VT shooting & gun laws

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since the VT shootings. It's harder still to believe that Virginians refused to amend gun statutes to protect citizens from mentally-disturbed persons making gun purchases.

NRA continues to hold dominion over Virginia
Posted January 26th, 2008 at 9:30 am

Guest Post by Morbo

After the Virginia Tech massacre, I wrote a post predicting that the horrific incident would do nothing to change our gun policy. I secretly hoped I’d be proven wrong. Sadly, it looks like I won’t.

In Virginia, lawmakers have rejected modest legislation closing a loophole that allows people to buy weapons at gun shows without undergoing a background check. This should be a no-brainer after what happened, but still the measure failed.

Reported The Washington Post:

Gun-control advocates, including survivors of the April 16 shooting rampage that took the lives of 32 victims at Virginia Tech, poured into a Senate committee meeting to support a bill that would require background checks for all gun-show sales. They then staged a “lie-in,” lying on their backs outside the Capitol to draw attention to gun deaths in Virginia last year.

Some of the survivors offered compelling personal testimony. Colin Goddard, 22, who survived the shootings and is now a senior at the school, cut to the chase when he said: “People tell me I am alive because of God or luck or a bunch of other stuff. I don’t know how much I can accept any of those, but one thing I can’t accept is that it was just criminals being criminals and I was just caught in the wrong situation at the wrong time.”

Amazingly, several gun nuts attended this event with weapons strapped on their hips. That’s right — in Virginia, it is legal to attend a public meeting of government representatives wearing a pistol. One complained that background checks are “onerous” because they can take as long as one day to complete.

At the hearing, some of the surviving students were approached by gun nuts who explained to them that had the students been armed, they could have taken out the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui. These gun nuts are clearly disturbed — yet the legislature listens to them, not the families of those who were killed.

A panel of the Virginia House of Delegates had already voted down closing the loophole. The Senate hearing was an attempt to revive it, but on Wednesday the members of the Courts of Justice Committee voted it down 9-6. All seven Republicans on the committee voted against it, as did two Democrats.

To the gun nuts, “gun control” is synonymous with seizure of weapons. They do this on purpose to frighten people. Thus, the debate becomes whether people can have guns or not instead of what reasonable restrictions we can put in place to make sure the wrong people don’t have access to guns. I don’t want to take away the rifle your uncle Fred uses to hunt deer. I do want to make sure that a deranged person can’t go to a gun show, walk out with an assault rifle and head for the nearest middle school.

If Virginia won’t even pass a baby-step measure like this in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, then all hope for any sensible gun laws in that state is lost. As I said back in April, we are left to wait until some other deranged person decides to top Cho Seung-Hui’s grim record.

After this was written, we had the NIU shootings. Did he get those guns illegally? Nope.

The graduate student bought two of his four guns at a Champaign, Ill., gun store Saturday — indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News' Richard Esposito and Pierre Thomas report. The other weapons were purchased from the same store in December and August 2007.

New IPCC report, politics & football

But it's all a hoax!!

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's megacities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

Keep your eye on this hot new item on Clinton supposedly having dirt on Obama.

Dammit, no SEC championship for UF, despite my prognostications else wise. Even if UT loses next week against UK and UGA loses against GT, it won't make a difference. The good news is, Tebow's Heisman talk is heating up. Also in good news, the Hokies are pounding on the 'Canes.

Great college football weekend

A good football weekend all-around for my two teams:

• We went to the UF-USC game -- see a picture here. We had great tickets, but had to pay $130 each (section 1, row 20, seats 3 & 4), close enough to Tebow for my wife to swoon (yet again). Watching him put up 7 touchdowns was amazing, and I can see why he's in the running for the Heisman. And do keep in mind that he's just a sophomore...wait until next year! Florida is #12 in the BCS, and they need Kentucky to beat Georgia and either Vandy or UK to beat UT to get a shot at the SEC title. Then, if they beat LSU in the title game, they would have an excellent shot at the BCS title. (yes, I'm being a little irrational here) More likely, they will end up with a nice top ten finish with no berth in the Sugar Bowl.
  


• VT finally beat FSU. They're now ranked #10 in the BCS. Go Hokies! They need to beat Miami this Saturday and UVA next Saturday. UVA looked really strong stomping the shit out of the 'Canes.

Westboro Baptist Bribed to Leave VT Funerals Alone

Via Prof. Friedman:

Westboro Baptist Bargains Away Virginia Tech Funeral Picketing For Radio Time

By Howard Friedman

Plans (previously reported here) by virulently anti-gay members of the Topeka, Kansas Westboro Baptist Church to picket funerals of the Virginia Tech victims have now been called off in a deal with a radio talk show host. The blog Straight, Not Narrow reported yesterday that church spokesperson Shirley Phelps-Roper will get 3 hours on the air with conservative radio host Mike Gallagher in exchange for calling off the funeral demonstrations. While a posting on Gallagher’s website is somewhat apologetic about the deal, Westboro describes the deal in contractual terms on its website. The church's earlier posting announcing the picketing of the first of the student funerals had said that the Virginia Tech killings were explainable as God "punishing America for her sodomite sins and for persecuting Westboro Baptist Church for warning America of her doom". Another of its postings says "The 33 Massacred at Virginia Tech died for America's sins against WBC."

I seriously expected one of the WBC to be added to the casualty list. If my son, or daughter, or wife, or sister, or mother, was lying dead in a casket and these people were standing a few feet away screaming that their death was God's wrath on butt sex, I would lose it. I would seriously, seriously lose it. And thus God would probably then use me as an instrument of his wrath to kill one of those hate-filled idiots.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism

God is a Dick, Cont'd

Perhaps blessed with some degree of prescience, I wrote on Monday night, "God is a Dick": articulating why the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good god (tri-omni) is completely illogical. In my piece, I used one particular sort of tragedy to highlight how inconsistent this version of god is with our reality: a terrible accident in which 7 children died, and whose grandfather had a heart attack and died when he heard the news. The reason I picked it was to talk about the sorts of evils that are not the result of anyone's intent. It was a terrible and tragic accident -- the trucker did not mean to kill.

For volume two, we have the fresh tears and blood flowing from Blacksburg to consider.

Yesterday, I walked through Turlington Plaza, and found Joey Johnsen preaching, as is par for the course. We talked about it a while, and he basically said it was evidence that men were sinners. The manifold problems with this way of thinking all center on the fact that if God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then there is an obligation to act to prevent harm and suffering in the creation to the greatest extent which is logically possible. As I've argued elsewhere, there are ways to do that which do not violate freedom of will.

Listen to a fellow alumnus weigh in as regarding the tragedy at VT:

The line stretched by the Baptist Student Union and Latter Day Saints outreach centers. The BSU had a big sign out reminding us that God is real, hears our prayers, and is able to move to heal us. Apparently, He is simply unwilling to move to save us in the first place. I am an atheist with respect to every god I’ve met in religious literature, and an agnostic on the concept of god in general. This kind of event seems more explicable as a person’s response to something horrible in his finite, physical mind and taking action in a finite, physical world. What is the alternative? A demon torturing his soul, and an all-powerful God who lets the innocent die? A God who is willing to clean up the mess by healing the survivors, but would not intervene to save those killed?

Albert Mohler, the guy who only thinks biotechnology is useful for curing "teh gay", has now weighed in on VT:

The Bible never flinches from assigning responsibility for moral evil. Human beings are capable of committing horrible acts of violence, malevolence, cruelty, and killing.

The Bible locates the problem of moral evil in the human heart.

Riiiiiiiiiiight (Dr. Evil). And the question of why God didn't create creatures who freely choose only good is still unanswered.

In taking moral evil seriously, the Bible affirms that we are responsible creatures. Our Creator will hold us fully accountable for our actions. All are sinners. Some sinners embrace evil with virtual abandon -- leading to horrors such as these killings on a university campus. We dare not attempt to minimize this moral responsibility.

Then, as C. S. Lewis so powerfully reminded us, we must trust that God's perfect justice will destroy evil and reset the moral equilibrium of the universe.

Sort of like a husband who beats his wife on their honeymoon, but then promises her flowers for the rest of eternity, God's rectifying a bad situation is supposed to absolve him of responsibility/blame for allowing it to occur in the first place?

A central tenet of the Christian faith is the claim that, on the cross, Jesus Christ willingly suffered the full force of evil, even unto death -- and that in raising Christ from the dead, the Father vindicated Christ's victory over sin, death, and evil.

The Virginia Tech horror reminds us all what human beings can do to each other. The cross of Christ reminds us of what Jesus did for sinners in bearing the full punishment for this evil.

Sort of a problem to argue that the Incarnation makes sense of the problem of evil. Allowing an innocent person to suffer for those who are guilty is not justice, or mercy, but a grave injustice. Only a twisted sort of logic could see it otherwise.

Christianity does not deny the reality of evil or try to hide from its true horror. Christians dare not minimize evil nor take refuge in euphemisms. Beyond this, we cannot accept that evil will have the last word. The last word will be the perfect fulfillment of the grace and justice of God.

In the meantime, we are witnesses to the true nature of moral catastrophes such as the killings at Virginia Tech. We mourn with those who mourn, and weep with those who weep.

Who could calculate the pain and suffering of these victims and their families? Even as I pray for those who grieve and suffer such excruciating loss, I place my confidence in the assurance that God will bring all things to the perfect conclusion of his judgment. Without this confidence, how could I make sense of what surely appears to be senseless evil and violence?

And yet to me, it is only in a world where an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing Being sits on its thumb that the world is senseless. In our world, the real world, human minds are organic and can thus malfunction, causing some people to be mentally ill and to kill for no reason whatsoever. In a world with supposedly nonphysical minds, one wonders how mental illness occurs...

Cho Seung-hui Had a MySpace Page

I was wrong about this -- turned out to be a fake page.

Wired News and others have asked about the shooter's online writings. I may be the first person to have found what appears to be Cho Seung-hui's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/choseunghui

I wrote a message to this account to accuse anyone who may have opened this after-the-fact of being a macabre and heartless soul. I think it's authentic, because it's set to private -- who would open it and label it with "Ismail Ax" but not try to throw crap out there for attention? I can't verify this independently, of course, but someone will.

**UPDATE: Check out the video page of this MySpace user. I exploited a small privacy weakness on MySpace which allows you to view the video page of any user, whether their profile is set to private or to public. Interestingly, it says, "California, US" as the location. It doesn't yet appear that he ever lived there, but I don't know how significant this would be, since the red "Ismail Ax" appears on the front page. If this page was modified since the shooting, then we know this page is a fake. If not, then we have a high degree of certainty that it is genuine -- the "Ismail Ax" is a clincher piece of evidence. I wrote to MySpace using their contact form and asked them to see if the page had been modified since the shooting, since this would appear to impinge on their identity theft policy, not to mention being a cruel hoax. If anyone hacks the page, please let me know, since I seem to be the first person to have found this.**

**UPDATE 2 (12:50 pm): Commenter Max below alerted me that the source code on the MySpace page in question (CTRL-U shows the source code of the page you're looking at) says that the last login was today (4-18-07). I did notify the MySpace authorities earlier this morning, so I wonder if they logged in to the account; I'd love to hear back from them to find out what is going on -- whether that login was them checking the profile or what. For now I'll play it safe and remove the wikipedia reference.

**UPDATE 3 (2pm): Exploiting another weakness in the MySpace privacy system, which I don't care to elaborate on, I found the following information:

First Name: Seung-Hui
Orientation: No Answer
Motive: Friends
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Location: , California, US
Profile Updated: Apr 17, 2007 7:22 PM

Therefore, this page is a fake. These people doing this are just fucktards. Please, send them a message telling them so.

**Final Update: I just received the following email from MySpace

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	RE: Not Found (2) - Imposter Profile
Date:	Fri, 20 Apr 2007 03:17:36 -0700
From:	Imposter Report, imposterreport@support.myspace.com

Hello,

Thank you for reporting this profile. The profile in question is
scheduled to be deleted.

Thank you,

MySpace.com

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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

An Email I Just Received from the Alumni Assoc. at VT

I just got this from the AA at VT, and wanted to pass it on so that people can have the info to give something to the families affected:

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO ALL ALUMNI OF VIRGINIA TECH

To our Virginia Tech alumni, I write the kind of message I never expected to have to write in my entire career serving the university. On Monday, the 16th of April, a campus resident senior student shot two students in Ambler Johnston residence hall and proceeded shortly thereafter to the other side of the Drillfield, entered Norris Hall and randomly shot more than 40 students and faculty in several classrooms. He then turned his gun on himself and took his own life. As I write this, 32 students and faculty who were among his victims have died. Others remain hospitalized. An ongoing investigation will answer so many facts and questions still unknown at this time.

This is the most horrific scene in the history of this or any university. Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of the victims. Our hearts go out to the friends, classmates and others who witnessed this tragedy. A Memorial Convocation is scheduled today (Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time) and will be nationally televised. President and Mrs. George W. Bush are expected to attend, along with Virginia Governor and Mrs. Tim Kaine and other dignitaries.

This is a shocking crime with crime scenes that have attracted national and international press, all broadcasting their live news shows from the Holtzman Alumni Center. President Charles Steger, himself an alumnus, has personally expressed with utmost compassion his condolences to the families who have been notified and are still being notified. His leadership through this tragedy has been extraordinary. All of us at the university wish to demonstrate our compassion especially to our students who have experienced a kind of horror and tragedy that hopefully they never will again. We share in their deepest sorrow and grief.

Other universities and institutions across the country, and indeed around the world, have communicated with us to express their shock and sympathy. Many of our alumni have communicated with us and also with each other to share expressions of support as well as their personal grief. I am confident that Virginia Tech will heal from this in whatever time it may take, and will do so because of its strong support from a family of caring alumni numbering over 200,000, including our current students and all their families. The faculty, staff and entire surrounding community are committed to helping our students and faculty recover from this terrible, terrible event. Those who will follow them will continue to embrace the true meaning of our motto “That I May Serve,” that bonds the entire Hokie Nation.

The Alumni Association placed a single wreath in the Campus Chapel within hours of the tragedy, and the Corps of Cadets has posted an honor guard with it to symbolize a university honoring those it has lost so tragically. It is but one symbol of the enormous grief that an entire campus and family of alumni around the world must bear. Many have asked how they may send financial memorials… any memorial gifts, payable to the “Virginia Tech Foundation,” designated specifically for the “Virginia Tech Family Fund,” should be mailed to University Development, 902 Prices Fork Road (0336), Blacksburg, VA 24061.

Thank you for your genuine concern and expressions of support for all of us at the university. And please keep those who lost their lives and their grieving families in your thoughts and prayers.

Tom Tillar
Vice President for Alumni Relations

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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

A YouTube Tribute to VT

A tribute. Many more will surely follow.

The outpouring of sympathy is great, but I tire of hearing the trite, "God bless VT" and "our thoughts and prayers are with you." Maybe it's just the angry atheist in me, but this sort of slacktivism pisses me off. If you really care about these victims, don't waste your time talking to your invisible magic friend. Go donate blood. Have your organ donor status certified. Go offer some money to a scholarship fund for one of many dead students or offer money to the widow/widowers. Go volunteer time with one of the students as an informal grief counselor. Give them hugs.

Do something tangiable and real.
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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies

This Hokie Grieves

Tragic.

Heads are going to roll, unfortunately.
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Technorati tags: Virginia Tech, Hokies