This letter is in today’s Boston Globe:
THE SHOOTING at Virginia Tech is another example of why gun-free zones are dangerous. This would have ended much sooner and with fewer people dead or injured if at least one of those students or faculty members had been armed and able to shoot back.
In February in a mall in Utah, another young man started shooting at customers. An armed, off-duty police officer engaged the shooter until other police arrived, and the police were able to kill the shooter.
If that armed citizen had not been there, the shooter could have killed many more innocent people.
When law-abiding citizens have guns, law-abiding citizens are safer and criminals are not.
ANNA DeMARINIS
Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has made this point in the past, that more guns equal more safety. Obviously, this is false. The statistical “proof” for this assertion doesn’t hold up. [Link] Would more guns make Baghdad safer? If the off-duty police officer in Utah saw another civilian drawing a weapon when he engaged the mall shooter, the safe assumption would have been that he was also dangerous.
I haven’t read everything there is to know about who knew what, and when, about the shooter at Virginia Tech, but it seems clear that concerns had been raised with the proper authorities. There was enough to go on for somebody to check if he owned guns, and to put him on a list of names to be reported when an application was made to buy a gun. I don’t know the Federal and Virginia regulations concerning gun ownership, but they were inadequate.
If only Abraham Lincoln had been packing heat. He could have returned fire!