition -- I mean, would anyone disapprove of an empty Auschwitz and a heap of dead Nazis?

It is wise to prevent genocides, and there is only one known way: stay armed. Genocides happen when three factors come together: hatred, government/state power, and gun control laws.

That is an unrealistic comparison because guns are designed weapons and cars are not.

Funnily enough, automobile accidents are by the numbers thirty-five times as lethal as firearms accidents, and even deliberate homicides only increase the numbers to approximate parity -- and a third of the homicides are ruled justifiable: lawful, that is. Killing bad guys. What's more, two-thirds of the unjustifiables are bad guys on bad guys. This is a net social plus no matter what your point of view is.

We may sum up the Virginia Tech massacre in very simple terms: in places where strong gun control is in place (college campuses generally are such), what you have created is hunting preserves for crazies.

And there is a solution to this kind of problem. It's not exactly nice, but then, getting murdered isn't very nice either, is it? I'll tell you what it is later.

The other thing that really strikes me is how much general resemblance there is between Cho Seung-Hui's diatribe and Ted Kascinski's manifesto: there are lengthy listings of grievances that are in the authors' eyes monstrous, enormous wrongs; there's a fury of resentment -- and then there's a complete inability to come up with any solution or resolution of any of it. They will make some approach to figuring out how to resolve it but will stop short of doing so; there is an incompleteness to their thinking. It stops at the sound and fury and at the revenge fantasy.