The Virginia Tech Massacre: An Argument for More, Not Less Guns

On April 16, 2007, sometime after seven in the morning, a South Korean student named Cho Seung-Hui entered a dorm on the campus of Virginia Tech and shot to death a female student, identified in some press accounts as the shooters ex girl friend but who actually was a woman Cho was stalking, and a male residence advisor who tried to intervene. Cho returned to his own dorm room, rearmed, and two hour later went to a class room building clear across campus and begin to massacre everyone he could find, killing at least thirty people before shooting himself as police closed in. It was the worse mass murder of its kind since Charles Whitman killed sixteen people from the top of the clock tower on the University of Texas over forty years before.

The tragedy raises some disturbing questions about security on the Virginia Tech campus and, by extension, all colleges and universities. Many people are outraged because of the fact that students were not informed that there was a shooter in their midst until 9:26, after the second shooting had already ended.There was no evacuation, no lock down of classes.

While people are sorting out the lack of security evident on the Virginia Tech campus (can metal detectors be far in the future?) another question is being raised. How did the "easy access" to fire arms contribute to the massacre?

The ever reliable New York Times opined, "Yesterday's mass shooting at Virginia Tech - the worst in American history - is another horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain." The Houston Chronicle, despite being in a state where private ownership of firearms in a jealously guarded right, joined in, "Meanwhile, the mass murderer is another in a series of American figures who combine a fascination with deadly weapons, easy access to them, a grudge against the world and an unexplained capacity for cruelty."