What we should learn from the VA Tech massacre

I'd much rather be blogging about taxes right now...but something slightly more important came up.

I don't know anyone who attends or attended Virginia Tech. The closest I can come is that my sister knows someone who attends their graduate school (she's ok, btw.)

I do know that as soon as the enormity of the situation was reported, the gun control advocates and "world opinion" would immediately criticize our "gun culture." This disgusts me for two reasons:

1. Many of the victims had not even been moved from the scene, much less identified yet. Consequently many families were not notified, when the politicizing of this extremely tragic event began. This shows sickening insensitivity to all those victimized by this madman.

2. Focusing on the weapon overshadows the evil perpetrated by this obscene individual. It creates a feeling that the guns themselves committed the acts and that Cho, who wasn't identified until a full day after the attacks, was being somehow led by them.

I have read several bloggers and media types condemn the politicizing of the tragedy, which shows progress and that knee jerk reactions that followed similar incidents in recent years in Australia and Scotland will not rule the day.

However, now that Cho's package has been made partially public by NBC News, and we can see how evil and despicable this man was, I would like to illustrate how Cho could've perpetrated these crimes without the use of handguns.

A. Knife or some other type of blade - Cho would not realistically accomplished much by using a knife, even a machete. He could've been tackled or brought down by several male students. The injuries caused would be brutal and there would be deaths, but I would guess they would number no more than 12, with many more severely injured. If he was disarmed, suicide would not have been an option for him.

B. Car - Cho could've taken his car, assuming that he has access to one, and simply attempted to run down as many students as possible, in a manner similar to the incident at the University of North Carolina. (Whatever happened with that, Mainstream Media?) Granted the death toll probably would not have been so great (let's say he hits between classes and kills 15 people, injuring another 12 or so) and it would've been harder to commit suicide when the cops closed in, but he could've rammed the vehicle into a building or committed "suicide-by-cop."

B. Poison - I thank my wife for this suggestion, as she worked in her campus cafeteria. If Cho wanted to kill indiscriminately, he could've gotten a work study job at the cafe, smuggled in Rat Poison or who knows what (I'm not up on my poisons, sorry.), and sickened or killed a lot of people. VA Tech has approximately 9,000 people on campus. He contaminates one item of one meal with the right poison and the death toll might just exceed 32.

C. Bomb - Let's say that instead of going to the dorm to murder his first victim, Cho decides to, at least, attempt to blow up the entire dorm. This would require a greater degree of planning and sophistication on his part (and rudimentary Internet search engine knowledge), but if he succeeds the death toll would easily be in the hundreds if he would've struck at the same time of day. (As an aside, Spain and the UK haven't banned common household products used in bomb-production yet, have they?)

So what's the point of this brief analysis? 32 innocent people are still dead and others have received devastating injuries. Well, as I suspected from the beginning, if Cho had not had access to handguns, I believe the general consensus in coming days will be that he would've used other means to try to murder as many people as possible.

Cho was evil and the mainstream media, politicians (unfortunately of both stripes) and liberals in general do not want to acknowledge that evil exists in the here and now. Even the university that has been victimized did not take aggressive steps to deal with him before he struck. Whether it takes the form of lone gunmen or Islamofascists, evil must be acknowledged and confronted. If this important lesson is learned and applied, we will be a much safer society for it.