DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Gun Control ??

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He was an engineering student, he could have easily made a bomb and blown up half the campus.

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....or he could've built a bridge or summat....is that what they teach engineering students these days?

Besides....i thought he was an english student....

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Gun Control ??

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yes, i'm all for it...











control your gun!

not a gunowner...i argue with myself about this issue...

constitutional right...
reason for constitutional right outdated...
hunting and protection are legit...
you don't hunt with handguns and guns for protection are either unsafe or impractical...
coutries like Australia and Englandhave had success reducing murders by toughening up on guns...
America is not Aus or Eng...the culture is different and the # of guns in circulation are beyond controlling...
guns don't kill people, people kill people...
well, you can't eliminate sick/amoral people, so guns are the logical 2nd choice...

and it goes on and on in my head, just as it does for people arguing each side...i'm a total lame-o fence-sitter on this one...and when i'm sitting on the fence on an issue of governmental control vs. government minding their own business, i side with government minding their own business...

there's my (worthless) .02...

You keep saying he was an engineering student, I haven't seen that anywhere. He was an English major.

well, he's Asian, so he must be either an engineer or a mathematician ...

I don't have the link, but hopefully someone can bring it up - in today's USA Today, it said armed robberies went up 44% in the year after the gun buyback in australia. Wonder why? Could it be that the guys that break laws in the first place realized there were many fewer guns in the hands of law abiding citizens?

Or gay.

I'm going out to run some errands in a few minutes. I'll buy the paper and scan the article.

Your right, sorry... One of the initial reports on the day it happened reported they thought the suspect was an engineering student, and it just stuck with me.

But my point is, just because he used guns, doesn't mean it was his only choice. The kid obviously had an issue, and intended to do this for sometime. Any moron with an IQ in double digits can surf the internet and find out how to make a bomb.

Found this an interesting point o f view, and kinda fits with some of the theme's that have passed through this thread.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzEzYzQ0Y2MyZjNlNjY1ZTEzMTA0MGRmM2EyMTQ0NjY=

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April 18, 2007, 0:44 p.m.

A Culture of Passivity
"Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.

By Mark Steyn

I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Point two: The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn’t meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.

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this guy reminds me of all those pastors that preach the sin of adultery, homosexuality, what have you, only to have their doors busted down by police for child porn...better said...

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
William Shakespeare

wouldn't shock me if this guy wet his pants in that situation, but ok, let's just blame the murder victims for being a members of a culture of passivity (is that a word?)...passive?...are you kidding me?...we live in a country with all this violence, disrespect of authority, etc., and this guy thinks we're all too passive?...GMAFB...

j/c


Changing the gun laws is only going to affect the people who intend to follow the laws in the first place. It is going to have essentially nil effect on those with bad intentions. It's just going to force them to plan ahead more.

If some guy has the intent of going and shooting up a campus like this, a few obstacles or delays in gun laws aren't going to stop him.

I think we read it differently.

I took it more as he was trying to convey that we as a society have become complacent and expect someone to always come to our aid, and we will always think of ourselves before others.

As was said earlier in this thread somewhere. At some point people need to take a stand against people like this, by the time he shot 10 people in the room, you have to figure he is not planning on stopping, will you sit there and wait your turn, or will you make an attempt to change events.

the saying "It's hard to say until your faced with the situation" is so true, yet as the article said, it is almost a disclaimer. If faced with 2 choices, Die, or Die a hero, which do you choose. Sadly, many people would be curled in the corner preparing to die. It's a mindset. Can it be changed? I don't know. But it is an interesting point of view.

Fact is, our world isn't going to suddenly become peaceful.

Anyone remember the video of the guy in the pizza parlor getting the crud beat out of him, meanwhile about 6-8 people are standing within 5 ft of the situation and just watching, NONE of them tried to do anything to stop or help the guy. THAT is our society.

well, who's to say they didn't try and fail to stop him/get out/etc?...not to mention the fact that it may take longer to grasp the situation and make an aggressive decision than it took for him to mow everyone down...

i don't know...maybe they were all cowards out to save their own ass, but i would never call anyone out like that b/c i may do the same...and i have doubts that this writer would've gone from trying to translate a German phrase to full-on Jack Bauer counter-terrorist maneuvers in 10 seconds...

Uncle Ted always has something to say when it comes to guns:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugent/index.html

Nugent: Gun-free zones are recipe for disaster

POSTED: 11:25 a.m. EDT, April 20, 2007
By Ted Nugent
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Rock guitarist Ted Nugent has sold more than 30 million albums. He's also a gun rights activist and serves on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. His program, "Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild," can be seen on the Outdoor Channel.

Read an opposing take on gun control from journalist Tom Plate: Let's lay down our right to bear arms

WACO, Texas (CNN) -- Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.

Anybody see what the evil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.

Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.

A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.

At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.

More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.

My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby's Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden "feel good" politics.

She has since led the charge for concealed weapon upgrade in Texas, where we can now stop evil. Yet, there are still the mindless puppets of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations insisting on continuing the gun-free zone insanity by which innocents are forced into unarmed helplessness. Shame on them. Shame on America. Shame on the anti-gunners all.

No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate restrictions or a "cult of agriculture fertilizer" following the unabashed evil of Timothy McVeigh's heinous crime against America on that fateful day in Oklahoma City. No one faulted kitchen utensils or other hardware of choice after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught drugging, mutilating, raping, murdering and cannibalizing his victims. Nobody wanted "steak knife control" as they autopsied the dead nurses in Chicago, Illinois, as Richard Speck went on trial for mass murder.

Evil is as evil does, and laws disarming guaranteed victims make evil people very, very happy. Shame on us.

Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.

Thirty-two people dead on a U.S. college campus pursuing their American Dream, mowed-down over an extended period of time by a lone, non-American gunman in illegal possession of a firearm on campus in defiance of a zero-tolerance gun law. Feel better yet? Didn't think so.

Who doesn't get this? Who has the audacity to demand unarmed helplessness? Who likes dead good guys?

I'll tell you who. People who tramp on the Second Amendment, that's who. People who refuse to accept the self-evident truth that free people have the God-given right to keep and bear arms, to defend themselves and their loved ones. People who are so desperate in their drive to control others, so mindless in their denial that they pretend access to gas causes arson, Ryder trucks and fertilizer cause terrorism, water causes drowning, forks and spoons cause obesity, dialing 911 will somehow save your life, and that their greedy clamoring to "feel good" is more important than admitting that armed citizens are much better equipped to stop evil than unarmed, helpless ones.

Pray for the families of victims everywhere, America. Study the methodology of evil. It has a profile, a system, a preferred environment where victims cannot fight back. Embrace the facts, demand upgrade and be certain that your children's school has a better plan than Virginia Tech or Columbine. Eliminate the insanity of gun-free zones, which will never, ever be gun-free zones. They will only be good guy gun-free zones, and that is a recipe for disaster written in blood on the altar of denial. I, for one, refuse to genuflect there.

What is your take on this commentary? E-mail us

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer. This is part of an occasional series of commentaries on CNN.com that offers a broad range of perspectives, thoughts and points of view.

Leave it to Ted... He always has something to say on the issue, and he is very good at getting his point across. Too bad those hell-bent on gun control won't listen. They still believe that not selling guns in a store will keep the bad guys from getting guns.

j/c Interesting thread. I feel very strongly about this issue, so here's my two cents.

Our founding fathers believed that keeping and bearing arms is an inalienable right. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of criminals and mental deviants in this world who intend to harm others. Gun control removes the right to defend yourself and your loved ones against these people.

It should be as plain as the nose on your face that these people who intend to do harm are NOT going to follow the law.....gun control laws included. Isn't it obvious that criminals will target those that they know are unarmed? No psychopath will have armed humans in their victim pool.

The only people benefitting from gun control laws are the criminals themselves. Gun control laws make victims out of law abiding citizens by removing the means to defend yourself. We already have laws against criminals owning firearms....how well is that going?

Just look at the scare tactics used by the media and politicians....if you look at their claims with a clear mind, you can see how ridiculous they are. My favorite is how a certain Ohio democrat frantically screamed that there would be "wild west" type shootouts and "road rage gun battles" if we enacted a concealed carry law in Ohio.

The anti-gun establishment in Washington is a joke. The most outspoken of these....Pelosi, Schumer, Ted Kennedy and Rosie O'Donnell can afford and utilize armed body guards. Feinstein even has a concealed carry permit..... but they sure don't want you to be able to defend yourself.

Law enforcement does NOT have a legal obligation to protect you, and that's been decided by the Supreme Court in three separate cases. Unfortunately, police arrive in time to draw the chalklines...and even if they arrive sooner, they are not legally required to defend you.

Anyone that supports gun control ought to see the forest for the trees. Again.....criminals and mental deviants do NOT follow laws. Law abiding citizens do.