See previous: At least 32 dead in Virginia Tech rampage; Anti-gunners seize the moment before bodies cold, Virginia Tech: The Day After, Virginia Tech: The Day After The Day After, Virginia Tech: The Day After The Day After The Day After

I'm done blogging about the sorry low-life son of a bitch that did the shooting Monday. He's had more publicity already than he was ever worth and there's no point in encouraging copycats. It's rant time. The system failed 32 innocent people and it's time to start pointing fingers at the deserving. I see two obvious targets:

1. The bleeding-heart "self-esteem is a constitutional right" do-gooders responsible for the fact a rabid animal wasn't locked away like he it should have been years ago.

2. The "Guns are loud and scary and no one should be allowed to have one" crowd responsible for the fact that not one of the 32 innocent law-abiding citizens who died Monday was armed. I hope the members of that group are extremely proud of themselves for keeping the students at Virginia Tech "safe."

Below the fold:

• Why wasn't Kevin Granata armed?
• What Exactly Is the Reason Not To Allow Professors To Carry Guns?
• Dingell, NRA Working on Bill to Strengthen Background Checks
• Virginia Tech and the heartlessness of our media and therapy culture.
• You Can't Defend The Indefensible
• Incompetent Retired ATF Agent and a Dishonest Lede from CBS
• A declaration of dependence
• Begone to Nothingness
• The Price of Freedom
• A Tale of Two Towns

*** ***

Why wasn't Kevin Granata armed?

Via Allahpundit's latest, this snippet from the WaPo: 

Kevin Granata had heard the commotion in his third-floor office and ran downstairs. He was a military veteran, very protective of his students. He was gunned down trying to confront the shooter.

I can understand the rational behind not letting 18 year old Freshmen carry guns on campus, but I can't think of any acceptable reason for this gentleman not to have been armed. As far as I'm concerned the people who prevented him from being have his blood on their hands, and that of an unknown number of other people he might have saved.  I hope they're extremely proud of themselves. This time it was a lone nutjob. And when the jihadis come ... ?

***

What Exactly Is the Reason Not
To Allow Professors To Carry Guns?
Eugene Volokh

Consider two scenarios:

1. An armed madman comes to a place and starts shooting people. None of the people who's around is armed.

2. An armed madman comes to a place and starts shooting people. Several (say, five) people in the vicinity are armed.

Which madman is more likely to be stopped quicker — the one who outguns everyone else 1-0, or the one who is outgunned 5-1?

If this weren't a madman but Jack Bauer — or even an average highly trained soldier — the five may well be unable to stop the one. But otherwise, the odds would seem to be more against the madman in situation 2 rather than 1, no?

No-one can prove anything, of course. Maybe the five would be the first to be shot. Maybe they'd run away. Maybe they wouldn't be around. Maybe they'd shoot and miss. Still, if you had to bet, which would you bet would be the worse scenario for the madman, and the better one for his victims? ...

***

Dingell, NRA Working on Bill to Strengthen Background Checks 
By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer

With the Virginia Tech shootings resurrecting calls for tighter gun controls, the National Rifle Association has begun negotiations with senior Democrats over legislation to bolster the national background-check system and potentially block gun purchases by the mentally ill.

Rep. John D. Dingell (Mich.), a gun-rights Democrat who once served on the NRA's board of directors, is leading talks with the powerful gun lobby in hopes of producing a deal by early next week, Democratic aides and lawmakers said.

Under the bill, states would be given money to help them supply the federal government with information on mental-illness adjudications and other run-ins with the law that are supposed to disqualify individuals from firearms purchases. For the first time, states would face penalties for not keeping the National Instant Criminal Background Check System current. ...

***

Cold Standard 
Virginia Tech and the heartlessness of our media and therapy culture.
Peggy Noonan

... There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Sheng-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.

One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups? ...

*** 

You Can't Defend The Indefensible 
Dan Riehl

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 19 — Officials at Virginia Tech on Thursday defended their decision to allow the gunman in Monday’s rampage to return to campus after he was released from a psychiatric facility, even though they were aware of his troubled mental history and potential for violence.

They do? Where? Because I don't see it.

Christopher Flynn, director of the campus counseling service, said the university had played no role in monitoring Mr. Cho’s psychiatric treatment. “The university is not part of the mental health system nor the judiciary system, and we would not be the providers of mandatory counseling in this instance,” Mr. Flynn said at a news conference. “This is not a law enforcement issue. He had broken no law that we know of. The mental health professionals were there to assess his safety, not particularly the safety of others.”

Since when is, it's not our job considered a defense when you take someone's money and agree to house them along with other students, none of whom know with what they are actually dealing? ...

***

Incompetent Retired ATF Agent and a Dishonest Lede from CBS
Confederate Yankee

... Before I go on, however, I'm going to take issue with retired ATF agent Joseph Vince, who NBC quotes in their article:

In the photos Cho sent to NBC, he showed some of his ammunition — hollow-point rounds, purchased, officials say, in the weeks before the shootings. Law enforcement officials say hollow-points are generally considered more lethal.

Joseph Vince, a retired ATF agent, agrees.

"It's not something that you would need for home protection, because what you are trying to do is eliminate an immediate threat," Vince says. "The idea of killing is what this ammunition portrays to me."

Vince is unequivocally wrong in this instance, and I don't see how he could be misquoted.

Hollowpoint and frangible ammunition is precisely the kind of ammunition you would want for home defense and personal protection. ...

Joseph Vince, retired AFT agent or not, is horribly, horribly wrong here....

If this CBS News story is correct, then Cho bought his Walther P22 online. Horrors!

Oh wait. He didn't. Media ignorance and misrepresentation once again rears its ugly head:

On this same day, the gun was shipped to JND Pawnbrokers in Blacksburg, Va., where Cho picked up the gun two days later. The federally licensed store then did a background check.

First, the sequence of events in paragraph is backwards. Cho could only pick up the gun after the NICS check, and that is what occurred. CBS News ignorance, or purposeful design? You make the call. ...

***

A declaration of dependence
Far Too Many Americans

We, the undersigned, having grown weary of the burden of freedom and responsibility, do hereby foreswear, forfeit, and waive our following rights:

1) Our right to protect our physical persons. We pay the government -- and quite well -- to do this for us, through the police, the military, and far too many other government agencies to count. We have chosen to disregard numerous court decisions that they have no responsibilities to us individually, and still place our fate entirely in their hands. And when they fail us, we will blame our excessive freedoms and surrender more rights in the name of physical safety.

2) ...

***

Begone to Nothingness
DJ Drummond

The mass murder this week at Virginia Tech was a horrible, inhuman act by a madman. The suffering was made worse, however, by the mercenary and stone-hearted decision by the media at large to broadcast everything they could find about the killer. What started as a reasonable effort to provide news and relevant information, soon devolved into a vulgar circus to see who could make the victims' families experience the worst anguish. It must be said, before I say anything further, that the decision by NBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and CNN to flood the airwaves with sounds and images from the malignant narcissist, is effectively to promote the worst kind of voyeurism, and to display as cruel an indifference to the pain already endured by the victims' families, as to be worthy of criminal charges in any just society. I firmly believe that on the day when all men are judged, there will be a grim reckoning for the likes of Brian Williams, Steve Capus, Dan Abrams, Roger Aisles, and their cronies.

But for all the crude behavior by the media, the fault for the massacre rests with the gunman. Him alone. For all the efforts made to blame the crime on Gun Control or the lack of it, on administrators or the police, the hate and the decision to destroy so many innocent lives lies on the person who made the choice. I don't know, or care, whether or not he was "mentally ill"; even the mentally ill often know how to keep from hurting other people, and in the end there is no excuse, whatsoever, which justifies murder.

This particular monster wanted attention. He sent out photos, a "manifesto", a video comparing himself to every person he ever considered great, though he was - at best - a pathetic failure who wasn't man enough to accomplish anything more than to blame everyone and everything else for his failures. He is not worth remembering.

You have probably noticed I have not mentioned his name. ...

***

The Price of Freedom
Lorie Byrd (H/T: LB)

The phrase “the price of freedom” is often used when referring to the sacrifices of soldiers in battle to defend America’s freedoms. There is another price of freedom though. We paid it most recently in a very big way in Blacksburg, Virginia, but we have paid it many times previously, as well.

Some news outlets reported the Virginia Tech shooting as the “worst mass murder in U.S. history." It was the most deadly school shooting in U.S. history, but certainly not the most deadly mass murder, and the distinction does matter in the context I am raising it.

The Jawa Report notes the Virginia Tech rampage was not only not the worst mass murder, it was not even the second, or third or fourth worst, but followed the 9/11 attacks (2,998 deaths), the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths), the HappyLand arson of 1990 (87 deaths) and the Bath, Michigan school bombing of 1927 (45 deaths), all claiming more lives than the Virginia Tech shootings (32 deaths).

One thing all these horrible murders have in common is that they were possible, at least in part, due to the fact that we have an open and free society. After the shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, and after any such horrific crime, one instinctive reaction is to want to do something in response to prevent it from ever happening again. In all the cases listed above, because the sites of the crimes were public places such as schools, office buildings, and night clubs, any such measure would include some sacrifice of our freedom. That sacrifice could be relatively unnoticeable, like installing more security cameras and instituting new security response procedures, or it could be more obvious and intrusive such as installing metal detectors and changing gun laws. Some changes might actually make us safer, while others could only provide the illusion of safety and, in fact, make us less safe.

This is the balancing act that goes on in a free democracy between the want and need to be secure and the desire to live in a free and open society. ...

***

A Tale of Two Towns
Kim Priestap

Twenty five years ago, there were two towns trying to deal with violent crime: Morton Grove, Illinois, and Kennesaw, Georgia. Morton Grove chose to ban all hand guns except those maintained by police officers. Kennesaw, in reaction, passed a unanimous ordinance that required all heads of households to own and maintain a gun. Guess what happened to the crime rates in each city: ...