I see where Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes has responded to the drive-by murder of a 15-year-old Palo Verde High School inmate by another one of Mr. Rullfes\u2019 young charges not by admitting a failure of his own tutelage (the first responsibility of educators, surely, being to mold character), but instead by whining it\u2019s difficult to prevent his young wards from shooting each other given today\u2019s \u201ceasy access to guns\u201d and television violence.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure about the TV part — seems to me most of the drive-bys I\u2019ve seen portrayed on the tube have concluded with the perpetrator going to jail, which Mr. Rulffes might explain to his young charges as \u201cjust like school only it doesn\u2019t last as many years and you can\u2019t take your boom-box.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as for the \u201ceasy access to guns\u201d part, since the hoplophobes insist on referring to guns as \u201cpenis substitutes,\u201d anyway (never explaining why any male but Hemingway\u2019s Jake Barnes would need a \u201csubstitute,\u201d) I await Mr. Rulffes explanation that some of his young darlings commit the crime of rape due to the currently excessive \u201ceasy access to penises.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as it\u2019s true that there would be fewer shootings if we \u201cgot rid of all the guns,\u201d so would there doubtless be fewer rapes if we \u201cgot rid of all the penises.\u201d But — 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.
\nThe 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 \u201ceasy availability\u201d for an explanation of such behaviors.<\/p>\n
Once again last week, all our overlapping \u201cgun control\u201d 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?<\/p>\n
Meantime, on the subject of school shootings, surely I wasn\u2019t the only one to notice the befuddled opinion piece credited to The Washington Post, right there on the Feb. 16 front page:<\/p>\n
\u201cDEKALB, ILL. — If there were lessons learned after the Virginia Tech massacre, they were: Lock down and notify,\u201d the supposed \u201cnews\u201d story began.<\/p>\n
\u201cSchool officials did neither until hours after the first shots sounded across the Blacksburg, Va. campus in April,\u201d Post opinion writers Kari Lydersen and Theresa Vargas continued. \u201cNorthern Illinois University officials did not make the same mistake Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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. …<\/p>\n
\u201cBy 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. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s see if we can\u2019t reconstruct that story as it might be written by anyone but a member of the Cult of the Hoplophobes, pre-determined to avoid considering the real and obvious solutions.
\n(Hint: why do depravos like Steven Kazmierczak never seem to attack police stations or army bases? And what do their psychiatric states REALLY all have in common?)<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the way that story would read, if constructed by someone not demented by anti-gun hysteria:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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,\u2019 they learned the fruitlessness of such top-down ‘control\u2019 solutions when another depraved drop-out shot and killed five students in less than a minute at Northern Illinois University Feb. 14. …<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech still have in common, as of Feb. 14, 2008?\u201d our more useful version of this account would ask. \u201cThey both remained artificial ‘gun-free zones,\u2019 where self-serving politicians have effectively barred potential victims from carrying the concealed self-defense weapons that could have put an end to Kazmierczak\u2019s rampage.\u201d<\/p>\n
On their Web sites, the gun-grabbers whimper sarcastically that \u201cThe NRA will absurdly insist the solution is MORE GUNS! Ha ha ha.\u201d<\/p>\n
But to ridicule the obvious step of \u201callowing\u201d 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 \u201cWhy, 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!\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, it worked, just as armed students and an armed vice principal cut short would-be student rampages at Appalachian School of Law in 2002 and at Pearl High School in Pearl, Miss. in 1997.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there is a way where this tragedy could have been anticipated and stopped beforehand, we will find it,\u201d vowed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Feb. 16.<\/p>\n
Actually, there WAS a link between the first modern schoolhouse shooter; Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Ore.; one if not both of the teen killers at Columbine High School, and most of our other domestic mass killers of recent years. A link that makes a lot more sense than \u201cthe easy availability of guns.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steven Kazmierczak had recently stopped taking his Prozac, his girlfriend told the press less than a week after the NIU shootings.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, chart the frequency of these mass shootings against the widespread introduction of such hallucinogenic 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.<\/p>\n
Gov. Blagojevich could seek to have all such psychoactive prescription nostrums prominently re-labeled: \u201cWarning — May cause you to kill people.\u201d But he won\u2019t, will he?<\/p>\n
Meantime, there\u2019s a second-best solution — the one that \u201callowed\u201d congregation member and former police officer Jeanne Assam to cut short an intended rampage by disgruntled former student Matthew Murray — carrying two handguns, an assault rifle and more than 1,000 rounds of ammo — at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs in just two months ago.<\/p>\n
Until they get around to properly labeling the depravity-inducing drugs which have been prescribed to nearly all these mass shooters, Gov. Blagojevich could tell the Illinois Legislature and sundry county authorities it\u2019s way past time to restore the 2nd and 14th amendment right to self-defense in Illinois by repealing every one of their overlapping \u201cgun control\u201d laws, ending that state\u2019s status as a de jure \u201cgun-free zone.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he won\u2019t do that, either. Will he?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I see where Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes has responded to the drive-by murder of a 15-year-old Palo Verde High School inmate by another one of Mr. Rullfes\u2019 young charges not by admitting a failure of his own tutelage (the first responsibility of educators, surely, being to mold character), but instead by whining it\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}