just some thoughts on the VT massacre...

     I've been tracking the news coming out of the Virginia Tech campus for most of the week. It looks like gun control laws have once again played a role in the deaths of innocent people.

     We will probably be hearing a lot of rhetoric over the next several months about why this happened. Some of that rhetoric will inevitably focus on gun control laws and how the current gun laws are not strong enough. The people who say that will conveniently ignore the fact that there are already laws that ban firearms from college campuses on the books. Those laws were ignored by the gunman who committed this horrific crime because criminals -- by the very definition of that word -- do not obey laws.

     Laws that create "gun free zones" do not prevent gun crimes from occurring in the restricted areas. Instead, they serve only to create free-fire zones for criminals. The criminals know that they will find plenty of unarmed victims in these "gun free zones" and all they have to do is ignore the laws that restrict guns from those areas. That is not a problem for them since they also plan on breaking the laws against shooting large numbers of people for no legitimate reason.

     We've seen a lot of mass shootings in public places in the last 15 years. Most of them occur in these "gun free zones" where the criminals know that they will be the only ones there who are armed. We've seen shootings in post offices, schools, churches, day care centers, and many other places where the law does not allow guns. If guns are the problem, then why aren't we seeing mass shootings at any skeet and trap shoots, NRA conventions, gun shows, or other places where it is well known that people will have ready access to guns of their own?

     We've had two well known school shootings that were ended by people who were not law enforcement officers pointing guns of their own at the shooters. The media widely reported the school shootings but ignored the way they ended.

     The shooting at the high school in Pearl, Mississippi ended when an assistant principal named Joel Myrick ran out to his vehicle and retrieved a handgun, then ran back into the school and tracked down the shooter, Luke Woodham, as he was trying to leave and go to the middle school nearly. After causing Woodham to wreck the car he was driving, Myrick held Woodham at gunpoint until the police arrived.

     The shooting at the Appalachian Law School was stopped in a similar fashion by two students who pulled their own guns and held the gunman at gunpoint until the police arrived. Note that in both incidents, the people who stopped the shooter did not fire their weapons at the shooter. The shooters in both cases surrendered and were held at gunpoint for responding police without further bloodshed.

     The Appalachian Law School shooting shows that college students, who are young adults, are capable of defending themselves in a responsible manner on campus. The current laws that won't allow them the chance to do this shoud be repealed.

     We desperately need to rethink our strategy for combatting gun crime. The current strategy of passing increasingly restrictive gun laws that only stop people who were not committing crimes to begin with is obviously not working.