This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. While many people have been using this anniversary to push a gun control agenda the truth is the amount of people killed by the shooter could have been reduced greatly if only students and faculty were allowed to carry on campus:
Speaking for myself, I would give anything if someone on campus; a professor, one of the trained military or guardsman taking classes or another student could have saved my daughter by shooting Cho before he killed our loved ones. Because professors, staff and students are precluded from protecting themselves on campus, Cho, a student at Virginia Tech himself, was able to simply walk on campus and go on a killing rampage with no worry that anyone would stop him.
What enabled the killer to walk around the campus and murder random individuals wasn’t a lack of gun control laws, it was to presences of them. Serial killers like Cho select gun-free zones for a reason, they can be reasonably sure that they won’t encounter any resistance and therefore hold all of the power. For many of these killers their real desire is power over others and killing unarmed individuals gives a person a feeling of power.
When the state prohibits you from carrying a firearm they are stripping you of your ability to defend yourself. No free society should ever find it acceptable to use the threat of violence (if you carry a gun you will be kidnapped and tossed into a cage) to prevent others from defending themselves. It’s ridiculous. The very fact that nonviolent individuals wanting nothing more than the ability to defend themselves are subjected to the threat of violence by the state should be appalling to everybody.
Although the Virginia Tech massacre couldn’t have been prevented entirely the number killed could have been greatly reduced. Instead society allowed the gun control advocates to get their way and it has cost lives. We should all remember the aftermath of Virginia Tech and vow to fight for individuals’ right to self-defense.