The pause that the nation collectively took to digest the enormity of the Virginia Tech shooting won’t last long. The argument is already beginning over whether school officials and the police reacted appropriately to Cho Seung-Hui’s rampage, and over what policies might prevent another such tragedy.
All sides in this debate should always keep in mind that Cho Seung-Hui is the only one responsible for the massacre. He was bent on visiting death and pain on as many innocents as possible, in a hateful fit of destruction. He took dozens of promising lives, and then his own. These were acts of pure malice, a reminder — if we needed one — that evil is afoot in this, our broken world.
After other such shootings, gun-control advocates have argued that more restrictions on guns can prevent these bloodbaths. After Columbine in 1999, even John McCain talked of tighter regulation on gun shows and assault weapons. Now, not even the Democratic presidential candidates are rushing en masse to endorse new gun-control measures. That is a sign the gun-control debate has shifted in a conservative direction. Evidently, Democrats have finally gotten tired of sustaining electoral damage by antagonizing gun owners.
This is a good thing, since a laundry list of new gun regulations would be an absurd response to this crime. Liberal editorialists, such as the ones at the
New York Daily News, are already tsk-tsking Virginia for having permissive gun laws. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence has criticized Virginia in the past for not requiring gun-safety training, not having a child-safety-lock requirement, not having background checks for gun shows, and not demanding pre-sale ballistic fingerprinting.
All these supposed deficiencies are irrelevant to what happened at Virginia Tech. Cho Seung-Hui obviously knew how to use a gun all too well, wouldn't have cared about child safety locks, and didn’t buy his guns at gun shows. Since there was no difficulty linking the rounds he fired to his guns, the ballistic fingerprinting would have been of no use. His guns weren’t “assault weapons,” but extremely common semi-automatic pistols that no one seriously proposes banning. The unfortunate fact is that mass murderers aren’t going to abide by gun laws, as Cho Seung-Hui demonstrated by having his guns on campus in the first place, a violation of school policy. He may not have had a permit to carry a concealed handgun, and he obliterated the serial numbers on his gun — a felony under federal law.
If anything, perhaps Virginia’s gun rules should be even looser, and permit licensed persons to carry concealed guns on campus. We understand the squeamishness many people feel toward this notion, but past school shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. In January 2002, a gunman at Appalachian Law School was subdued by two students who had run to their cars to get guns. If someone else had been armed in Norris Hall, perhaps Cho Seung-Hui wouldn’t have been able to roam it for as long as 20 minutes, methodically murdering defenseless students.
The other nagging “what if” in the shooting is the reaction of the school and the police. Hindsight is always easy in such matters, but it is hard to fathom how in the age of “zero tolerance” Virginia Tech administrators didn’t move more vigorously to secure the campus after the first two students were murdered early in the morning in a dormitory.
We should not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that any combination of enlightened public policy and campus decision-making would have definitely stopped Cho Seung-Hui from carrying out his monstrous plan. In a better world all such heinous acts would be preventable. Not in this one.
