This person may want to identify herself, but I'll leave that up to her:

I was 12 years old when Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas University clock tower and started murdering people below.

I had to refresh that old memory of grainy, black-and-white TV coverage by
doing some research, but one of the reasons he didn't kill MORE people than
he did was that not only did the local police fire upward at him, trying to
keep him down . . . but LOCAL CITIZENS ran to their homes and cars and brought back their guns and rifles and joined in on firing up at the tower.

Now we all just wait around for the SWAT teams and heaven forfend any
civilians try to help.

But the police aren't doing much either: they're too busy "securing the perimeter," as Attila the Hub points out. They don't try to get the shooter, so lives can be saved: they just seal off the campus, as they did at Columbine. Meanwhile, the students we've disarmed so V-Tech can be a nice, safe "gun-free zone" are being systematically executed. Law enforcement wasn't there. School security wasn't there. Those students who owned guns weren't permitted to have them on campus.

And we've told kids that when someone has a gun, we ought to do what they say. So when they were told to line up, that's what they did.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:00 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Barry Saunders of Raleigh, North Carolina's, News & Observer encapsulates the "reasoning" we'll be hearing a lot of in the weeks and months ahead: that if only a big magnet in the sky could suck up all the firearms on the planet, no one ever need fear "gun violence" again. And events like those at Virginia Tech would need never happen again.

I'm too angry to send him a polite, reasoned reply. Perhaps I'll be capable of it later.

There's an e-mail address at the end of the piece: you might try sending him a note if you can compose one that will create reasonable doubt in the back of his mind about the wisdom of his views. Don't just vent. It won't do any good.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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. . . for Gun-Free Zones.

Does anyone have a current body count from these very-safe gun-free zones?

I mean, at least high-risk activities like sky-diving aren't generally considered critical to one's career (in the case of colleges) or mandated by law (in the case of high schools).

Our schools are turning into do-it-yourself killing fields, due to the proliferation of gun-free zones—which are, in effect, target galleries for the unhinged.

Ed Isler points out:

Pollsters have found that 85% of Americans would find it appropriate for a principal or teacher to use "a gun at school to defend the lives of students" to stop a school massacre (Research 2000 poll).

The words of Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker should be haunting him in the wake of the massacre at his school. Last year, a bill was killed in the Virginia legislature to enable those with concealed weapons permits to carry their guns at schools. Hincker said that "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

I'm sure the parents of the dead kids appreciate it very much.

UPDATE: More here, via a fairly good Instapundit roundup. I am just enraged that we disarm people, and tell them never to resist the nice guy with the weapon. Thirty-two innocent people dead. With a different public mindset—and different policies—it could have been one or maybe two, including the gunman.

Don't let the silly words of Larry Hincker die: make sure he and the other state legislators around this country know that we don't want to feel safe. We want to be safe—at least, as safe as we can be in a world that includes the criminally insane.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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ABC is apparently asking for stories from ordinary citizens who have used guns in self-defense (including by brandishing them). No word on whether John Stossel is involved, but it is for 20/20, and we should probably send our stories in. More here.

Via Insty.

FWIW, I once appeared on a small segment on CNN as a gun owner/Second Amendment advocate who considered herself a feminist (this was in the early 1990s, and another of those "women against gun violence" groups had just formed—I was the "equal time" tokenette). Those who saw the segment said I came off pretty well, despite the fact that the woman who interviewed me was a major consumer of the gun-control Kool-Aid.

So it's worth doing even if the 20/20 segment in question is not produced by St. John.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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