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Main Page One year after Virginia Tech killings, the search for a solution remains elusive
(Click here to view the original thread on the MassCops Message Board)

Posted by: resqjyw0

The Associated Press
Published: April 23, 2008

NARROWS, Virginia: Allen Neely eases his Chrysler Pacifica onto the bridge named in honor of Jarrett Lane, who grew up in this tiny town near the West Virginia border. Jarrett, Neely says quietly, always wanted to build a bridge.

Under the back seat are two pistols. Neely keeps them close these days. He and his construction crew were in Virginia Tech's Norris Hall on April 16 when a mentally ill student went on a rampage — killing Jarrett Lane and 31 others.

Since then, Neely feels safer if his guns are within reach.

Over the past year, people here have questioned the mental health system, which allowed killer Seung-Hui Cho to fall through the cracks. They've questioned the university's security procedures, the media's glorification of violence. Fewer have questioned the state's gun laws.

The New River divides the town of Narrows, nestled in the Appalachian Mountains about 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Virginia Tech's campus in Blacksburg. This is a typical southwest Virginia town: Many residents leave their doors unlocked, everybody knows everybody's business, and there seem to be as many churches as people.

And this is a community of hunters. Here, guns are tools to be respected; children are taught how to handle them.

Vicki Jones sits at a table with her friends in Anna's Restaurant, the town's gathering spot. Like most everyone in Narrows, she knew Lane, a 22-year-old senior majoring in civil engineering. He was high school valedictorian, athletic, funny, full of promise. More than half the town turned out for his memorial service.

Jones and her friends toss around suggestions for preventing tragedies like the one at Tech: Mental health checks for prospective students. Ridding TV shows of all the violence. They think the idea of allowing students to arm themselves for protection is crazy. But they don't believe gun control is the solution.

Thing is, Jones says as she picks at her salad, there's no simple solution to any of this.

Take a tour of Virginia, a year after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. You'll find little has changed — the state remains draped in memorial ribbons, bumper stickers and Tech flags, and the debate over firearms rages on.

Was the easy availability of guns to blame for what happened on that campus? Should the students have been allowed to carry firearms so they could have protected themselves? Did gun laws have anything to do with it at all?

In the weeks and months after the killings, there were protests and counter-protests. Legislation was drafted to tighten oversight of sales at gun shows, then quickly killed by Virginia lawmakers.

So the shows go on. On a recent weekend, an occasional flash of orange or maroon peeks through the crowd at the Richmond Raceway Complex gun show as someone in Virginia Tech attire passes through. The noisy chatter among prospective customers — middle-aged men, mothers with babies, fathers and sons — is occasionally broken by the crackle of a Taser gun demonstration.

There are 88 vendors, hawking everything from modern-day Glocks to 18th-century rifles. Sherry Ramey is one of them. She's also wearing a Virginia Tech sweat shirt. The 37-year-old is a proud alum.

Ramey was uncomfortable around guns until her husband bought her one. Now she's one of the many people in this room who believe students who are legally allowed to carry firearms should be permitted to have them in class.

"If you have a way to stop somebody," she says, "you should use it."
Under state law, private sellers at shows don't have to run background checks of prospective customers. After Virginia Tech, opponents demanded that the law be changed to close what they called the gun show loophole; their opponents argued that Cho didn't buy his guns from a show, and lawmakers ultimately killed the legislation.

Terry Kirkpatrick leans back in his chair and watches customers pore over his antique firearms. The 65-year-old Vietnam veteran has been collecting guns since he was 12, when he found piles of broken Civil War weapons on his farm.

He's of a generation that learned how to hunt young, but that doesn't happen as much these days, he says. Land is being lost to construction, and there are fewer places to hunt. That means fewer people today are familiar with guns — and less understanding leads to more fear.

He doesn't think there's much room in metropolitan areas for guns unless they're locked up. But he doesn't believe in blanket bans on firearms.

"We're always gonna have nuts," he says. "We had it at Virginia Tech, we had it in Colorado."

Nearby, Ken Burton runs his hand along an antique pistol. To him, it is a work of art. He doesn't carry or shoot guns, but he loves the stories behind them — so much so that he moved to the U.S. from his native Australia to sell them. After 35 people were killed by a lone gunman in Tasmania in 1996, Australia instituted strict gun controls — an ineffective measure, Burton says.

"I think this is the best country in the world, and I think it's one of the safest countries in the world," he says. "And I think, well, if people have got guns, it'll stay safe."

The bloodstains in front of Jeanette Richardson's two-story brick home have faded. Her anger has not.

A cold wind is blowing through this middle-class neighborhood in the eastern Virginia city of Newport News. Richardson wipes away tears and stands where her eldest son was shot to death by a stranger with a stolen gun.

It was New Year's Eve, and 18-year-old Patrick, home on Christmas break from art school, was ringing in 2004 with friends at a nearby party. Richardson and her husband were celebrating with neighbors.

She'd heard a lot of popping that night but dismissed the noise as fireworks — until a neighbor came running up to her, screaming.

Richardson found her son splayed out on his back on the street. She fell to her knees and crawled to him, but when she touched his leg, it was already growing cold.

After Patrick's death, she was outraged — furious at a system of laws she felt had done nothing to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Richardson didn't feel rage like that again until April 16, 2007, when she stood in an Illinois hotel room watching the breaking news of the Virginia Tech shootings on TV. She sank to the couch and wept. And she later told her friends, "Nothing's going to change. It's Virginia."

She'd already spent the two years since Patrick's death lobbying for stronger gun control. Within weeks of his murder, she had contacted the Brady Campaign and the Million Mom March, which was pushing to renew a ban on assault weapons. She founded a local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children. She attended rallies and protests, marched and shouted and demanded change.

After Virginia Tech, she spoke at a protest held outside the Capitol in Richmond in support of closing the gun show loophole.

She knows there's a great chasm in Virginia and in the nation over guns. It's torn apart her own family. She hasn't spoken to her aunt, a gun owner who vehemently disagrees with her views, in more than three years.

"It's like civil war," she says, clutching a damp tissue. "It's a divider."

On the mantle over her fireplace is a self-portrait Patrick painted just hours before he died. Upstairs, one of her surviving sons is playing a computer game and cheering loudly.

If need be, she says, he'll push her wheelchair to protests when she's too old to walk.

Lily Habtu works a pair of scissors through orange and maroon fabric, the tendons of her wrist moving under skin still scarred by a bullet from Cho's gun. Around her, a dozen mothers are hunched over plastic tables in a hot, cramped art room of an Alexandria preschool, piecing together hundreds of memorial ribbons. A wall covered in children's handprints is partly obscured by a banner advertising the group's Web site: ProtestEasyGuns.com.

This has become an unlikely headquarters for a grassroots gun control contingent, the result of an idea generated by two moms standing next to a sandbox a day after the Virginia Tech shootings.

Most of these women had never been to a demonstration or thought about gun control. Now they are loud proponents of closing the so-called gun show loophole.

Alexandria, in northern Virginia, is a wealthy and largely liberal enclave. But the members of this group fall everywhere on the political spectrum, from far left to far right. Some have never been comfortable around guns, others grew up with them. They have made thousands of ribbons in the past year, worn by protesters nationwide.

Tina Gehring made so many her hands blistered. Then she made some more.
The leader of this pack, 42-year-old Abby Spangler, a willowy cellist and mother of two, is calling out updates: They now have commitments for more than 80 "lie-ins" nationwide for April 16. At each event, 32 people, the number of people killed by Cho, will lie down for three minutes, the amount of time it took Cho to buy his guns. This group will lie down in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Continued: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...uns.php?page=3

Posted by: Wolfman

Quote:

Jones and her friends toss around suggestions for preventing tragedies like the one at Tech: Mental health checks for prospective students. Ridding TV shows of all the violence. They think the idea of allowing students to arm themselves for protection is crazy.

Just be a victim then. Die cowering on your knees and hope you qualify for some great reward in the afterlife. These people really need to climb out of their sheep suits and grow a pair.

Cho legally possessed his weapons after passing every qualification Brady and their ilk put up. GUN CONTROL DOES NOT WORK. People need to understand that these psychotic massacres can not be prevented before the fact. You cannot "wish away" the guns in the world, or the violence in the media. You cannot look into a psychologists crystal ball and determine that Jane Smith is going to pop her circuit breaker next month and drive her car through a crowded bus stop. There are mentally disturbed among us. There are those with violent tendencies among us. There are people who appear completely normal until something sets them off and they go on a bloody rampage. The criminal does not plan on getting away or living to see the aftermath of his/her evil work, just that the work gets done. They will plan and prepare. They will pick a ripe target. Spontaneity is not part of the whackjob's operational plan.

These violent and tragic events WILL happen again with no way to predict when or where. It is impossible to prevent. All anyone can do is to minimize the damage by employing a response - which consists of (a) hiding under a desk and hoping Death passes you by, (b) sending emails and text messages out in the remote instance that someone may be able to avoid walking into a bloodbath that began 20 minutes earlier, (c) call the police and hope they can pull a miracle out of their collective asses and pick off the guy, or (d) fight back. I don't know what these idiot people are thinking but it seems to me a proactive response is your best bet on walking out of there alive. Carry a gun and shoot. Throw chairs, books, desks, lab equipment, pocketbooks, cellphones, whatever. If 12 students hide under desks, you will have 12 shots and 12 corpses before the criminal moves on to the next room. If 12 students rush one attacker, odds are there will be fewer than 12 corpses and the attacker will not be moving on to the next classroom. Slow the criminal down, knock the criminal down, stomp the criminals guts out. Make the criminal miss when he/she shoots. Make the criminal waste ammo - or better yet, run out of ammo. Do not give the criminal the benefit of a stationary defenseless target.

One innocent death is tragic. 5 innocent deaths even more so. But cowering and hiding and waiting for someone to come and save you while 30 innocents suffer a methodical execution is inexcusable.

Posted by: resqjyw0

Right on the mark as usual, Wolfman.

Posted by: Killjoy

Outstanding, Wolf.

Posted by: Hb13

Yup, what Resq and Killjoy said Wolf, you hit the nail on the head with that one. Well said sir

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