Just watched this on the news....very sad. My heart goes out to the families/friends. Also to the family/friends of the little boy killed on school bus in Ontario.

I think if everyone had a gun this would not be able to happen in our society. John Wayne would have got him as soon as he started waving his gun around. We are becoming a disarmed society where criminals and worse yet politicians that react with freedom restricting laws rule the day.

I bet the gun man has his reality altered by the war on terror and this can be a source of the violence.

Terror should be treated as individual criminal actions treated as a police investigation and not escalated into a war on verbs that inspires those who wish to go out making a political statement. The war on terror (managed for politics) creates more victims in the name of justice and this creates blow back as we see every day in Iraq. IMO this could be the start of American society coming unglued as a result of the trauma of their war in Iraq and their resulting loss of moralality. It is a sad day for the victims of such violence.

From a media release...

--------
Virginia is a concealed carry state and yet Virginia Tech campus recently enforced a policy prohibiting "unauthorized possession, storage or control" of firearms on campus.
---------------

And then the school waited over 2 hours after the shooting started to warn students and then they sealed the campus locking the students in with the shooter? Apperantly the school was crawling with police because of a bomb threat and yet they all backed off and waited for the shooter to kill himself? More questions than answers IMO.

"I think if everyone had a gun this would not be able to happen in our society."

And you believe this on what rational grounds? Do you know of a country in the world, preferrably more than one, which can act as verification of your theory?

If you know that a person has a gun on his or her person, or in a drawer at home or in the office, and you intend to go in to shoot them, you would simply go and shoot rahter than engaging in a few seconds of conversation such as "here, take this you jerk". Shoot first will simply become the method of choice.

If you want to get a crowd, get to high ground, hide in the trunk of a car .. you know, the usual way some of these incidents happen ... carrying a weapon will not help .....

Carrying a weapon will also not help much if one has been trained by the armed forces not only in the use of firearms, but also in stealth.

With every change, there will come other changes to offset the change. In the case of guns, I tend to think that the change will be escallation, not reduction.

Those who are intent on killing will continue to do so. Those who are not intent on killing, but could be switched over due to circumstances will have a greater accessiblity to carrying that momentary thought through to reality.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3678624.stm

A couple of years old, and I do not know whether it has made any difference, however, Brazil is cited as having a murder rate of about 32.5/100,000 with the highest percentage (88%) of murders being committed by firearms in the world. (THE ECONOMIST 19-June-1999)

Washington DC is at around 70/100,000

Paris, France is about 3.3/100,000

Amsterdam about 7.7/100,000

BC homicide rate is 2.24/100,000 in 2003. The further north one goes and the further west, the higher it becomes.

PEI is 0.73/100,000 and in the 4 maritime provinces it is below 1.0

In Australia when they banned guns violent crimes and home invasions went up substantially. Obviously disarming the population had the reverse intended effect in that country, but we can all agree that stats don’t always factor in all the variables for specific peoples or circumstances.

------------------

The problem with your hypothetical Owl, IMO is that you assume if everyone packed a gun, then everyone would pack a gun and so it would be last man standing (very good movie by the way). I guess I should clarify.

IMO if you have ever been convicted of a criminal crime, then you should loose the right to carry a concealed gun. This way only law abiding citizens can be deputized citizens in protecting the law in emergencies. For the criminals or past criminals they will pry on each other, but think twice before venturing away from their kind and victimizing innocent people.

It should be obvious though that no system is perfect, and in an ideal world no guns would be preferable, but if reality is gunmen like the kind that was on the loose down in Virginia, than it is only logical that a rational solution would dictate law abiding people be allowed to protect themselves.

If I were interested in doing research on guns and their effect on the population at large with respect to crime mitigation or crime promotion, this appears to be a book I would want to start with.

But, I am really not all that interested since, compared to our neighbour to the south we really have a very small problem with guns. We are much more closely aligned to European rates of gun associated crimes than we are with the USA, which makes for an interesting study in itself since we are, after all, a major part of the entertainment culture of the USA which is said by many to promote such violence. Yet it does not seem to have the same effect. Must be the cold winters.

http://books.google.com/books?id=nChWOCgeX2oC&dq=%22Ludwig%22+%

I do not like vigilantes ..... bad idea .... IMHO ....

Chadermando … what is your data source for the Australia information?

Here is NRA supported data site … information is for one, possibly 2 years following new laws in 1998 …
http://www.nrawinningteam.com/auresult.html

This is a report from the school of public health in Sydney … has 10.5 years of data following 1996 …. It presents one geographical data set.
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/6/365
Conclusions: Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides.
Notice it says “may be” … if this were the NRA reporting they would not be so hesitant .. give them 3 minutes of data and if it demonstrates their point they will put it out as gospel truth.
The NRA supported site picks and chooses pockets of data …. The smaller the area viewed, the higher the fluctuations become, that is a given property of statistical analysis. Read the phrases. For anyone who has any research skills and background, most are ludicrous.

So, NRA or Public Health? … NRA or Public Health?…. NRA or Public Health? …. This is tough …. Can’t make up my mind …

;-)

Sure keeps the non-victims talking up a storm, eh? A few experts wade in to keep it more interesting. Just like the gnus go to the watering holes and one gets pulled in by his nose by an alligator. The rest run away. Eventually they come back. What do you suppose will be news tomorrow?
Such is the circle of life.

I got my data from the NRA and I agree it could be slanted. I just don't agree with disarming law abiding citizens when criminals like the Crew in town here in PG are importing boxes of hand guns and automatic weapons from China.

Maybe a compromise could be the allowance of concealed one shot type guns. Make it a one shot rule where everyone has at least one shot to defend themselves and deter would be assailants.

I found this article on the internet interesting.

--------------
As described by a Rogers University website:

“Goldberg analyzed media coverage of a school shooting that occurred at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia. According to Goldberg, what made this story newsworthy is that the shooter in this event was subdued by several students who themselves used guns to ‘overpower’ the gunman. Conducting his own Lexis-Nexis search, Goldberg pronounced himself ‘stunned’ to discover that in a search of one hundred news sources, “only a few papers in the whole country reported the rescuers had guns” (p. 186). That many newspapers then used this case to editorialize their opposition to private ownership of handguns simply reaffirms Goldberg’s belief that a liberal media embraces a reflexive anti-gun bias.”

No doubt this is true, which is reinforced by the following excerpt from a CNN article entitled “Suspects in Law School slaying arraigned”, which overtly neglects to mention that those students that “tackled” the gunmen were themselves armed with firearms, which undoubtedly made their job much easier:

“Students apparently tackled the gunman, said Ellen Qualls, press secretary for Virginia Gov. Mark Warner.”

Now I’ll bet anyone $100.00 today that you and I will never see, not even once, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, or CBS, mention the fact that armed students disarmed a shooter at the Appalachian School of Law back in 2002 on [this is important] National Television.

The CCW debate continues. I don’t believe that CCW is an answer to everything; Owls hidden rifleman scenario and the single person “walk in and shoot somebody” assassination style murder scenario are two examples of how a person with a CCW probably couldn’t help much. But there are so many more examples of where a person with a CCW can and has saved lives.

Sometimes all it takes is delaying a mass murderer until law enforcement shows up. Recently in a mall south of the border this exact thing happened. A citizen with a CCW (who just happened to be an off duty police officer) managed to delay and contain a madman armed with a shotgun until the cops arrived and took control of the situation. Who knows how many innocent people he saved by giving them the opportunity to escape? I keep asking myself what if…what if there was someone nearby who was armed, could they have done the same in Virginia?

Even if there was one person, who was nearby and armed then there was A CHANCE (even if it was small in this case) the death toll could of been reduced. Right now the general public has ZERO defenses against a madman armed with any type of firearm, and don’t say we need tighter restrictions on guns because we all know if you want a gun you will get one no matter what laws and restrictions are in place.

Owl posted: “With every change, there will come other changes to offset the change. In the case of guns, I tend to think that the change will be escallation, not reduction.

Those who are intent on killing will continue to do so. Those who are not intent on killing, but could be switched over due to circumstances will have a greater accessiblity to carrying that momentary thought through to reality.”

This is the “streets will run red with blood” mantra that the anti CCW groups spout at every CCW debate. If human beings were like this then the streets would already be rivers of blood in my opinion. Objects that can be used as weapons, some just as lethal as firearms, SURROUND us. Yet you don’t hear about Mr. Joe average stabbing someone to death with a letter opener after having a heated argument about paper cuts do you? How many Wild West shootouts do you hear about from Texas lately, none? Even the Wild West wasn’t the Wild West for 99% of the time anyways.