The Underground Conservative

First, our thoughts and prayers go to the family, friends and community at Virginia Tech over today’s horrific tragedy.

Next, it’s not surprising to find the anti-gun crowd are already starting to come out:

Advocates of wider gun controls said the availability of guns in the United States had made it easier for people to commit murder everywhere, including in schools and colleges.

“What have we done as a nation in the 8 years since Columbine about this problem? We compound the trade of the day by our failure to deal with the proliferation of guns in our country,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Helmke said that since Columbine, which happened eight years ago this week, there had been no new legislation on control of guns and he said a ban on assault weapons was allowed to expire in September 2004.

Um, would somebody please remind Mr. Helmke that–although the police investigation is not yet complete–indications are that the alleged shooter used handguns that were perfectly legal to use under the assault weapons ban?

Here’s the underlying cause of these tragic shootings:

People who commit killings in schools and colleges are sometimes motivated by a specific grievance against that institution or people within it, said Nadine Kaslow, a professor and chief psychologist at Emory School of Medicine.

They are sometimes mentally ill and may equally be reacting to a trauma, either real or imagined, that they have suffered, and decide to take that trauma out on everyone else, Kaslow said in an interview.

“Some of these people — I don’t want to use the word ’snap’ — but they just go over the edge. All the rest of us have a conscience that says: ‘don’t do this,”‘ she said stressing she was new to the Virginia Tech case.

The way in which the media play up cases such as Columbine may make the idea of committing such a crime to achieve notoriety attractive to certain individuals, she said to explain why such killings appear more prevalent in the United States than in other Western countries.

And the money quote:

“We are bombarded with violent images in our culture. We have a culture of violence here (in the United States). Kids will go home and watch this on TV,” she said.

I’m not one to promote Michael Moore, but I actually did see Bowling for Columbine. What I took from that movie is that guns don’t cause the violence–Moore went to Canada for the film and pointed out that Canadians have guns too but they don’t go around shooting people. Rather, the violence stems from our culture’s “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality as demonstrated by the choice of stories on most local TV newscasts. “Kids will go home and watch this on TV,” indeed.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Second Amendment, Media, Politics, Current Affairs, America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.