Virginia Tech killings, take one

Too early to say what the motive was in the case of the lone gunman who slaughtered (by various accounts) upwards of 20 or 30 Virginia Tech students this morning.

And, maybe we'll never know.

My heart goes out to the parents and friends of these kids. That a single man could lay hands on sufficient firepower to kill that many in a single act of senseless violence makes the Second Amendment crazies seem all the more crazy. Whether he got the guns legally or not, my mother used to always say "Locks are meant to keep an honest man honest, a thief will get in anyway". Gun control laws make it more difficult for dangerous minds to do these sort of things. Just like with a lock, it discourages trespass.

Laws against dangerous items are there to at least slow down those who might use them in a moment's rage or madness. Just as having a handgun in your home greatly increases the chance that you or someone you know will die by it, so does the availability of lethal toys, which is all most of the questionable firearms are, increase the odds of something like what happened today going down in our colleges, our schools, our shopping malls.

Had this gunman not had easy access to weaponry capable of taking this many lives he still may have gone on a murderous rampage; fists, rocks and knives flying. And killed a fraction of those he killed today.

And so many less families would have been left to grieve. Thank you, NRA, for your help in dealing with the population problem by your misplaced fascination with giving lethal toys to disturbed people so that we may learn just how deadly a dark moment in someone's life can be for innocent bystanders.