New horror as Tech students slain at campground
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Already reeling from the 2007 massacre and the nearly-two-years-later cafeteria beheading, Virginia Tech finds itself once again hit by horror, as two students visiting a campground in the nearby Jefferson National Forest have been slain by gunfire.
Why is there “horror” and “outrage” every time a shooting murder occurs? Why do people act surprised? If you really value human life - put your money where your mouth is. What do you value - human life and safety or the right for every individual to carry and own guns? Guns kill people, people with guns kill people - you can’t have it both ways folks! It’s time to accept the tragic consequences of your choice and quit pretending like you don’t have a solution.
Hhmmm… a choice. I value the right to carry and own guns. Always have, always will.
While gun ownership by citizens will never be banned totally in the USA, it won’t be a pretty place to live if it does somehow happen.
A gun didn’t jump out of the front seat of a car and walk over to kill these two young people. A person was behind the gun. The person is the problem. Find the person, execute him, problem solved.
I’ll take my chances at being shot and killed by some lunatic with a gun…. before I give up my right to own a gun so as to defend myself from this same lunatic. Because the crazy lunatic is going to find a gun whether they are outlawed or not.
Yes, I agree. If we take away the right for every individual to carry and own guns, we’ll all be much safer. Once guns are illegal, people will be protected from criminals, those who willfully break the law. Surely those who choose to break the law will never choose to break the law by illegally possessing a firearm!
Idiot.
Exactly (I assume you are the self-righteous citizen?) - that’s what I’m saying. The majority of Americans feel exactly as you do - so let’s stop pretending that we are outraged or shocked when tragic murders of people we love happen. The majority of people want guns and people with guns kill other people. I just want to stop the hypocrisy of wondering why murders occur at the numbers they do in the US.
Henry Adams, are you joking? Who’s pretending to be outraged or shocked? Forget guns, the murderer didn’t accidentally kill these two students.
If he used a knife would you outlaw knives? Your mind is simple.
Why is there “horror” and “outrage” every time a driving murder occurs? Why do people act surprised? If you really value human life - put your money where your mouth is. What do you value - human life and safety or the right for every individual to drive a car? Cars kill people, people with cars kill people - you can’t have it both ways folks! It’s time to accept the tragic consequences of your choice and quit pretending like you don’t have a solution.
So far none of you have gotten the point - see the headline of the story. People love to blame other people and act powerless - like how could this happen to me. Well ,it happens because you and all the others - make choices. Death and murder are part of life when you value and live in a gun society. Look at the statistics, quit whining about it, and accept the facts - I have. I love guns, but I don’t confuse them with my fork.
Death and murder occur in a society with or without guns. If the victims had guns, they may not have been able to protect themselves. If the murderer didn’t have a gun, he/she may have used a knife instead.
Either way, this is considered “horror” to many people in the world even though it may not affect you.
I don’t eat with my gun either and I know life goes on. However, if everyone were as callous and insensitive as yourself, life wouldn’t be worth living.
Guns do not kill people. People kill people. A gun does not go off unless the trigger is pulled and/or guns do not automatically aim themselves. It’s considered a horror and people are suprised when you live in a society that values life such as we do. If you want to live in a society thats not suprised move to the middle east. You are granted only one life on this earth and when it’s cut short by a murderer it is a horror.
Henry Adams, I thought your point was more gun control? As in banning civilian possession of firearms? The only problem with banning guns totally is the fact that the only people left with guns will be cops and criminals. I think it will then be pretty hard to tell which is which.
Murder is murder. A criminal act no matter what tool is used. Lizzie Borden didn’t use a gun. And if I had been one of her victims, I would have preferred she did use a gun.
Oh geez, these comments are why I hate Middle America.
I agree with WestBerkeleyFlats, and therefore advise Henry Adams to give up trying to get the other commenters to see reason (let alone get them to refrain from regurgitating the tired slogans of NRA lobbying campaigns). The gun rights cranks are not the type to ever look at statistics generated in countries other than this one, which has one positive effect — if things get so ballistically crazy here that the rest of us need to flee, we can be confident that the gun-slingers won’t follow us abroad, but just remain here and blast their way into oblivion. But what I don’t get is how such law-and-order types can so easily dismiss the consistent pleas by law enforcement officers (who risk their lives to protect us) to better control citizen access to guns — it’s like they want to make the cops’ jobs harder and more dangerous for them.
“Oh geez, these comments are why I hate Middle America.”
These comments are why we hate elitist.
Oh jebus, WestBerkeleyFlats, you’re so right Between comments like these, and the yelling morons at the Town Hall meetings, it’s like being tossed into a big old bucket of DUMB.
Whatever happened to the concept of civilization? And why does every story in the Hook have to degenerate into a gun owners’ or cops-n-robbers rant?
I’m a gun owner by the way, and a crack shot. But I believe there should be much tighter regulations attached to ownership. It’s a huge responsibility to own a weapon who’s sole purpose is killing someone, and I dare say most aren’t up the responsibility. So save your lame automobile analogies for your hick neighbors and pals in the NRA.
“I’m a gun owner by the way, and a crack shot. But I believe there should be much tighter regulations attached to ownership. It’s a huge responsibility to own a weapon who’s sole purpose is killing someone, and I dare say most aren’t up the responsibility. So save your lame automobile analogies for your hick neighbors and pals in the NRA”
So what qualifies you to own a gun? Being a crack shot is not a legitimate reason. Maybe you feel entitled because you may be educated or possibly because you feel superior to others?
What gives you the right to even express your opinion on this board? Maybe we need tighter speech laws in addition to tighter gun control laws.
Think about it.
“It’s a huge responsibility to own a weapon who’s sole purpose is killing someone”
I agree that there should be tighter regulations but claiming that a gun’s “sole purpose” is to kill someone is ignorant (see: hunting). Please leave your drama at the door.
Bottom line is that the person who shot the gun is responsible and not “guns”. The car/knives analogy is appropriate because it’s silly to think that cars or knives will be banned, yet they kill people all the time. It’s the decisions that people make that end lives.
This article headline is sensationalistic, what difference does it make if they’re Tech students? There are are over 25,000 people enrolled at Tech. Is it going to be news when any of them die from now on?
Can you all just drop it..these were people i loved and you are using it to argue about if guns shall be allowed to be owned or not…show some respect to the people the where taken from us.
blame, blame, blame…. the answer is deterrnent! murder can be committed with a rock, ban rocks? Expedite the trial, kill the murderer and the next time someone considers committing the crime, maybe they won’t
quote: “…law-and-order types can so easily dismiss the consistent pleas by law enforcement officers (who risk their lives to protect us) to better control citizen access to guns — it’s like they want to make the cops’ jobs harder and more dangerous for them.”
You are mistaken. Cops aren’t the ones whining about more gun control.
And “gun on cop” crime is very miniscule in the USA. So small it really doesn’t even apply in a gun control debate.
If S.R.C. takes the trouble to check the lists of those who supported the Brady Bill and oppsoed letting the assult weapons ban lapse, s/he will see that the police are indeed cocnerned about the free access to guns in certain parts of this country. Whether the police can be accused of “whining” about it is a subjective matter. Certainly they are not nearly as strident as the whack jobs showing up at town hall meetings or the tea-baggers.
VPI students would seem to be taking their lives into their hands every time they return to Blacksburg. That place has become a yearly bloodbath. Forget about the guns, let’s just shut down the school.
I’m sure our country’s founding fathers thought about the consequences of having a right to bear arms imbedded in the laws of this land, these horrible occurences being an example of such. But these problems, murder, have been a problem since the dawn of the ages for man. That being said our right to bear arms is actually a huge advantage for this country. If it weren’t for this right Japan would of invaded the US back in WWII without blinking an eye. The REAL problem is society and like so many before me have already said, the people involved in the sinful act.
“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms …. disarm only
those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
Such laws make things worse for the assaulted
and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage
than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be
attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
- Thomas Jefferson
dig on that C-ville.
as for the victims of this senseless act in which the above article references, you are martyrs. The cause? Freedom. Life. Education. The only thing I can do is pray for the families….
mmmm 23 years of law enforcement- and criminals kill people, with or without guns.
“would of invaded the US back in WWII….”
If only the grammar police were better armed…
It is a shame that these two young people were murdered. I hope they catch the murderer. However these two people did have a choice to be armed. OC is legal in Va and NF. But without details how the murder occured is is not possible to know if they were taken unaware or had a chance to defend themselves.
However I know when I camped I always had a knife since that is a very useful tool when camping. So hey could have been armed with a folding knife. Not good against a gun but not totally defenseless
To East Valley Hills I am very offended by you disparaging comment about Middle America. I am located on the East Coast , have lived here all my life and believe in the Bill of Rights and the right to keep and bear arms.
That elitish snob remark shows that you have no class.
to WestBerkeleyFlats: Virginia is on the East Coast, not “Middle America”. Get a map of the U.S. or better yet a geography textbook. In fact even a clue would do nicely. Last but not least, IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT IN VIRGINIA OR “MIDDLE AMERICA”, DON’T COME HERE!!! It’s as simple as that. If you’re from the Bay area, i.e. Berkeley, stay there. Folks there are perfect in every way. There’s no crime or nasty words spoken. Prisons like San Quentin, Folsom, Pelican Bay, etc. are all filled with innocent decent human beings framed by crooked cops and D.A.’s no doubt.
Idiot.
Here’s news for you anti-gun elitist types. I have NEVER owned a gun in my life until last December, after the election, when I felt my right to own a gun might be doubtful in the future. This is the amazing and incredible part about that news flash: I haven’t murdered anyone with my gun, not even thought about doing it! I know you might not believe that, but it’s true. Perhaps if one or both of those unfortunate students owned a gun and had it with them, they might be alive today. You elitists might not understand that criminals don’t give a damn about gun laws, THAT’S WHY THEY’RE CALLED CRIMINALS! DUH! If you prevent decent law-abiding citizens from owning guns, all you’re doing is reducing the risk for criminals when they commit their crimes.
quote: “Prisons like San Quentin, Folsom, Pelican Bay, etc. are all filled with innocent decent human beings framed by crooked cops and D.A.’s no doubt.”
I think you were being sarcastic. :)
But actually, it’s not real hard to believe it could be the truth! Some of the worst criminals in the USA wear badges and carry guns. I can name 5 of them in a 25 mile radius of me that should be in jail for perjury.
Wow, nearly 20+ inches of text before Sick started to twist the subject to himself! Finally, we’re making some progress!
quote: “Wow, nearly 20+ inches of text before Sick started to twist the subject to himself! Finally, we’re making some progress!”
Not real quick, are you? Take a look at reply #10.
So, if there is no direct relationship between America’s relatively lax gun laws (compared to other “civilized” countries that are governed by the rule of law rather than by religious threocracy, military dictatorship, or not at all) and our strikingly high violent crime rate (espcially crimes involving the use of guns, often by people with permits), what would explain our crime problem? Do we have more “sinners” per capita than other countries? And what about our extremely high rate of accidental gun deaths? If the guns themselves are innocent of causing the mayhem, then it says we as a people are incompetent to govern our own use of them, and when the peace of society is threatened by the abuse of a “right,” it’s time to re-think the validity of that right. Some rights, we all believe, are given by God, but others, like the right to bear arms, are just the products of legalistic words, and can be reasonably changed to better fit modern circumstances. After all, in TJ’s time, they didn’t have mass murderers like we have now, and no Colonial-era school room ever got shot-up by freaked out psychopaths. (And don’t tell me that wild Indians were the same thing — those were invaded peoples trying to protect their sovereign lands form European invaders.)
just wondering: “are just the products of legalistic words”
No.
“No” what? Do you disagree that “rights” are reflected in the words written into laws? A constitution is just that, a law, and under its own terms is subject to possible change — change in its words that set forth the laws that reflect the rights. No right is absolute — not even the right to life (unless you oppose the death penalty on that basis, in which case your view is not currently represented in most of the state laws in this country). They are all subject to limitation by reasonable laws, as our very own Supreme Court has been telling us for centuries.
Both of you are arguing a mute issue. Guns will never be banned in this country. Certain types with an evil appearance may be banned again (as in the infamous Assault Weapon Ban), but that’s nothing more than a “feel good” law for the anti-gun whiners. The first ban was a joke, the second ban will be a joke too. You can take a banned AK47, throw a “sport” stock on it, and it’s suddenly legal.
Furthermore, tha lawmakers didn’t have a clue what they were dealing with during the first Assault Weapon Ban which expired recently. During this ban I couldn’t buy a Colt semi-automatic AR15 during the ban, but I could legally buy a Colt full auto M16. Just because an individual could pass the background and paperwork required to purchase a full auto firearm didn’t make them invincible to going over the edge.
“No” that any right (including the right to bear arms) is given to us by “legalistic words.” The government does not give us rights. We as a people CAN choose to give up or limit some of our rights as we see fit (through the forming of a government), whether to keep us safer, healthier, or to make life easier. Rights are not derived from the Constitution, they are enshrined in it. Not every right we have is laid out in that document, obviously.
Then where, specifically, in a western secular democracy that has already formed its government, does the “right to bear arms” come from, if it isn’t that same government’s Constitution? (Please don’t say “God,” since that only earns you an F on the Con Law exam, and would be an acceptable answer only in a theocracy like Iran.) The Supreme Court, when it recently ruled on whether the right even exists, in the sense of an individual’s right to have guns rather than merely in a State’s right to form a militia, focused specifically on the literal words of the Constitution. You seem to suggest they didn’t need to do that, even though the 9 justices all thought they did. In what specific way would you correct them, and based on what alternative jurisprudence? (Again, an answer like “Natural Law” does not earn a passing grade — we no longer accept such notions, just as in med school “Possessed by Demons” is never correct as a diagnosis.) Rights don’t exist just people people claim, want or believe in them — they have to be proven to exist in a nation’s laws for them to carry any weight in terms of limiting a government’s right to infringe on the freedoms of its citizenry. That’s why it’s so important to get them written down in the form of treaties, conventions, protocols, constitutions, statutes, regulations, permits and judicial rulings. If it aint in writing, it aint there at all, in a legal sense, being the only one that matters when speaking of “rights” as things with real import rather than just the expression of what a person wants to do, have or say.
I prefer to base my beliefs on Locke, Jefferson et al.:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator [God, Nature, from the mere fact of being human... whichever you please] with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Governments don’t give us rights. We give governments rights. Maybe that fact is not so self-evident?
I hold this truth to be self evident: based on what is written here, if the majority of posters in this conversation were our representatives the constitutional convention, this nation would have disappeared from this earth after a very short time. either we have devolved as citizens and social beings, or our founding fathers were very wise to create a representative democracy where most people’s voices are heard only outside the halls of power. our founding fathers were elitist, they created a government with an elitist structure, and we prove them right every day with blather like we see here. It’s either hilarious or depressing. RIP to the two youngsters and condolences to their family and friends.
Thanks for bringing us all back to reality, sancho p. It did feel a little Don Q-like to keep tilting at the windmills of the faith-based right-ists. Whatever Locke and Mr. J would have thunk about a society of fat, mis-educated myth-believing Yahoos driving around in SUVs filled to the brim with loaded assault weaponry will forever remain a mystery — but I doubt it’s what they had in mind when they set up those systems in which the voices of the mob would be semi-filtered through reason-capable elites in the halls of government (it’s what the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College was all about). But back to mequa shore — those lofty words you quoted still don’t seem to get anywhere close to sanctifying a “right” to own and wield a killing machine created by super-evolved apes; it’s only the errant words of the 2nd Amendment that do that, according to the Supremes.
To “just wondering”: comparing this country’s crime rates to other developed nations is like comparing apples to potatoes. Most, if not all developed countries have more homogeneous societies. They also have, in many cases, different cultures, different histories, different ethnic makeups, different religious beliefs, etc. That’s why it’s also questionable to compare other stats, like lifespans. Some of the Obamacare proponents like to point out our lifespan stats vs other countries like Sweden or Switzerland. But if you compare stats for Caucasians in this country, we come out ahead. As has been pointed out, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
“a society of fat, mis-educated myth-believing Yahoos driving around in SUVs filled to the brim with loaded assault weaponry…”
LOL– well, I think you’ve pretty accurately described one poster here to a T!
I often wonder at the sorts of personal mischief some people get up to that they NEED assault weapons to defend themselves. (Protecting their meth labs perhaps?) Despite having lived an adventurous and risk-filled life myself, oddly enough I’ve never needed to play Shoot-out at the OK Corral on the mean streets of Cville, DC, or NYC.
I wonder why we never see news reports of fat mis-educated myth-believing Yahoos driving in SUVs filled to the brim with loaded assault weaponry being discovered in campgrounds dead when the sun comes up? Perhaps because they are prepared to defend their families and friends?
Bet ya one thing, if the young girl’s father (a state trooper) had been with the teenagers, one of two things would have taken place:
1- the murders would never have taken place. Criminals know who to prey upon and who to leave alone. It’s a sixth sense that even the dumbest of criminals seem to possess.
2- the trooper would have shot and killed the fool attempting to murder them. He of course would have used an evil GUN!! Imagine that, using a firearm to defend one’s self. What a novel idea!
SUV loaded with assault weaponry said: “2- the trooper would have shot and killed the fool attempting to murder them. He of course would have used an evil GUN!!”
******************************************************************
I’ll add a third thing: 3-The ACLU and various so-called human rights organizations will raise hell about how the state trooper murdered someone in cold blood. Various other liberal folks will claim the perp (unless he’s a right-wing nutcase) was abused as a child, victimized by school and law enforcement authorities throughout his misunderstood life and was, in general, not really responsible for his misdeeds. It’s society’s fault not the perp’s. Finally, the trooper will have multi-million dollar lawsuits filed against him which will financially ruin him and his family.