I just find it deplorable that people openly mock victims of a tragedy that they do not even know. Especially when all they have to go on about it are vague reports on the news.

I feel that this is a very bad platform to base this argument on. Especially when one takes into consdieration that after the attack many students stayed behind to help those shot. But in the minds of Blake, they don’t count. Nathaniel Blake raises an argument on a false statement.

The point is about the moral stance of refusing to let others dictate to you. If you want to run and break both your legs and survive, you’re doing exactly what I think you should: you’re exercising your will and deciding to live, rather than falling into the drama that the nutjob has created for you. If you fight back, you’re exercising your will and deciding to live, rather than fall into the role. I see the two as morally equivalent, since they’re really the same class.

Maybe making a strawman of other’s positions isn’t itself the best tactic.

If any of us had been in that same exact situation, we would have been better off running up to the killer and dying rather than breaking both our legs jumping out the window and surviving.

Alright, Alright. Let’s put a pin on that to examine about half past never.

Did it ever occur to you that ACTUAL heroes, like the brave professor who held the door closed before being killed– not the loser on his computer who thinks posting a comment on an obscure website or newsletter is an achievement– were probably trying to give people a chance to escape and possibly survive while sacrificing themselves, instead of maybe thinking “Eh, I’m a gonner anyway!”? We’ll never know, but I strongly doubt the latter.

Let’s take a look at some other heroes. Heroes who have made it their profession to save lives. Do you recall any story involving the Iraq Occupation where a soldier runs unarmed at a suicide bomber? Really? None?

Maybe running face first into death– not unlike the killer– isn’t the best tactic. That probably has to do with the fact that in real life, there is no reset button and when you die, you die. Maybe true heroes understand that because they know that there is a time to pick your battles.

Or maybe the people who resent the victims themselves wish a more honorable death than atrophy behind a desk.

I honestly worry about some of you. I hope you never send press packets to NBC and blast your heads off in a vain attempt to seem heroic.

And I’m not a conservative of any stripe, by the way. Pro-gay, pro-labor, pro-choice, pro-ACLU and pro-atheist–but none of that means I think you should just take it when a madman inflicts his will upon you.

Some of the discussion is of the form “Well, you can’t fight back because he’s got a gun.” Well, why can’t you? These scenarios play out as little dramas: “Aggressor with guns rushes in, people scream and are shot to death” was this plot. But the aggressor sets the plot and the roles. If you refuse to play your role, you might just end the scenario in victory.

Note that I don’t mention “shoot the aggressor.” If you can just set your own role, you might well win without a gun (when flaming this post, please let’s talk about the mental stance, rather than the gun possession for/against stuff).

duh!

I grew up in a place where everybody had guns– the wonderful utopia in L.A. called Watts. A dead body lying on the street on a weekly basis must have been the result of people choking on the salty air of freedom. Funny thing about it, everyone of those bodies fell on its own bullets.

If you think that you would be far safer there than where you are, you should move there and carry all the guns you like. I don’t live there anymore, but that’s just because I’m some coward. When the time comes to stand up to an AK-47, I can’t even shoot my gun with enough accuracy to block the bullets of another gun being fired at me.

Hey! I bet Baghdad is the safest place place around! They have guns everywhere AND bombs!

Turner had finished her required credits and was preparing for her May graduation but took German as an elective, said her father, Paul Turner. The 22-year-old was shot in the German class.

“She was very excited — she was very excited about school in general,” her father said.

An anonymous poster told MSNBC.com that she had been a classmate of Turner’s at James Madison High School in Vienna. “She was at the top of our class and did really well in school … Vienna is a very close, tight-knit community and I know those from our graduating class of 2003 and all other JMHS students past and present are grieving from this tragic loss of life.”

Turner was accepted by a handful of high-profile schools, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But she was determined to be a Virginia Tech Hokie, her father said.

“We tried to convince her to go elsewhere. When you get accepted to Johns Hopkins, it’s a very prestigious school,” he said. “But no, she wanted to go to Virginia Tech.”

Turner recently helped found a chapter of Alpha Omega Epsilon, a sorority for women in engineering. She had accepted a chemical engineering job with W.L. Gore & Associates in Elkton, Md.

“It’s a terrible loss,” her father said Wednesday, weeping. “I cannot understand the legislators in this country, not putting in laws that protect people.”

White worked at a YMCA as a lifeguard and was an honor student in high school, the newspaper reported.

Her family was planning a news conference Thursday in Suffolk.

Laurie Guiffre, who grew up with White, remembers her friend as a person of great character with a genuine love for animals.

“I keep trying to come to terms with the fact that she is no longer here and I will never see her again.” Guiffre wrote to MSNBC.com.

Another childhood friend, Michelle D. Clay, of Toccoa Falls, Ga., recalled that ” was one my four best friends, and we all shared everything.”

“I never imagined she would be gone in the blink of an eye.”

This isn’t a movie, there are no stunt doubles and retakes. I wonder if they would suggest that their own child run into an armed gunman..

Now you’re saying, “one can make general predictions”. Then do that, please–don’t claim to know. All you know is statistics and previous events, which are not in any way predictive of a specific event. They may be predictive of an overall statistical trend, but that cannot be used to predict with any kind of certainty the outcome of a specific incident, which is what you’ve been wasting your time doing.

You’ve also been wasting time on snide language, broadly dismissive remarks, and vague insults. Your first post here was an insult–when no one had personally insulted you, you chose to introduce yourself to the discussion with an insult directed at most everyone here. This approach undermines the larger point you’re trying to make. You’re trading the fortification of your larger ideology for the cheap pleasure of snideness–do your beliefs a favor and stick to what can be known.

As I said before, there are valid arguments on both sides of this gun-control question. There are risks involved in both the presence and lack of guns. Having a gun present does not always make one safer. Not accepting that statement is foolish. Having a gun present does sometimes make one safer. That’s an equally inescapable statement. But the issue will never be as black-and-white as you’re trying to make it.

At the end of the day it may just come down to the nation making a judgment call about what type of country we want to be, because either course of action involves risk. Do we choose the risk of unnecessary violence against unarmed innocents, or do we choose the risk associated with an increased presence of firearms–the attendant accidents and capacity for spontaneous violence? Who knows, the country-as-a-whole crime and death numbers may not even add up to be all that different when it’s all said and done.

You believe in one approach. Many people here believe in another. None of us really know what would happen, either way. If we claim we do, we’re wrong. If we present our beliefs, then it stops being a question of who’s right and who’s wrong, and starts being a productive discussion. If you truly care about what you believe, and want it to be accepted instead of rammed down the throats of those who disagree with you, that’s the only productive course.

1. How do you know the students were liberals? You seem to imply this since you say they failed to attack the killer and instead acted like “good little liberals.” You don’t know the political ideology of the students so you must just be talking out of your ass- as usual for somebody who goes by “Braveheart.”

2. You call us liberals “bedwetters.” It seems to me that anyone who feels they have to carry a concealed weapon to a college campus is more of a bedwetter than a person who believes guns should be prohibited on campus. Think about it, clown.

3. Speaking as a college professor, gun owner, and former Army officer, I would prefer that students didn’t walk around campus armed. We hire campus police to deal with these problems. I don’t want some armed and dangerous yokel blasting away at every Arab or Asian-looking person because they are afraid of being terrorized. I don’t trust people of your sort to defend me. Now if you want to go and enlist in the Army or USMC or become a cop, then you have a responsibility to defend me. Until then, keep you guns off my campus.

4. You should read up on the number of cases of shootings precipated by armed people who are arguing or having another kind of dispute. Many of those people didn’t have criminal records before they blew somebody away in the heat of the moment. Perhaps they didn’t talk about that in your concealed carry training but they did in mine.

5. By the way, who peer-reviewed those studies, the NRA?

6. Do you know the difference between anecdotes and properly conducted empirical research?

7. Is your real name “Glen Reynolds?”

9. Would it be all right for me to carry a bazooka around with me? How about a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle? Did I tell you that I look Arabic? Does that change your opinion about whether you’d like me to pack heat, either concealed or in the open?

10. Why do you refer to yourself as “Braveheart?” Is there some interesting story that goes along with that? Are you Mel Gibson?

11. Is it really your thesis if you weren’t the one to publish the peer reviewed studies?

12. I’d like to be able to carry a gun into your church or into your child’s daycare- would that be all right with you?

So Kevin, I acknowledge that life is filled with uncertainty and that nobody can truly KNOW what might have happened. But, one can make general predictions based upon, not anecdotal evidence, but statitistical studies that have been peer reviewed. I earlier gave two examples that are NOT anecdotal but verifiable where, under similar situations as VT, armed civilian protectors stopped a massacre. Those are FACTS that you can not refute becuase they happened.

I posit that you ARE safer if you are carrying a handgun when confronted by violent criminals becuase the data supports that thesis. This is also why so many States have cancealed carry laws. If the DATA didn’t show a positive impact then it is far easier to vote down those bills. In a fact based ideology, such as mine, if you can show that the arming of law abiding citizens is unsafe, then I would be forced by reason to change my views. Those facts have yet to come to the surface in peer reviewed studies.

I list for your THREE peer reviewed studies that support my thesis. It is up to you to educate yourself away from YOUR dogmatic, fantasy based views.
Under the Gun,
Point Blank
More Guns Less Crime
Go to Amazon or your library. They are more like text books but then that is how a peer reviewed study reads.

Have fun.