Virginia Tech shooting rekindles gun debate

Thirty three people died at the hands of the Virginia state legislature on Monday.

At Virginia Tech, a madman with apparent advanced planning, caged students in the campus engineering building and began a calculated mass murder. Wearing a flack vest and chaining doors closed to prevent escape, one deranged person changed the lives of more than 30 families in less than an hour.

He did so with the complicit help of lawmakers in Virginia.

In 1995, the state of Virginia passed a "shall-issue" concealed carry law permitting any adult resident without a criminal record to carry firearms in public. Virginia's already low violent crime rate dropped a few more notches, while just over the Virginia border, mayhem in Washington, D.C., continued to escalate despite a complete ban on handguns and strict regulation of all firearm ownership. Like 39 other states, Virginia had enabled citizens to protect themselves, creating a significant deterrent to criminals and lunatics alike.

Except on college campuses, where the state legislature restricted the citizen's self-defense rights. Aside from bars, churches and courthouses, the only place where citizens were forcefully disarmed were campuses. Through misguided conservatism, Virginia lawmakers made colleges a prime target for homicidal rampages. Virginia politicians certainly knew better. In 2002, at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, a student named Peter Odighizuwa took revenge on the school's dean, a professor and another student. The death toll would have been higher had two other students not retrieved personal firearms from their cars and held Odighizuwa captive for the police. Last year, a bill to liberalize concealed carry for students and faculty failed in the Virginia legislature. Testimony in favor of the bill noted that violent crime can, and does, occur on campuses across Virginia, and that the first line of defense were those the state had rendered defenseless. At the bill's defeat, a Virginia Tech spokesman said to the press "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." The 2002 case study in Grundy was lost to political posturing, and as a result Virginia Tech students and faculty had no option but to face being expelled or fired if they carried self-defense tools on campus.

On Monday, their only option was to die. Like most massacres, we will discover that it was not a spontaneous act, but like Columbine, Lubby's and Austin before, it was premeditated and targeted those left helpless by law. We will sadly conclude that many laws designed to protect people have tragic unintended consequences.

Guy Smith is the author of "Gun facts: Debunking Gun Control Myths," http://www.gunfacts.info/

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/04/18/EDGB5PA6E61.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle