> [WS:] What I find surprising is that nobody there tried to subdue the perp.
> VA has the concealed weapon laws - so it is likely someone in a large crowd
> could have concealed weapon and use it to incapacitate the perp. OTOH, many
> establishments in VA prohibit concealed weapons on their premises - and the
> university was likely to be one of them. But even without concealed fire
> arms - it is still surprising that nobody tried to subdue the perp.
I have to agree with Woj here.
I didn't learn about the shooting until around 4 yesterday when I was walking by a bar at La Guardia airport. I saw the CNN headline about 32 people being shot and my jaw dropped.
My thoughts after that point reflected Woj's point. Why didn't these people fight back? Did the whole thing unfold so fast that people couldn't grasp what was going on? Were they just shot so quickly that nobody has time to react? But news stories say that one professor sacrificed himself so that other students could escape.
I know the liberals will piss and whine about the need for more gun control. As the pro-gun people will correctly point out, if somebody in one of those classrooms had had a gun, this rampage might have ended more quickly, or could have been prevented.
But this whole tragedy points to the fact that most Americans are incapable of acting on their own behalf. We've set up a system that relies on somebody else to take care of us. Even if there had been cameras in those classrooms and campus security guards had seen the shooting when they weren't reading some magazine, the police can't react as quickly as people in that classroom should have reacted.
The ranting anti-gun zealots will ignore one of the obvious counter-arguments to their call for more gun control. The VT killer could have easily killed those students or more with other weapons. He could have thrown grenades into the classroom. He could have thrown a stick of dynamite. More easily, he could have planted charges in the buildings and blown them up.
Didn't the Columbine killers have explosives with them?
Here is one of my mini-editorials on today's events: http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20070417120925757
Chuck