30+ ppl killed at Virginia Tech university

[Jax]

Sure, but as I said before and also like red bear mentioned, it's alot harder to kill someone using a knife than a gun. Gun is simple, point and pull the trigger, everything else requiers physical contact. So the argument of comparing guns with different kinds of weapons (swords, knives, baseball bats, sticks) doesn't sound very convincing.
I'm not argumenting a total ban on guns or the outlaw them for civilians, just for some stiffer regulation.
I believe red bear mentioned that "education" is the key, I'm sorry but will you remember such an education if you are in a state of total anger and pure hate towards a person and you are carrying a gun. Not every person will be able to restrain himself and before you know its too late.
Something else I find strange is that there is absolutely no discussion possible what so ever about gun regulation, not even the slightest amount of regulation is open for discussion.

[redbear]

i sit here and read this mega-long thread and think many,many things.

outside of the fact that i feel i'm done with any type of productive discussion ... my last post would be this ... as europeans, canadians and other non-americans ... trying to 'get rid the the guns' is never going to be the solution here, no matter how much complaining and griping is done anywhere in the world, or even here in america. so get over it. by focusing on strictly that sentiment, you are missing the bigger picture, which i also have tried to realize and understand myself. Cho, as well as gunmen in the past, had many problems. most of which were ignored until it was too late. some of the problems here also didn't rest just with Cho either. yeah, he pulled the trigger and was ultimately responsible for the day's actions. however, VT should be held accountable in some regards for dropping the ball and letting the school become unlocked while a gunman walked its campus. i'm sure a few legal actions will take place becuase of this. The fact that Cho was able to get the guns, as aluded to by chernabog_ca and others was really a problem considering he was found to be a 'danger to himself and others' by a few people. with 10,000 gun laws on the books already, i don't know how much stricter one can make the existing laws to prevent what happened on that day. i really don't.

[chernabog_ca]

It's true. All us non-Americans sit here and advocate gun control and what not. Guns are a part of American society and probably not going to change anytime soon. I guess it's hard for us to understand as it's different in our countries and I guess we can't get past that. I personally cannot understand why someone feels they need a hand gun. I can understand people who hunt owing a rifle but why is there a need for hand guns and automatic weapons? If someone could give me a valid, logical reason, then perhaps I could understand.

I guess the one thing we've overlooked and red bear has pointed out is Cho was allowed to get to that point. It's the same with the two that were involved in Columbine. There were signals there that no one picked up on. Ultimately that is the biggest problem, is that they went unnoticed until those fateful days. It was almost the same situation with the guy in Montreal that was responsible for the shooting at Dawson College. It's hard to believe that there wasn't anybody there for these people that could have stopped them.

But you still have to ask yourself, if they didn't have easy access to guns, what would have happened....

[Jake]

^I absolutely agree that Cho should not have been able to purchase the weapons. There are federal laws that prevent this from happening, it is the school's/hospital's fault for not reporting his status to the federal authorities responsible for background checks.

from wiki:

The sale of firearms to permanent residents in Virginia is legal as long as the buyer shows proof of residency.

Additionally, though, Virginia has a law that limits purchases of handguns to one every 30 days.

Federal law requires a criminal background check for handgun purchases from licensed firearms dealers, and Virginia checks other databases in addition to the Federally-mandated NICS. Federal law also prohibits those "adjudicated as a mental defective" from buying guns, and Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment.

“ Virginia state law on mental health disqualifications to firearms purchases, however, is worded slightly differently from the federal statute. So the form that Virginia courts use to notify state police about a mental health disqualification addresses only the state criteria, which list two potential categories that would warrant notification to the state police: someone who was “involuntarily committed” or ruled mentally “incapacitated.””

The federal law defines adjudication as a mental defective to include "determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority" that as a result of mental illness, the person is a "danger to himself or others."

Because of gaps between federal and Virginia state laws, the state failed to report Cho's legal status to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and thus failed to prevent Cho's purchases.

The week following the incident, Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell called for changes in state law to close those gaps.

So it's not like Cho got the weapons because we're gun-crazy nuts, he got them because the US is a federal republic. There are already a lot of laws about gun control to address these issues. The fact that they were not enforced is another debate altogether.

For example there's a law in New York that says you can't spit in public. This is a remnant of the tuberculosis epidemics decades ago. Writing more laws on the matter is useless when nobody actually obeys or enforces this law. Similarly writing more paragraphs and sections into the law code will be pointless when the people responsible for them do nothing.



All that being said I still think if we had the strictest gun control in the world this still would've happened. You can clearly see that Cho was very motivated in his actions and people are capable of extreme things when they feel strongly about something. "Where there's a will there's a way" certainly holds true in this case and honestly I think if he had not gotten them the way he did he'd simply pursue other means of acquiring the weapons.

[j7wild]

if you look in the Classified of the Houston's newspaper, there are individuals advertising firearms for sales all the time and you don't need a license or a background check to purchase those because the Law only applies to purchases made from a licensed Firearm dealer at a store or a gun show or over the internet (shipped to a dealer).

so this CHO guy could had gone that route too if he couldn't get one from a dealer.

[Kn'thrak]

What was that Family Guy joke about "the right to bear arms."???

Point proven

[jmcc]

I would like to see you here in Venezuela... maybe you will change your mind about having firearms...

Casually, some days ago, after the shooting at Virginia Tech, I and 3 friends were menaced with death by a being who, maybe, can be described as a drugged-irrational-killing-machine. We were at the cybercafé, 25 minutes after closing it (8:25 pm) and the guy came to the door and wanted to use a telephone. The cyber works from 8 am to 8 pm but he apparently believed it was bad. I live near that internet café and this is a dangerous zone near Caracas and even 8 pm can be a dangerous hour.

The man wanted to do an "emergency call" and he had a cellular phone on its hands (here in Venezuela lots of people have cell phones used with prepaid cards, and maybe his prepaid card was totally used and his emergency call was not to look for authorities but someone else). But maybe he wanted to rob the cyber. We were saying him that we can't let him enter because we were already closed when he started to menace us. He was talking to another one that we can't see, because to get to the door you need to go to a one floor staircase, and he started to say to the other:

--Let us go to kill them!

He said this 4 times and we get very worried. "You work for a company?" "Why do you close so early?" "Man, let us go to kill them." Believe me, if even one of us had a weapon, sure thing that man would be death at that moment because such menaces only can come from a very disturbed person and no one will say that for fun (and the way he did it makes us to believe he was bad).

Do you know what happened next? The guy seated on the reception desktop just opened the door without saying nothing to the rest of us (from this group of 4, 2 work at the internet café). The drunk man (yes, he was drunk) entered and seemed to be willing to continue the discusion but after some words, he said "Thanks" and some another things (between dirty words and offenses) and entered the phone cabin.

During his conversation he menaced someone various times and at some moment he left the cabin to say us:

--You and you [pointing to me and to another friend] are alive now only because my saint granted me a favor.



Then he continued talking on the phone and at the end he said that "Sorry. You know, I am in problems. Sorry" and "You are lucky... [implying that he has some power over our lives ]" and paid his call and left the internet café.

The guy who opened the door apparently felt sure that the criminal would not harm us. Later we get some info: apparently that man was looking for a gun for something. In this area those things are not strange.

It was a delicate situation. I believe we are alive because we show no fear on our faces and we treated him well, like a normal person. But I frankly believe this: If we had a weapon maybe we would have killed him. The police would be with us, I think, because the number of crimes are so high and they are outnumbered by criminals in such a way that one dead criminal more would be good news.

The conclusion is that we are alive by chance. The problem of killing the criminal is that his "friends" would know at some moment who killed him and would want to take revenge. What do you think?

This is one of the near death situation I have passed here (I believe I can call it like that). One of the another such situations was almost two years ago, when a group of "persons" passed the night spying us through our house's windows. That night I wake up at 3 am and noticed some kind of strange sound on my room's window. I take one flashlight and pointed it "on" to the window and then I heard another strange sound. A person was there. The windows are reinforced so no one can, in theory, break it.

I abandoned my room and then started to talk with my mother about that when we started to hear sounds coming from the stairs that communicate our door (and our neighbor's door) to the principal door of the house and, from there, to its roof. Someone was (were?) there. Just some seconds after that, we saw a man's shadow in one window that looks to the stair's corridor. And you know what? Now I think: If I had a weapon sure thing I would shoot at him, looking to kill him. But I don't have weapons and, calling the police apart, the only thing I could do was this: Our door is made in full metal, a bit reinforced, so I take something and started to knock it very hard, to call our neighbor's attention (some of them have firearms). Fortunately, the criminals get fear with this (I believe they were surprised) and left the house. The police arrived around ten minutes later but we only saw a shadow. They didn't found someone.

On the next minutes, talking with our closest neighbors (there are 2 more families living in this house, which is divided in apartments) we found that their 12 years old daughter saw "a man's face" on her room's window at 11 pm. She told her mother and her mother didn't believe her. So you can calculate it: they were at least 4 hours in our windows.

Another neighbor heard steps on the roof.

In Venezuela it has happened before: when criminals get inside of a house, the family can end massacreed, raped and killed. In one case, for example, the criminals massacreed, raped and killed one mother in front of his less than 15 years old son. So I want to know what do you think about having weapons at home, given those examples.

In another case for some years ago not related to me, one pregnant woman saved her life because he heard that various persons were trying to get in her house. She was married but alone at the moment and she take a gun and go to hide herself in one bathroom. When she heard that someone was trying to open the bathroom's door, she fired and, fortunately, killed the guy, who by the way was less than 18 years old. He was not alone and, apparently, the others ran out of the house at that moment (this is a sign of inexperience from the side of the criminals: the normal thing would be to take revenge... fortunately it didn't happened).

Just in the past days, a well known TV actor was stabbed to death in front of his 20 years old daughter, when they were waiting a daughter's friend at 5 am in a city near Caracas. The friend's house was being robbed at that moment by a band o 4 criminals when the actor, Yanis Chimaras Maury, honked the horn repeatedly for the girl to come out. The criminals asked the family who was at that car and:

The thieves came outside, forced Chimaras out of his vehicle at gunpoint and stabbed him three times, police said. He suffered a punctured lung and bled to death [source].

No one arrested until now.

I can even start a thread about such kind of crimes here in Venezuela to let you know the horror. My cousin was killed on past October by a criminal. That person fired a gun pointed to my cousin's face at a distance of a few centimeters. It happened when my cousin and my uncle were closing his alcohol drinks store (sorry, I don't know how it is called in English, a place where you can buy whisky, gin, rum, etcetera) and, suddenly, the criminal appeared from behind my cousin, shoot to him and then quickly disappeared (these kind of crimes are common here and are due to envy).

No one arrested until now.

In the past days I have read in a newspaper that in past 8 years 85.672 persons have been killed in Venezuela due to crime (a link in Spanish with those numbers).

I don't know... I am starting to believe that a weapon can save your life in some situations. I would feel happy with some of j7wild's weapons.

Edit: I have family in South Africa and Brazil and the situation is dangerous there also. A boyfriend of one of the girls of our family in South Africa was killed in his store but I don't know/don't remember the details now. This was some years ago.