The Republican Party's Virginia Tech Problem

The shooting and apparent suicide at Virginia Tech ought to make people wake up and ask once again why it is so easy for those who prove to be deranged to obtain firearms. As a piece in The Daily Beast notes, this week's events pose serious questions for Rick Perry who has supported a bill that would allow concealed weapons on college campuses. But Perry is anything but unique in his support for allowing guns in areas where they don't belong and in this regard, the article should have more strongly condemned the GOP as a whole. Here in Virginia members of the Republican Party of Virginia have been pushing equally insane bills (as the article duly notes) and gun advocates are livid with Old Dominion University which wants to restrict guns on campus. It would seem the GOP wants a return of the Wild West of old where guns are everywhere and the carnage will only increase.

And as for Eric Cantors feigned "shock" over this latest tragedy at Virginia Tech, it's is disingenuous at best. Carnage such as this is the natural consequence of the GOP's wrongheaded policies on gun control. Another Daily Beast article written by a Virginia Tech professor addresses the deadly consequences of the GOP's lust for unrestricted firearms. Here are highlights from this later article:

I was locked down with my class of journalism students during the April 16, 2007, shooting rampage on Virginia Tech’s campus. As soon as it was over, one of my students and I set out for the crime scene nearby, to report the story.

Numb with disbelief, we quietly made our way through police lines and even stopped to chat briefly with two officers. I was taken aback when one of the policemen suddenly blurted out, “We’ve got to do something about people having access to guns. I don’t know what, but we have to do something.”

Later, given time to reflect, I understood that the officer had arrived at the only sane conclusion possible in those circumstances. No freakin’ guns. None. Just a few yards away, Tech’s Norris Hall was filled with the bodies of 32 very precious souls.


I stood outside Norris just beyond the yellow crime-scene tape that whipped in the stiff wind. We watched the grim faces of officers and technicians coming and going from the grisly scene inside. They were profoundly disturbed by the ringing of the victims’ cellphones as family and friends tried desperately to confirm their safety in the wake of news reports.

The peaceful little village of Blacksburg was forced to revisit that trauma this week when a gunman inexplicably killed a campus police officer and the university was plunged into another lockdown that lasted into Thursday evening. Suddenly, national media were again converging on Virginia Tech, invoking for many the painful and nauseating memories of 2007.

[T]ens of thousands die each year around the globe from gun violence. In the United States alone, better than 31,000 people died from firearms wounds in 2007 with nearly 70,000 more suffering injury, according to the advocacy group Legal Community Against Violence. Of that number, 12,632 were murdered.

So often in the wake of these incidents I’ve thought of the helpless complaint from that officer in 2007: “We’ve got to do something about people having access to guns. I don’t know what, but we have to do something.”

In recent years, there has been a movement to allow registered guns on college campuses. Having taught 20 years of college journalism and taught in the public schools for three more, I can say that schools are often places highly charged with emotion and conflict. Only an idiot could posit that guns would somehow enhance that atmosphere.

You cannot be injured by a weapon that isn’t there. So you can argue all you want about Second Amendment rights, but many countries don’t have anywhere near our level of gun violence simply because guns are illegal or deemphasized. Unfortunately, in this country, the killing isn’t going to stop, not unless we stand up to the gun manufacturers’ lobby and begin dialing back our aggressive firearms culture.

The only alternative is to continue to endure the succession of shootings and killings and public trauma and to continue to accept the idea that we are impotent to do anything about it. From Blacksburg to Little Rock to Tucson, we are discovering one terrible day after another that that’s simply no way to live a life.