How Many Deaths Are Enough?

[spanone]

On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school’s campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Eric Thompson, owner of the online firearms store that sold a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun to the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, did not think that his appearance at Virginia Tech was disrespectful or that his position was extreme. He felt so strongly that college students should be allowed to be armed while engaged in their campus activities that he offered discounts to any students who wanted to buy guns from him.

Thompson spun the discounts as altruistic. He told ABCNews.com, “This offers students and people who might not have otherwise been able to afford a weapon to purchase one at a hefty discount and at a significant expense to myself.”

The sale to Cho was not Thompson’s only unfortunate link to a mass killer. His firm sold a pair of 9-millimeter Glock magazines and a holster to Steven Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old graduate student in DeKalb, Ill., who, on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2008, went heavily armed into an auditorium-type lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. Kazmierczak walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of students and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded 18 others before killing himself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18herbert.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1295366465-THztzDGSzjaG8loN8NgZHw&pagewanted=print

[RKP5637]

1. Recommend!!! n/t

[gratuitous]

2. The High Church of Redemptive Violence demands human sacrifice

If you don't like it, there are plenty of other planets to choose from. Here, we worship the Gun, the Bullet and the Holy Bomb. Violence is the solution to all our problems, and if the problem is excessive violence, that's nothing that a little more violence can't solve. The Keepers of Orthodoxy and Defenders of the Faith will be along to explain it all soon.

[WCGreen]

3. And everyone being armed to the teeth has stopped violence....

[former9thward]

5. Everyone is not "armed to the teeth" at least in public.

A lot of people have guns, myself included, but it is rare that people take them out in public even though there may be a legal right to do so. Most people that I know own a gun but no one ever takes it out of the house. Maybe we should but we don't.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

8. I don't think "everyone" means what you think it means...

Or was that just your weak attempt using hyperbole to gin up support?

That's all you guys got... fallacies, hyperbole, and fear. :eyes:

[Glassunion]

4. How tacky.

I agree to a "point" with the guy. However, I would have thought better about speaking, not to mention the bullshit discount is quite deplorable. A man of little tact.

[Crankie Avalon]

6. Why conceal them? Keep them visible for their deterrent factor...

...it worked in Deadwood and Dodge City, didn't it? :crazy:

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

7. There is a decent sized movement that has been pressuring this issue for years.

SCCC, I think they are called.

[dmallind]

9. How many deaths depend on these actions?

There are many gun stores to choose from, and these sales followed all legal requirements. The great fault in Cho's case was VA's inability or unwillingness to update databases so that those legal requirements would have resulted in a refusal. Of course even then he could have bought guns illicitly, but it would have made this Clupea harengus less incarnadine.

[AngryAmish]

10. I'll let you know.