Blood Steyns

Mark Steyn has been offering his latest words of wisdom on the Virginia Tech campus shooting:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/351710,CST-EDT-STEYN22.article

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, he used to be a columnist on the Daily Telegraph, until it became a bit left wing for him. So he seems to have moved the the USA from his native Canada, where he can find a larger audience for his famously perspicacious brand of right-wing mentalism.

Virginia Tech's great crime, according to Steyn, was to put signs up proclaiming the campus a "gun-free zone", which naturally lulled all the students into a false sense of security. One may argue about the benefits of placing public aspirational messages around a college campus - indeed you may even call it fatuous. But it scarcely makes you more vulnerable to complacency about mass murder, any more than seeing street preachers proclaim the end of the world makes me check the news for an apocalypse.

It turns out the real reason for the tragic loss of life at Virginia Tech (VT) was because there weren't enough guns. Had "the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT", he goes on "someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived."

Of course Cho Seung-hui would also have had to remember to wear his "would-be mass murderer" T-Shirt that day as well, just so the cops didn't add to the mayhem by shooting the wrong armed student and anyone caught in the crossfire.