Holy crap. Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 22.
At least 22 people were killed today, some of them students, and about two dozen more injured during shootings at Virginia Tech, some of them in a classroom, the police said. A gunman was also shot to death, officials said.
. . .
At 7:15 a.m., an emergency 911 call came in to University police department about a shooting at a campus building, West Ambler Johnston, a dormitory for about 900 freshman students. About two hours later it was followed by a second shooting at a classroom in a science and engineering building on the opposite end of campus, Norris Hall. The shooter died there, the police said.“It didn’t stop for almost two or three minutes,†a junior from Fairfax named Josh told CNN. “It sounded like a handgun or something but it was many, many shots.â€
Meanwhile, In The Agora seems to blame the tragedy on a gun ban at Virginia Tech. I’m a friend of the Second Amendment and think there is a certain utility in allowing citizens to meet force with force where necessary, but jeeze, wait until the bodies are cold.
Huh? First, examining the cause and/or missed opportunities to prevent this massacre is hardly offensive to those dead. Indeed, it would seem to be a duty owed to them.
Second, our weblog is hardly alone in exploring such things. The gun ban is being discussed on – literally – countless blogs and virtually all of the big ones, most notably Instapundit. If ITA is insensitive you best get busy damning much of the ‘blogosphere’.
You know, I was waiting for some sort of ridiculous commentary like this but I would have thought the bodies would at least be cold first.
This libertarian ideal world where everyone is armed to the teeth and therefore stopping gun violence may be a happy little land, but it’s just as realistic as the Tooth Fairy or the Hogfather.
(Yes, I’m reading too much Terry Pratchett lately)
Jason, addressing such positions out of hand, as if ludicrous as the Tooth Fairy, is something typically done by those who have no reasoned/scientific response. In fact, the position I’ve implied has a heck of a lot of research and support behind it. Check here, for starters: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=161637
On the other hand, if you prefer scoffing as a form of intelligent discourse, don’t expect much participation from me.
literally countless blogs! so many that it would be literally impossible to count them all! literally!
and virtually all of the big blogs! well, except for those liberal blogs… none of them are talking about it. but other than that, virtually all!
you’d better stock up on server space for all your condemnations, doug.
The post is from the guy who decided to make the underage drinking of Brad Ellsworth’s college-aged daughter a campaign issue. Consider the source.
I didn’t graduate from Tech, but I took a year’s worth of commuter classes there while living in Roanoke. I consider it my pseudo alma mater, since it was the closest thing to a real college experience that I had.
My friend is a TA that had at least one class in Norris. I haven’t been able to reach him.
Before the relentless spin and politicizing begins, you might try to remember that these are someone’s children. Someone’s friends.
From what I’ve heard, the death tally is likely go to higher soon. It’s easy to start the blame wurlitzer, but can’t we mourn this loss first?
And as we all know, only liberal hippie commie gun grabbers would dare ban guns from college campuses, places where, last I checked, fair amounts of alcohol and other drugs are consumed.
The academic research on the subject (Joshua’s ludicrous cite of serial fabricator and academic fraud John Lott notwithstanding… Thanks for the laugh though) shows that guns work in both violence-increasing and violence-decreasing directions. On the one hand, there’s the woman who fends off knife-wielding would-be rapist with her handgun, but on the other hand, the barroom argument which would have ended with maybe a punch or two ends with gunfire. No one can know if looser gun laws would have led to the VA Tech killer being brought down earlier, or if the hypothetical lower death total would have made up for the hypothetical alcohol-fueled accidents and disagreements made worse with the introduction of firearms.
To claim to know otherwise is pointless crystal-ball gazing. It is interesting which side of the gun debate jumped to unproveable counterfactuals the day of the tragedy though, isn’t it?
I’m sorry if my comment added to that feeling. it just pisses me off to no end when people misrepresent tragedies for their own myopic fairy tale world views.
My thoughts are going out to everyone at VT and I hope the fatalities don’t go any higher.
You’ll notice Claybourne disappeared when the reasoned discourse appeared.
Let’s not get personal, please. Attack the ideas, not the person.
Sorry.
John, I disappeared when I left work and went out to eat with friends. But the only “reasoned discourse” in the comments I seem to have missed thus far comes from Phaedrus, who rightly critiques John Lott’s work. It was initially linked to by Prof. Glen Reynolds – a generally respected academic on the subject – and so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Having said that, the scoff and derisive tone of Phaedrus’ comment is hardly the kind that opens one up to “reasoned discourse.” Contrast his tone with that of liberal ITA reader philosopher here (http://www.intheagora.com/archives/2007/04/gun_ban_assists.html#019034), who notes Lott’s failings in a respectful way. And note that I am perfectly willing to concede those criticisms here. Yet the whole tone of the comments of this post, and in far too many other posts here, is one that suffocates any kind of intellectual discourse and drives away anyone interested in healthy discourse.
Doug, I appreciate your perspective and the issues you cover on this blog. But, frankly, the kind of comments in this post are the kind that will keep readers away…of course, I can only speak for myself.
Meanwhile, the network coverage of this event this morning really rubbed me the wrong way — in particular some sort of retrospective on school shootings. The whole thing fairly screamed out to the viewer: BE AFRAID.
Also, not really a fan of using this tragedy to immediately call for more gun control either.
I’d recommend:
1. Be horrified.
2. Give sympathy to the victims.
3. Figure out what happened.
4. Figure out why it happened.
5. Figure out how to prevent it from happening again.
“Turn it into a political football” would be well down on the list.
Doug, I think some are suggesting – and perhaps me, my mind is not completely made up on this – that the issues of gun control goes directly to numbers 4 and 5. When politicians immediately use it to advocate a particular policy you have reason to suspect political maneuvering. But when academics and those in the business of studying public policy do so, it is more out of concern for 4 and 5 and not to score political points.
The 24 hour news cycle and the cable networks, while convenient and handy for catching up on the news whenever desired, are absolutely toxic on thing like these. The instant second-guessing of Virginia Tech’s response seems a bit much. The early accounts of the shooting were that this was some sort of a domestic incident rather than a random act of violence. Certainly, they could have locked down the campus, but I’m not sure they had reason to believe it was necessary.
Events like this are newsworthy because they are tragic and scary and unpredictable, but sometimes the coverage loses sight of the fact that such things are rare, and more importantly, basically unpreventable. Unfortunately, some humans have the capacity to do evil things like this, either because of indifference to human life, mental illness, ro some combination of both. I’m sure that we will see calls for increased security on college campuses, and it goes without saying that campus police should have detailed plans for how to deal with these situations when they arise. Still, what sort of security would have prevented an attack like this from a person who is willing to die during the course of committing the crime? An armed security guard? The shooter could have killed him first. Locked doors? He could have stolen a student’s backpack (if he wasn’t a student himself) and done the same thing. The current trend in society is to find someone to blame whenever something goes wrong. In this case, I do see how the blame really can go past the shooter.
Ugh. Should be “do not see” in the last sentence.
Discussions about locking down the campus are silly. Campus is too big, etc. Plus, it looked domestic. The first part of the shooting closely mirrored a shooting we had at IU back in 1992. A spurned ex-boyfriend drove cross-country to IU and shot the girlfriend and her new boyfriend at close range in the graduate dorm. In a bit of luck, the guy lost his glasses in the scuffle and ended up blindly scurrying off and hunkering down a few blocks away and killing himself. When his car was found, it had thousands of rounds of ammo. Who knows if he intended to do more killing? Anyway, at the time, we didn’t have cellphones and laptops for the most part. I think the campus response was to call the RA’s, because ours told us to stay inside.
In theory, a lecture hall full of people throwing textbooks at the guy and simultaneously rushing him ought to be an effective way to neutralize a single shooter. But it’s really hard to organize such a response when someone suddenly bursts in. Who would want to lead the charge, after all? It would be interesting to know if such an approach would be more effective than randomly armed people rummaging for their guns and then returning fire from various distances in the midst of total mayhem. Unfortunately, probably not testable.
Sometimes arming students does, in fact, stop rampaging gunmen: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001749
Not so much a “fairy tale” anymore, is it?
the final count is 33 dead, including the shooter.
“Forget any and all college affiliations today. For today, we are all Hokies.” -CNN
pray for our hokies
Quoting Joshua Clayborn from his comment on his own blog: “philosopher, that’s good to know about Lott. Prof. Reynolds, who linked to it, is generally a respectable academic on the subject so the fact that he linked to it carried some weight. I wonder why, if the author is not to be respected, Reynolds would link to him. Ah well.”
If I’m using a derisive tone, it’s because stuff like this drives me to it. In my experience, Glenn Reynolds linking to someone approvingly is a pretty helpful heuristic that the source is not to be trusted at all. :-)
The funny thing is that my actual position is basically in favor of some level of gun rights. I essentially agree with Levitt in “Freakonomics” where he says that guns overall have pretty even amounts of violence-increasing and violence-decreasing incidents, making them statistically neutral with respect to the overall crime rate. As such, given that we live in a society with a presumption of freedom, generalized gun bans strike me as an unecessary infringment on liberty.
However, these results only hold true for generalized bans. Convicted criminals will of course be much more likely to use guns in violence-increasing ways, so banning convicted felons from gun ownership, and requiring criminal background checks, strikes me as reasonble. We can assume that those properly schooled in gun safety are less likely to be involved in accidents, so a case can be made for requiring a gun buyer to demonstrate familiarity with basic gun safety.
But to stay with this specific case, it would not surprise me to see that college-age students are statistically more likely to do foolish and unsafe things, making a case for a localized college campus ban. Now I have no idea if the numbers bare this out, but absent a legitimate academic study, no one knows either way. So I’d agree with Doug, both the people blaming gun bans for this incident, as well as the ones saying stricter gun control would have prevented it, are merely looking for political footballs.
the logical conclusion of the line of thinking that looser gun laws would have prevented this shooting is to go the john derbyshire/nathan blake route and argue that the victims were cowards because they didn’t just rush the guy, whether they were armed or not.