The Gun Blogs

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For starters (and this will change as it’s breaking news) the breaking news headline at the top of the page reads “Four Baghdad car bombings kill at least 66 people”.

Pretty clearly the idea that mass killings require guns or only happen when people have guns is BUNK. Anyone saying otherwise is either intentionally being deceitful or shamefully misinformed about what happens in Iraq–and elsewhere–in this day and age. We’re blessed here in the US, and we so often forget it. For much of the world’s population, mass killings are the norm, not the exception. Remember that.

Virginia Tech senior Cho Seung-Hui walked into a Roanoke gun shop five weeks ago, put down a credit card and walked out with a Glock 19 handgun and a box of ammunition. He paid $571.

Forgive my ignorance, but there’s no seven day waiting period on handgun purchases in VA? I know there’s one here in MD (when my pistol got repaired a few years back, I had to wait seven days just to have my own property returned to me). Let’s check with, of all people, the Brady Bunch. Nope, no waiting period. Demerits to the Brady Campaign for having misinformation on their website, though (shocking, I know)–it says there’s no training requirement for a CCW permit in VA, which is patently false.

Sidenote: The VT shooter didn’t have a permit, did he? Once again, people who go through the trouble to get permits aren’t generally the people you need be worried about. Troubled students with a worrisome psychological history and a pattern of really creepy writing…yes. CCW permit holders, not so much. Moving on.

I can hear the antigunners now, “see, if there’d been a waiting period maybe this wouldn’t have happened!” Look closer friends, that article makes it clear why that isn’t the case–the shooter waited a month before going on his rampage.

Virginia does require an NICS background check.

Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty said Tuesday afternoon that both guns were purchased legally in Virginia.

So the gun store did what it was supposed to do, or else A) the store owner would be in a calamitous world of hurt and B) the VASP wouldn’t say that the purchase was legal. Which rather obviously requires us to ponder the nagging question any gun controller needs to consider, exactly what gun control law would have prevented this? Other than an outright ban on the sale of the gun, what gun control law would stand in the way of this sort of thing? A waiting period wouldn’t have done it. A background check wouldn’t have done it. The guy was a legal resident and had no criminal history.

A psychological profile, perhaps? Please. The guy was a student at a prestigious university, if he wanted to effect the purchase I’m sure he’d simply have said “no, I’m not a crazy person planning on shooting up my school and my girlfriend.” Anyone who thinks gun dealers should be both clairvoyant and trained in psychiatry is themselves in need of a psychiatrist.

More bias:

Under the federal assault-weapons ban enacted in 1994, magazines were limited to 10 rounds. But that ban was allowed to expire in 2004.

All indications are the guy reloaded several times and had several magazines on him. Magazine capacity is not the issue here. A 9mm slug from a ten round mag is just as deadly as one from a five rounder or a fifteen rounder.

Cue the obligatory quote from the gun grabbers without rebuttal from a pro-self defense organization.

“The key thing that we have seen in all of these school shootings is easy access to high firepower weapons,” said Daniel Vice, an attorney with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “These killings can’t be done with baseball bats and knives.”

Boy is that line getting tiresome; nope, killing 30+ people with a baseball bat or other blunt weapon would be tough, but a talented guy with a sword in a room with a bunch of trapped people (the VT shooter chained the door shut) could do a lot of damage . They can be done by an idiot with a grenade, a homemade bomb, an IED, a Ryder truck, an elderly person behind the wheel at a crowded street market, etc.

The idea that mass killings only happen in the presence of guns really needs be confronted head on, folks.