Snowflakes in Hell

The Smoking Gun has the VA Tech killer’s one act play.   Check it out.  It’s a look inside a warped mind.   He thought this stuff was OK to share with people?   It’s horribly written and highly disturbing stuff.

Apparently there was a mob hit on the Mayor of Nagasaki, in Japan:

The shooting was rare in a country where handguns are strictly banned and only four politicians are known to have been killed since the Second World War.
Mayor Iccho Ito, 61, was shot twice in the back at point-blank range outside a train station Tuesday evening, Nagasaki police official Rumi Tsujimoto said.

One of the bullets struck the mayor’s heart and he went into cardiac arrest, according to Nagasaki University Hospital spokesman Kenzo Kusano. Kyodo News agency and national broadcaster NHK said Ito died of his wounds early Wednesday.

Firearms are effectively are illegal in Japan, with few exceptions. Yet we can see that criminals are still able to obtain them. Japan’s violent crime rate is very low, but that is more a reflection of Japanese culture than of Japanese law.  One can find cultures with more ubiquitous ownership of small arms that have similar rates of violent crime.  This example would seem to indicate, that criminals in Japan who desire guns can still get them.

Be sure to check out Dave Kopel’s article on gun control in Japan.

The deranged killer at Virginia Tech, it turns out, had a Glock 9mm, no mention on whether it was the Model 17 or 19, but the 19 is a bit more common on the civilian market. I shoot and carry a Glock 19. The other was a Walther P22, which Ahab carries.

No doubt the media will be parroting VPC and Brady material touting these weapons as high powered killing machines, too dangerous to be used safely by ordinary schlobs like myself and Ahab. But really, the Glock 19 and 17 are probably the most ubiquitous police pistol around, and they are damned popular on the civilian market too. They aren’t particularly powerful or lethal, no pistol is. And the P22? Please. It’s a common target pistol.

UPDATE: Check out  Ahab’s coverage on the P22 and it’s capabilities at his blog, What Would John Wayne Do?

This editorial in the Roanoke Times:

Please realize that I am licensed to carry a concealed handgun in the commonwealth of Virginia, and do so on a regular basis. However, because I am a Virginia Tech student, I am prohibited from carrying at school because of Virginia Tech’s student policy, which makes possession of a handgun an expellable offense, but not a prosecutable crime.

I had entrusted my safety, and the safety of others to the police. In light of this, there are a few things I wish to point out.

First, I never want to have my safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police.

Second, I considered bringing my gun with me to campus, but did not due to the obvious risk of losing my graduate career, which is ridiculous because had I been shot and killed, there would have been no graduate career for me anyway.

Third, and most important, I am trained and able to carry a concealed handgun almost anywhere in Virginia and other states that have reciprocity with Virginia, but cannot carry where I spend more time than anywhere else because, somehow, I become a threat to others when I cross from the town of Blacksburg onto Virginia Tech’s campus.

Read the whole thing.  We all have to weigh the cost of dealing with rules written in ignorance by others.   My advise to folks is to pay no attention to them, when they have no force of law.  If your attire, attitude and holster is proper, you should never have a problem.  I will not advocate that anyone break the law, but there’s also the notion out there that it’s better judged by 12 than carried by six.  I’ll leave it at that.

HatTip to Dave Hardy, for the original article.

SayUncle has the roundup.

Dr. Helen relays to us the story of Woo Bum-Kon, a mass killer in Korea, who happened to be a police officer:

Bum-Kon had an argument with his live-in girlfriend in the afternoon of April 26, 1982. Enraged, he left the house and went to the police armory, where he began consuming large amounts of whiskey. He became moderately drunk, raided the police armory of its weapons and built a personal arsenal. Bum-Kon then stole a single high-powered rifle and some grenades and left the armory. It was by this point around dinner time. He walked from house to house, and abused his position as a police officer to make people feel safe and gain entry to the home. Then he shot the victims, or killed the entire family with a grenade. He continued this pattern for the next eight hours, and into the early morning hours of April 27.

This speaks to a point I’ve been raising in the comment sections of various blogs: the police aren’t super humans. They are people, just like everyone else, and have the same passions, failings, virtues and deficiencies as the rest of us. Folks are calling it “insane” to suggest that valid concealed weapons license holders be allowed to carry on campus, but most would have few problems with a police officer in the same age range being permitted to do the same. Why? The idea that police officers are particularly well trained is a fallacy. Some are, and some aren’t, just like the rest of us. While police should be appreciated for the job they do, which is necessary, they should not be exalted above ordinary citizens. The police, in fact, are ordinary citizens, just ones that society pays to enforce laws and keep the peace. If you would trust an armed 22 year old police officer on campus, you should trust an armed CHL holder too.

Professor Liviu Librescu:

Librescu was among the thirty-three people killed in the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007. He was killed during a class in the Norris Hall Engineering Building. He was 76 years old.^[6] Librescu held the door of his classroom shut while the gunman Cho Seung-hui was attempting to enter it. He was shot through the door but was able to prevent the gunman from entering the classroom until his students had escaped through the windows^[7][8]. A number of Librescu’s students have called him a hero because of his actions, with one student, Asael Arad, saying that all the professor’s students “lived because of him.”^[9]

In all tragedies come our heros.

SayUncle also has a roundup of the media mistakes during this whole thing.

I didn’t watch any of the TV media coverage, and I’ve been ignoring print media, because quite honestly, I can’t tolerate their coverage of events like this.

The media is just as culpable in these types of tragedies as the gun, which they are so eager to place blame on, because I think the media sensationalism it causes plays into the fantasies of these types of killers.  I’m very worried about copycats in the coming days.

But I don’t blame the media for the tragedy.   The 24 hour live news cycle is part of our society now, and we have a free press.  I totally accept the media’s right to cover these events.   I just with they’d respect my right to bear arms as much as I respect their freedom of press.  I don’t appreciate a lot of the scapegoating on guns, while the media refuses to acknowledge that the may have a role to play in these as well.

I agree with Uncle that, given the data we have now, the police acted appropriately in not locking down the school after the first shooting.   They had sufficient reason to believe that this was an ordinary murder, and that the killer was at that point on the lamb.  I don’t think the police could have reasonable anticipated the killer would then start a mass killing spree.

The police are not supermen.   They are ordinary people who make ordinary mistakes, and have to act, quite often, on spotty information.  Once those folks were chained into the room, there wasn’t much the police could have done.  Even a SWAT team would have taken time to blow down the door.  As I said before, the only person to blame in this tragedy is the deranged lunatic.  It’s foolish to expect others to provide perfect safety.