Vin Suprynowicz

I see where Clark County Superintendent of Schools Walt Rulffes here in Las Vegas has responded to the Feb. 14 drive-by murder of a 15-year-old Palo Verde High School inmate — shot by another one of Mr. Rullfes’ young charges — not by admitting a failure of his own tutelage, but instead by whining it’s difficult to prevent his young wards from shooting each other given today’s “easy access to guns” and television violence.

I’m not sure about the TV part — seems to me most of the drive-bys I’ve seen portrayed on the tube have concluded with the perpetrator going to jail, which Mr. Rulffes might explain to his young charges as “just like school only it doesn’t last as many years and you can’t take your boom-box.”

But as for the “easy access to guns” part, since the hoplophobes insist on referring to guns as “penis substitutes,” anyway (never explaining why any male but Hemingway’s Jake Barnes would need a “substitute,”) I await Mr. Rulffes explanation that some of his young darlings commit the crime of rape due to the currently excessive “easy access to penises.”

As attractive as the scheme might seem to the disciples of Andrea Dworkin, I suspect there might be some hint of a civil rights problem with a society-wide program of penis removal, even though the right to keep and bear those organs is not protected as explicitly in the Constitution as the right to keep and bear arms of military usefulness.

The point, if I must connect the dots, is that only an infinitessimal percentage of those possessed of either, um, tool use it to commit a crime, so we might want to look beyond “easy availability” for an explanation of such behaviors.

Once again last month in Las Vegas, all our overlapping “gun control” laws failed to work. On the other hand, if the young perpetrator had been taught proper gun safety on the school shooting range — such facilities were ubiquitous through the 1960s; I was taught safe supervised shooting at Eaglebrook in Massachusetts starting at age 12 — what are the chances this young killer would have remained so chillingly opaque to the likely consequence of his actions?

(He and his companions reportedly told police he opened fire with a Luger .22 “just to scare” some competing gang members who had “flashed gang signs” at one of their girls — accidentally hitting the white kid.)

Meantime, on the subject of school shootings, surely I wasn’t the only one to notice the befuddled opinion piece credited to The Washington Post, right there on the Feb. 16 front page of my own daily newspaper:

“DEKALB, ILL. — If there were lessons learned after the Virginia Tech massacre, they were: Lock down and notify,” the supposed “news” story began.

“School officials did neither until hours after the first shots sounded across the Blacksburg, Va. campus in April,” Post opinion writers Kari Lydersen and Theresa Vargas continued. “Northern Illinois University officials did not make the same mistake Thursday.

“But the actions could not stop a gunman armed with powerful rapid-fire weapons and the intent of killing as many people as possible, higher education and safety experts said Friday. …

“By many preliminary accounts, the university did well: Within 30 seconds of a report of shots fired at Cole Hall, the first officer was on the scene. But he was too late. The shooter, Steven Kazmierczak, 27, a former graduate student who was armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and three pistols, had already sprayed more than 50 rounds of buckshot and bullets at panicked students before turning his weapon on himself. Six people … were killed. …”

Here’s the way that story would read, if constructed by someone not demented by anti-gun hysteria:

“If school officials and gun-grabbing politicians thought the lesson of the shooting deaths of 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus last April was ‘Lock down and notify,’ they learned the fruitlessness of such top-down ‘control’ solutions when another depraved drop-out, armed with 100-year-old technology, shot and killed five students in less than a minute at Northern Illinois University Feb. 14. …”

“What did Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech still have in common, as of Feb. 14, 2008?” our more useful version of this account would ask. “They both remained artificial ‘gun-free zones,’ where self-serving politicians have effectively barred potential victims from carrying the concealed self-defense weapons that could have put an end to Kazmierczak’s rampage.”

On their Web sites, the gun-grabbers whimper sarcastically that “The NRA will absurdly insist the solution is MORE GUNS! Ha ha ha.”

Actually, the National Rifle Association — America’s largest gun control organization — can’t and doesn’t say much after such incidents, since in order to maintain their “political viability” they suicidally favor “enforcing all existing gun laws,” no matter how egregiously they defy both the Constitution and common sense.

But to ridicule the obvious step of “allowing” civilians to arm themselves for self-defense — a right which all levels of government on this continent are barred from infringing by the 2nd and 14th amendments — is akin to saying “Why, to hear these madmen tell it, the best way to eliminate smallpox is to inoculate people with cattle pox, spreading even more disease! Hee-haw!”

In fact, it worked, just as armed students, an armed vice principal, and armed teachers cut short would-be student rampages at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss. in 1997, at Appalachian School of Law in 2002, and — in an incident we’ll try to get to next month — at a yeshiva in the Israeli settlement of Kfar Etzion in January of this year.

“If there is a way where this tragedy could have been anticipated and stopped beforehand, we will find it,” vowed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Feb. 16.

Actually, there WAS a link between the first modern schoolhouse shooter; Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon; one if not both of the teen killers at Columbine High School, and most of our other domestic mass killers in recent years. A link that makes a lot more sense than “the easy availability of guns.”

Steven Kazmierczak had recently stopped taking his Prozac, his girlfriend told the press less than a week after the NIU shootings.

Guns were far easier to obtain in this country before 1968 — you could buy them through the mail. But there were hardly any such mass-shooting rampages.

On the other hand, chart the frequency of these mass shootings against the widespread introduction of such drugs as Prozac, Ritalin, and Luvox among the inmates of the tax-funded youth concentration camps — the kinds of drugs that Kip Kinkel had been on, the kind that got Columbine killer Eric Harris blocked from enlistment in the Marines. Let me know what you find.

Gov. Blagojevich could seek to have all such psychoactive prescription nostrums prominently re-labeled: “Warning — This stuff may cause you to kill people.” But he won’t, will he?

Meantime, there’s a second-best solution — the one that “allowed” congregation member and former police officer Jeanne Assam to cut short an intended rampage by disgruntled former student Matthew Murray — carrying two handguns, a semi-automatic rifle and more than 1,000 rounds of ammo — at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs just a few months ago.

Consider the mass shootings planned by 21-year-old Richard Gable Stevens for July 6, 1999, in Santa Clara, Calif. Gable left a note for his parents predicting they’d be bankrupted by lawsuits from all the “victims” he intended to murder.

Why have you never heard of that particular mass shooting? Because Stevens decided to start his murder rampage at the local National Shooting Club, where he rented a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and used it to herd the employees out into the back alley, announcing he intended to kill them.

There was no mass killing rampage in Santa Clara, Calif. on July 6, 1999, because one of the shooting range employees drew a .45 from under his shirt and plugged Richard Gable Stevens several times in the chest. End of rampage.

Until they get around to properly labeling the depravity-inducing drugs which have been prescribed to nearly all these mass shooters (for the record, the worst problems seem tom arise shortly after they go OFF the drugs), Gov. Blagojevich could tell the Illinois Legislature and sundry county authorities it’s way past time to restore the 2nd and 14th amendments in Illinois by repealing every one of their overlapping “gun control” laws, ending that state’s status as a de jure “gun-free zone.”

But he won’t do that, either. Will he?

# # #

The Associated Press reported Feb. 16 Senate Republicans are protesting that “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is trying to protect the two leading Democrats for president by shielding them from a difficult vote on an issue that many rural voters consider crucial” — a proposal, lodged in the current Public Lands bill, to restore the Constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to carry their firearms in the national parks, without having them unloaded and disassembled.

But why should the vote be “difficult”? Every candidate for national office who I’ve interviewed since 1994, regardless of party, has insisted “I support the Second Amendment.”

Why not just let senators Clinton and Obama — and big-government nanny-stater John McCain, for that matter — prove they mean what they say, by allowing them to vote to restore this vital constitutional right for Americans on government property?

Because they’re all lying, of course, and Harry knows it. The gun-grabbers live in terror of having to expose their real position on this issue, ever since Bill Clinton was forced to admit it was primarily his own party’s radical hoplophobic ways that managed to dump control of both houses of Congress into Republican hands in 1994.

Has no one else noticed the deafening silence from Clinton & Clinton, Obama, Feinstein, Pelosi … even John McCain … in response to all the recent multiple shootings by wing-nuts who recently stopped taking their Prozac?

There’s an obvious “code of silence” on calls for new gun controls … which I predict will last until — let me gaze into my crystal ball, here — um … late November, 2008.