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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Brady Gang Blames Virginia for College Massacre

Blacksburg, VA (TLS). Residents, students, and faculty in this normally quiet Blue Ridge Mountain town are still reeling from the heartbreak and senseless tragedy of a Virginia Tech campus massacre that left 33 dead and over 25 wounded.

No adequate words can be mustered to express the intense shock, grief, and outrage experienced by those personally effected by this tragedy. Our prayers and thoughts go out to all of those involved.

The Brady Campaign to rid the nation of handguns was in full swing, however, almost immediately after the incident took place. A spokesman for the Brady Campaign took to the airwaves, not to talk about the emotional toll on a campus in shock, but about the fact that supposedly Virginia's lax gun control laws are to blame for the carnage.

Such blatant political opportunism is to be forcefully condemned. Shame on the Brady campaign.

Plus, to add insult to injury, a CBS News correspondent reporting from Virginia Tech stated that 'a gun show was held just 30 minutes from campus two weeks ago,' implying of course that the gunman obviously was present at the show and probably bought his handguns there.

After all, only mentally unstable nutcases with anger control issues go to gun shows, right?

Here we go again. The anti-gun bigots always crawl out of the woodwork when something like this happens, even before the families of all the victims have been notified, before we know anything about the status of the wounded, and before we know anything at all about the perpetrator.

The ONLY thing we know is that the gunman was in his mid-20s and of Asian descent.

We do not know his motives, when or where he bought his weapons, or anything else about him, for that matter, except that without saying much he walked into a dormitory and a classroom building and began to systematically kill whoever was there.

One Tech professor was shot in the head.

The gun did not discharge on its own. I have never witnessed a firearm spontaneously firing at the heads of human beings, unless there were a human being attached to the trigger.

Perhaps rather than taking the easy way out and demonizing an inanimate object that has no capability of action apart from the trigger action of a person, American society needs to take a cold, hard look at the culture that produces these kinds of perpetrators.

We know, for example, that in the music culture, lyrics about chopping off heads, shooting people, and slaughtering the unsuspecting innocents with knives, all within the context of vengeful rage against women, society, politicians, clergymen, and police officers are all too common and readily available. These songs are listened to over and over again on iPods and other portable sound equipment for most of the day.

While Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson spout their blather about how awful Don Imus is for using certain language, millions of African American teenagers listen to lyrics of songs each day in which the 'n' word and much worse are used numerous times. These messages are played over and over again into minds of young, impressionable teens who walk around nearly delirious from the constant barrage of the relentless beat and the hate-filled lyrics.

And yes, this is just as bad if not worse than anything Don Imus has said in all his years on radio.

Over the course of the next few weeks I am sure we will hear again from the Brady gang. There will be calls for strict gun control measures.

But guess what? Virginia Tech already has a strict gun control policy that is much tougher than the state of Virginia. The students and professors caught in the crossfire were not armed--by university policy.

Once again, as we have seen numerous times before, if there had been armed persons in those classrooms, the perpetrator would have been dead on the floor before he would have succeeded in shooting over 50 people. I found myself saying to myself as the news broke, 'If I had been there, that "s-o-b" would have been dead before getting off five shots.'

My friends, one dead perpetrator and five people wounded is much better than 33 dead and 26 wounded.

An armed citizen in the classroom could have prevented this massacre. And anyone who tells you otherwise is simply lying.

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