In Memorium--Virginia Tech

Today is the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech Massacre and the Virginia Tech Day of Remembrance. Read the bios of the victims.

In particular, my fraternity, Phi Sigma Pi lost family members. Erin Peterson was nearing the end of her initiation period when she was killed. Phi Sigma Pi's Virginia Tech Chapter has a special memorial to her.

Erin's funeral on April 24th was attended by well over 1,000 family and friends, including over sixty Alpha Rho Brothers whom wore their brother pins and purple and gold ribbons in a show of unity. Erin was laid to rest in the shirt she rightfully earned but never had a chance to wear during life: her letters. She was posthumously inducted into Alpha Rho Chapter with the rest of her initiate class.

It may be hard for people not in our Fraternity to understand, but even though I never met Erin and indeed have had little contact with the Virginia Tech Chapter since my active collegiate days, some of the best Brothers I know came from that chapter and I have spent some wonderful times in Blacksburg. Their pain is my pain, their tears, my tears.

Phi Sigma Pi has a saying, Brothers for Life. And even in the after life.



This post will remain at the top of the blog today.

This is Not What "Back to School" Should Entail

AP Photo

In Memory of Erin Peterson and all the Victims at Virginia Tech, I wish you were going back to school also.

Erin Peterson.

A Sound and Logical Reaction

University of Maryland College Park and Towson University, the two largest state univerisities in Maryland are launching separate programs to use text messaging to warn students of emergencies.

Both universities took swift action in the wake of the deadliest shooting rampage in American history at Virginia Tech last month, which raised questions about why students and faculty there went hours without knowledge of a gunman on the campus.

As university enrollments rise and young people increasingly prefer communicating via text messages sent to cell phones rather than by e-mail, schools are incorporating the newer trend into their emergency response plans, security experts say.

With the prevalence of cell phones with the messaging service on campus, the move seems logical. Some of Maryland's smaller universities already have such a system. The system cost the University of Maryland a mere $65,000 to set up and it seems a small price to pay for a useful tool on a campus of more than 30,000 students.

For the system to work, students would have to subscribe to the service. The Baltimore Sun story did not contain any information about whether there is a fee for the service, but I would suspect not.

How to Disarm America

Of course in the aftermath of Viriginia Tech there are predictable calls for gun control. While most of the proposals are objectionalbe simply on policy grounds, i.e. I don't agree with the policy of gun control at its core, at least the proposals generally don't involve gestappo-like tactics to enforce, like this one:

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

snip

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.

Clearly, since such sweeps could not take place all across the country at the same time. But fairly quickly there would begin to be gun-swept, gun-free areas where there should be no firearms. If there were, those carrying them would be subject to quick confiscation and prosecution. On the streets it would be a question of stop-and-search of anyone, even grandma with her walker, with the same penalties for "carrying."

Of course, as Captain Ed pointed out, there is that pesky 2nd Amendment, but Eugene Volokh proposes substituting drugs for guns and see if you come up with another 4th Amendment violation. Here is another substitution for you, obscene material in your own home or "subversive literatute." Sound a little Orwellian to you?

By the way, the author of the dismarmament plan notes in his defense:

And before anyone starts to hyperventilate and think I'm a crazed liberal zealot wanting to take his gun from his cold, dead hands, let me share my experience of guns.

As a child I played cowboys and Indians with cap guns. I had a Daisy Red Ryder B-B gun. My father had in his bedside table drawer an old pistol which I examined surreptitiously from time to time. When assigned to the American embassy in Beirut during the war in Lebanon, I sometimes carried a .357 Magnum, which I could fire accurately. I also learned to handle and fire a variety of weapons while I was there, including Uzis and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Not that this pre-disposition makes up for the unconstitutional plan.

Disconnect Between Virginia Tech and Islamists

Wayne Simmons has the tally and the effects:

The tragedy that occurred on April 16, on the campus of Virginia Tech has highlighted the ways in which our nation pulls together and responds with compassion to those around us who are hurt and need our help. The outpouring of love and affection for those who were slaughtered is characteristic of America.

Yet this tragedy also highlights the disconnect between our public debate and the existential wars we are in.

The very same Americans expressing outrage against mass murderer Cho Seung-hui, do not express the same rage and anger against the Islamic terrorist’s who have already killed thousands of Americans and continue to slaughter Americans and other citizens of the world on a daily basis.

snip

Just week the Associated Press wrote a story about a rare opinion article” written by Sgt. Jim Wilt. Wilt pointed out that at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan the US flag flew at half-staff last week to honor the lost lives at Virginia Tech but the same honor is not given to our own troops. "I think it is sad that we do not raise the bases' flag to half-staff when a member of our own task force dies," Wilt said.

Why do we express outrage and lower flags over the preventable massacre of our beautiful children at Virginia Tech and not even honor our own soldiers or support the War on Terror?

A disconnect indeed.

Bad Case Yeilds Bad Laws

This op-ed makes a pretty good case for why we need to make sure we know what we are doing when responding to the horror of life, whether it is 9/11 or Virginia Tech. There's a saying in the legal profession:

Bad cases make for bad law. Drafting sweeping legislation in response to a particularly terrible incident can end up doing more harm than good. The Patriot Act, produced quickly and without serious deliberation in the wake of 9/11, is a case in point.


The Virginia Tech massacre, with its horrific toll and brutal perpetrator, leads everyone to ask: Could this incident have been prevented, and how could we stop something like it from happening in the future?

snip

The victims of last week's shootings deserve more than just a quick fix that will do little to address the real problems brought to the fore by this tragedy. Designing laws aimed at preventing "future Virginia Techs" will require serious, thoughtful and time-consuming deliberation.

And, even then, they still might not work.

As tragic as the events may be, there is probably little that can be done systematically to prevent Virginia Tech from happening again. It is tragic, but probably the truth.

Mark Steyn on Reality

Um, yeah. What he said:

I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

snip

The "gun-free zone" fraud isn't just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia's distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with "the erosion of intellectual self-defense," and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and "safe spaces" that's the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we "fear guns," and "verbal violence," and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ''The Three Musketeers.'' What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?

That is all.

Hokie Nation

This post will remain at the top today. On behalf of all my Brothers at Phi Sigma Pi, we mourn the loss of Erin Peterson and Reema Samaha, the sister of a Virginia Tech Brother.

Remember all the victims!

Wear your Orange and Maroon today. We are Hokie Nation.

Political Opportunism

Charles Krauthammer has a lengthy op-ed in today's Washington Post about Virginia Tech, laws regarding the mentally unstable, gun control and finally political opportunism.

Now the use of tragedy to advance one's agenda is nothing new, nor is it entirely the province of presidential candidates and interest groups, but Sen. Barack Obama made a serious miscalculation with his speech in Milwaukee on Monday. This from Krauthammer's peice:

It is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage. But it is simply dismaying that a serious presidential candidate should use it as the ideological frame for his set-piece issues.

Politico columnist Ben Smith has brought attention to a speech that Barack Obama made in Milwaukee just hours after the massacre. It must be heard to be believed. After deploring and expressing grief about the shootings, he continues (my transcription): "I hope that it causes us to reflect a little bit more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms. . . . There's also another kind of violence . . . it's not necessarily physical violence."

What kinds does he have in mind? First, "Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women [of Rutgers]. . . . For them to be degraded . . . that's a form of violence. It may be quiet. It may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn." Good to know that Don Imus's "violence" does not quite rise to the level of Cho's.

Second, outsourcing. Yes, outsourcing: "the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country."

Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur -- accusing America of conducting "foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there." Is Obama, who proudly opposed overthrowing the premier mass murderer of our time, Saddam Hussein, suggesting an invasion of Sudan?

Who knows. This whole exercise in defining violence down to include shock-jock taunts and outsourcing would normally be mere intellectual slovenliness. Doing so in the shadow of the murder of 32 innocents still unburied is tasteless, bordering on the sacrilegious.

Of course, Obama's opponent, Hillary Clinton used the Imus/Rutgers affairs to score a few political points as a sympathetic ear and presence. But Krauthammer has this one right. Obama swung and missed on this one, although I think I understand his point. As far as extemporaneoud speaking, I have heard worse.

Writ large, what Obama is doing is nothing more than what Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are doing with regard to the Iraq war, or what Rudy Giuliani has done with regard to 9/11, everyone uses tragedies of historical poporaitons to advance their world view, but in this case, Obama would have been well-served by offering a prayer and shutting up about violence.

Despite all our handwringing about the tragic loss, the media exploitation and grief mongering by nearly all parties, we as a nation seem to revel in the grief. I don't know if this makes us wimpy or simply pathetic in our quest to feel something, but it does belie our outrage. The problem is that the families of the slain victims don't need a nation to mourn with them, they will do that on their own. What they need is a nation that has returned to some semblence of normal so that they too can return to as normal a life as they will ever have again.

That may sound hypocritical given the Virginia Tech stories I have posted. But the national mourning needs to end at some point and the sooner the better. I am not suggesting we forget, but we do need to move beyond that national grief exhibit we seem to love so much.

The Level of Debate

Steven Taylor has this excellent post at Outside the Beltway, where he takes several people, including Michelle Malkin, to task for trying to find someone or something to blame.

What in the world is going on? First we have Derbyshire and Blake and now this. First, why do we have to find blame in places other than the fact that a truly disturbed individual simply did an unthinkable act and cracked. There is only so much that can be done in a free society to prevent such situations. This attempt to blame a general “liberal” attitude at universities and that this somehow has led to a culture of “conflict avoidance” that somehow, by inference, led to people not defending themselves on Monday–that is utterly ridiculous.(links in original altered)

Of course it is natural to look for someone or some orgranization to blame. Given the revelations of the past 24 hours, the Virginia courts and mental health system is likely to take a beating, but can we really blame anyone than the killer?

He cracked and yes, it now appears that the cracking was a slow process, but do we have to torment ourselves and the already bereaved families with searching for the scapegoat? I would hope not.

VA Tech Gunman Went to Mental Facility--Big Deal

The Chicago Tribune and CNN are both reporting that the VA Tech kller had been taken to a mental hospital. To say that this is not surprising is a minor understatement.

What is interesting though is that now all these signs of disturbed individual are coming forward, not surprisingly, but that the media seems to think that these warning signs should have been heeded.

The killer was an adult, and absent a court order, you cannot hold an adult in a mental facility against his or her will. So the fact that he was voluntarily taken to a mental facility does not mean he could have been kept there. Additionally, even with an evaluation at teh facility, he may have been released because he was not considered a threat and two years ago that appeared to be the case.

But the other facet to remember is that thousands of individuals exhibit Cho's behavior and never move beyond being morose or withdrawn. You cannot predict individual human behavior. Warning signs can be misinterpreted or chalked up to just plain odd behavior.

Bad Leads Common In Police Work

Ask any cop. The New York Times is reporting:

And new information emerged that may help explain a fateful two-hour delay by university officials in warning the campus of a gunman at large. According to search warrants and statements from the police, campus investigators had been busy pursuing what appears to have been a fruitless lead in the first of two shooting episodes Monday.

After two people, Emily Jane Hilscher, a freshman, and Ryan Clark, the resident adviser whose room was nearby in the dormitory, were shot dead, the campus police began searching for Karl D. Thornhill, who was described in Internet memorials as Ms. Hilscher’s boyfriend.

According to a search warrant filed by the police, Ms. Hilscher’s roommate had told the police that Mr. Thornhill, a student at nearby Radford University, had guns at his town house. The roommate told the police that she had recently been at a shooting range with Mr. Thornhill, the affidavit said, leading the police to believe he may have been the gunman.

But as they were questioning Mr. Thornhill, reports of widespread shooting at Norris Hall came in, making it clear that they had not contained the threat on campus. Mr. Thornhill was not arrested, although he continues to be an important witness in the case, the police said.

At the time of the dormitory shootings, Col. W. Steven Flaherty, the superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said, “There was certainly no evidence or no reason to think that there was anyone else at that particular point in time.”

It remains to be seen what the nature of the connection between the first two victims and the killer turns out to be, but this report seems to indicate a reasonable assumption by the police based on affadvits.

Virginia Tech Police Response

This Baltimore Sun story talks about some of the same issues I discussed in this post yesterday. The first complaint that has been lodged by many armchair, post-event quarterbacks is that the school should have gone into lockdown, but:

Locking down the Virginia Tech campus would be akin to shutting down a small city - and even then, there's no guarantee that a student concealing weapons couldn't find a way in, campus security experts said.

"In this situation, the shooter was a legitimate student who had an ID card," said Robert Rowan, director of the emergency response team at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. "You could easily lock a building with the shooter in it. I'm not sure that would have prevented the situation there."

snip

Susan Riseling, chief of campus police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said a lockdown would entail securing hundreds of buildings.

"The concept of a lockdown on a 2,600-acre campus that is open and has a thousand entry points by foot or hundreds by car is not feasible," Riseling said.

Riseling, who also serves as vice president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said that locking campus buildings could prove dangerous if the shooter is outside and people are prevented from taking cover indoors.

She also said that sending out alerts by e-mail can take longer than people might expect. First, officials must respond to the call and learn the details of the crime. Then they must weigh the threat to the community and consider whether sending out alerts, through e-mail or reverse 911 calls, for example, would stir unnecessary panic.

That sounds an awful lot like my comments:

Now, let assume that a domestic violence shooting happens in any other city. The killer flees and the police responde a few minutes later. As sad as the domestic violence situation is and unprecedented on the campus, domestic violence shootings do occur in other cities. The procedure would be to begin searching for the killer, but organizing that search takes at minimum a few minutes. So if the shooting took place at 7:15am, give five minutes for police to respond and get starting a search at 7:30-7:40 am would reasonable in any other city and indeed, in a smaller city with few police resources, a 15-25 minute search response is excellent.

Next, police have to make a few assumptions about pursuing such suspects, including guessing where such a killer may go. It would make no sense to remain on a college campus that can closed down a lot easier than a regular town, so the assumption the original shooter fled campus is a reasonable one, even it turns out to be incorrect. In the heat of the moment, with reports no doubt flooding Steger's and Flinchum's office, they had to make a decision at 7:45 am--do we close the campus and notify everyone and cause a panic when we have no facts to support that call?

Of course, closing the campus would be an option and lets assume they did so. How do you secure a 2,600 acre campus with a small police force, at least half of which was not on duty? You can close the street access, but having been to Virginia Tech, I can tell you it is pretty easy to simply walk off campus into the woods. But let us assume the campus and local police can close the campus--who is going to search for the killer?

Now you see the initial delimma of Steger and Flinchum, either close the campus or catch a killer. With their manpower they could only do one or the other.

I am not a security expert, but common sense will tell you that the larger the location and the more open it is, the more difficult it becomes to secure it. Furthermore, any police action must be taken based upon information available at that time.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has said that he will ask indedpendent police experts to take a look at the response of Virginia Tech's leadership. While Kaine has publicly expressed his support for VA Tech President Charles Steger (as has the VA Tech community if the standing ovation Steger got at the convocation yesterday is any indication), the review is not a witch hunt.

Contrary to media myth, these events are rare. However, each event offers an opportunity to learn and a review of the actions of teh school, the campus police and the local police can lead to some important lessons for all universities. Heavan knows we don't ever want to see another tragedy like this one, but we cannot ignore the possible lessons of this event.

But this review must be handled by people outside the event. The review panel must work soon so that memories are fresh and not corrupted by time and outside influences. Furthermore, the panel must look at the problem for the viewpoint of Steger and his administration as well as hindsight.

In the end, I still maintain that, on first impression, Steger and his staff handled this event as best as possible.

Discussion of Concealed Carry Laws and Virginia Tech

The Liberty Papers has several posts on the subject, worthy of a read.

The Loss is Staggering, pt. 2

I am a Brother of the Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity and have been so for 12 years. I am proud of my association and although I can't have possibly met all the Brothers in this outstanding association, we have been rocked by tragedy.

A Brother (and we have women in the Fraternity, but still called Brother) named Erin Peterson was among the victims yesterday. Technically Erin was an Initiate going through the pledge process at Virginia Tech, but she is my Brother.

I have never met Erin, but the very nature of our Brotherhood connects us over the years separating our collegiate careers and the distance between our schools.

The Chapter at Virginia Tech is a very close knit unit, full of life and love for each other and each Brother. Without exception every Brother I have met from Virginia Tech is an extraordinary person and I cannot begin to imagine their pain. Even having never met Erin, my heart aches and the sadness of my Brothers in Blacksburg is palpable in a way that I have no way to explain.


Erin Peterson

Bad Call: VA Tech Parents Demand President, Police Chief Resign

Fox News is reporting that some parents are already demanding the resignation of VA Tech President Charles Steger and Campus Police Chief W.R. Flinchum in the wake of yesteday's shooting.

Steger and Flinchum should not resign.

Tensions are high and some people are understandably upset, but this is absolutely the wrong call. People should be asked to resign only if their actions were unreasonable under the situation or patently incompetent. So far, I have seen no evidence that either man acted unreasonably. Everything that unfolds now is unfolding with the benefit of hindsight. But the very nature of crisis decision making is that the decision makers are working with incomplete information, information that we now possess but they did not at the time. So the measure is whether the actions of Steger and Flinchum were reasonable at the time and in crisis mode with far less information than we know have.

Here is a excerpt from Fox News:

"My God, if someone shoots somebody there should be an immediate lockdown of the campus," said John Shourds. "They totally blew it. The president blew it, campus police blew it."

The Shourds said they received a phone call from their daughter, Alexandra, a freshman at the college in Blacksburg, who was unsure of how to handle a vague university e-mail received around 9:20 a.m. regarding the first shooting incident that happened at the West Ambler Johnston Hall around 7:15 a.m.

Let us consider Virginia Tech as its own self-contained city, which in effect it is. With a population of 30,000 between students and staff, it is not a small town, but a small city. The concept of a "lockdown" is absolutely laughable when you talk about any other city. When dealing with curious and, yes rebellious, students getting a "lockdown" is impossible and anyone who thinks it is possible has no concept of security outside their own home. The Shrouds, parents that they may be, were not in Steger's and Flinchum's position, they have no concept of how to react in such a situation.

Now, let assume that a domestic violence shooting happens in any other city. The killer flees and the police responde a few minutes later. As sad as the domestic violence situation is and unprecedented on the campus, domestic violence shootings do occur in other cities. The procedure would be to begin searching for the killer, but organizing that search takes at minimum a few minutes. So if the shooting took place at 7:15am, give five minutes for police to respond and get starting a search at 7:30-7:40 am would reasonable in any other city and indeed, in a smaller city with few police resources, a 15-25 minute search response is excellent.

Next, police have to make a few assumptions about pursuing such suspects, including guessing where such a killer may go. It would make no sense to remain on a college campus that can closed down a lot easier than a regular town, so the assumption the original shooter fled campus is a reasonable one, even it turns out to be incorrect. In the heat of the moment, with reports no doubt flooding Steger's and Flinchum's office, they had to make a decision at 7:45 am--do we close the campus and notify everyone and cause a panic when we have no facts to support that call?

Of course, closing the campus would be an option and lets assume they did so. How do you secure a 2,600 acre campus with a small police force, at least half of which was not on duty? You can close the street access, but having been to Virginia Tech, I can tell you it is pretty easy to simply walk off campus into the woods. But let us assume the campus and local police can close the campus--who is going to search for the killer?

Now you see the initial delimma of Steger and Flinchum, either close the campus or catch a killer. With their manpower they could only do one or the other.

With a campus now closed, the killer could be contained on campus, which is what happended by design of the killer.

When the killer was not quickly apprehended, say it is now 8:30-8:45am, roughly one hour after the start of a manhunt. Now Steger and Flinchum are faced with the decision of whether and how to inform an entire city. Here is where VA Tech differs greatly from the rest of the world. On college campuses, every employee, student, and faculty member has an email address. So they sent out an email, which took a while to compose, in an effort to inform people of the danger and at the same time prevent widespread panic--call this 10-15 minutes to compose and send. The time now is 9:00am or so.

But sending an email to 30,000 people takes time, even with state-of-the-art email facilities at VA Tech. So around 9:10-9:20am people start checking emails and getting the message.

From the time the first responders got to the first shooting scene, at best 7:16am, and Steger and Flinchum are notified, call it another 10 minutes, to the decision to send an email out to campus, we have 1 hour and 45 minutes or so of elapsed time. Now I am just guessing as to the sequence of events, but I will bet that in the coming days, my guess will be pretty close to accurate. No action here is unreasonable nor rises to the level of firing or resignation.

Crisis decision making of this scale is not something the Mr. Steger has any experience nor can you really plan for something like this. Chief Flinchum's job probably entails planning for such a scenario, but with a police force more accustomed to controlling rowdy fans at a football game, how often can the police train for such a scenario.

In light of what is known now, I must tip my hat to both Steger and Flinchum. Both did a fine job under nightmarish cirucmstances. Instead of being forced to leave their job, they should be commended for good solid crisis decision-making.

Misunderstanding Virginia Tech

Gerard Baker, writing in The Times of London, displays a stunning lack of understanding of the causes of the Virginia Tech massacre:

Perhaps of all the elements of American exceptionalism – those factors, positive or negative, that make the US such a different country, politically, socially, culturally, from the rest of the civilised world – it is the gun culture that foreigners find so hard to understand.

The country’s religiosity, so at odds with the rest of the developed world these days; its economic system which seems to tolerate vast disparities of income; even all those strange sports Americans enjoy – all of these can at least be understood by the rest of us, even if not shared.

But why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?

As shocking as the killings that seem to happen with such frequency are, they do not shock the American conscious as much as abridging freedoms do. If the rest of the world is so "civilised" as Baker suggests, why do killings happen there? The United Kingdom has far more instances of terrorism in its recent history than the United States. In many ways, these crimes or acts of terrorism if you will, are probably prevented more than they occur, because of that very "gun culture" we cherish.

Might a gun carrying professor or student have prevented the incident yesterday? We can only speculate. However, the one thing we know for sure is that the rest of the "civilised world" will look at the United States as a bunch of gun-crazed shootists who think their nation is the O.K. Corral, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

Baker seems to take the position that the United States is collectively insane:

The simple truth is that Americans themselves remain unwilling to take drastic measures to restrict gun availability. This is rooted deep in the American belief in individual freedom and a powerful suspicion of government. Americans are deeply leery of efforts by government to restrict the freedom to defend themselves. A sizeable minority, perhaps a majority, believe the risk that criminals will perpetrate events such as yesterday’s is a painful but necessary price to pay to protect that freedom.

The sheer scale of the carnage yesterday may after all make the Blacksburg killings truly unique in American history. That will doubtless lead to more self-examination and perhaps calls for new restrictions on firearms. But it won’t change America’s deep-rooted and sometimes lethal commitment to its own freedoms.

In fact, statistically, it is far safer to live in the United States, even in a post 9/11 world, than anywhere else in the world. Surely there are some Brits who believe that if more poeople in their nation were armed that they may be able to prevent some the terrorism that occurs there. But restricting gun ownership only means that criminal have to fear being shot by police, who may take minutes at best to respond.

Make no mistake, it may come to pass that the killer in Blacksburg obtained his weaponry legally. But the opposite may be true and in the end it matters little. But sacrificing our freedoms upon the altar of our grief will only lead to more grief. Having restricted gun laws has not spared Britain or any other nation from the animal instincts of some of it citizens and it won't do so here either.

The Patently Predictable

Michelle Malkin has the predictable NY Times reaction (Hint it involves more abridgments of our Constitutional rights).

The Instapundit has a good roundup of information that is a little less obvious, including this piece about campus security:

Campuses don’t need more security. Although simply reassuring the student body probably will require some beefed up security in the short run, neither Virginia Tech nor any other college campus needs to make any long term commitment on the basis of this shooting. Like most college campuses, Virginia Tech is safe. In 2005, the last year for which data are available, the campus had no murders, forcible thefts, or aggravated assaults. Almost no cities of 25,000, Virginia Tech’s student enrollment, ever have had a year that safe. Despite a single horrific day nothing fundamental has changed.

Virginia Tech already has ample gun control and it didn’t stop the shooting. Although the State of Virginia itself has rather liberal concealed firearms laws, Virginia Tech’s Campus Code of Conduct (See section V.W.) already bans all real firearms, BB guns, and even fencing foils. Other than police and members of the University’s ROTC program, nobody can even possess any weapons on the Virginia Tech campus already. No free country has weapons laws as severe as Virginia Tech’s.

Previously the Instapundit had noted that one of his readers had told him about an effort to allow gun possession on campus was denied by the Virginia General Assembly.

The Loss is Staggering

As details about those who died in Blacksburg come to light, the loss is simply staggering. Of course, the immediate loss of life is difficult to imagine. Yet, the loss not just to the immediate family and friends, but to the world at large. Among the dead were two faculty members:

The head of the engineer science and mechanics department says two professors were among the 32 people gunned down by a lone gunman, who then took his own life.

One of the professors was Liviu Librescu (LIV'-yoo li-BRES'-coo), a Romanian who was known internationally for his research in aeronautical engineering. Engineering department chief Ishwar Puri (ISH-wahr PYUR'-ee) says Librescu's research made aircraft better.

The other professor killed was Kevin Granata. He conducted orthopedic research in hospitals before coming to Tech. Puri says Granata was one of the top five biomechanics researchers in the country working on movement dynamics in cerebral palsy.

The contributions of these two men were significant and real. But the potential in each student who died is also real and cannot be quantified. Virginia Tech has produced thousands of America's best engineering minds and the loss of even one person who could have changed the world simply cannot be measured.