4/17/2007 cartoon by Steve Sack, of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (email) is one of the many featured by Daryl Cagle on the topic of the Virginia Tech shootings. I found an earlier Sack cartoon on gun control at the webpage of communitarian R. Owen Barnes (email) . See also Sack's take on art masters viewing today's world over at Cagle.
Back on January 2, 2003, Canadian Randy Sutherland (email, if you replace "AT" with "@"), in response to the NRA rhetoric, "Guns Don't Kill People, People Do" posted his song "A Country & Wesson Supermarket Tragedy" (audio clip), introduced by the comment "Fingers Don't Kill People, Bullets Do."
I was in the supermarket today
a really awful thing happened
I tripped and fell, my hand gun went off
I killed a man by the napkins
ya it's bad, but it only gets worse
when he fell his gun shot a lady with a purse
when that hit the floor it filled the store clerk with lead
before the whole thing was over - seventeen of us dead
I burn in hell, the fuel is the sorrow
my story is your lesson
when you go out shopping tomorrow
put the safety on your smith & wesson
George W. Bush, who couldn't find his way to New Orleans the day after Katrina, was on hand this afternoon in Blacksburg for the memorial service after yesterday's Virginia Tech massacre.
One his kindred anti-gun contol advocates, State Del. Mark Cole (R) , tried this past session of the General Assembly to push through a measure that would have let students with concealed-carry permits bring firearms on campus, trumping the school’s policy prohibiting them. The prior year, Delegate Todd Gilbert sponsored the measure. Both Cole and Gilbert are the heroes of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
No I will not link to the group's website and legitimate it in the view of Technorati and Google, et. al. Suffice it to say, said site touts on its homepage, an article in the Daily Press that the organization is
on a mission to root out every nugget of gun control it can detect in Virginia. It has been behind campaigns to make sure concealed weapons are allowed in local government buildings, even civic centers, and fought to open up state and local parks to concealed weapons.
These are the guys who outdo the NRA, showing up at the General Assembly with orange buttons sporting the slogan, "Guns Save Lives." These are the guys who ghoulishly published a news release yesterday headlined "Gun-control claims lives at Virginia Tech."
the university and college lobbyists swore that crime was not an
issue and that the schools did not want students and visitors to be
able to defend themselves with a gun or other weapon. They argued
that the schools had little boxes with lights that had a button
someone could press if they needed the police.
These are the guys who list as their (expletive deleted) accomplishments:
- getting Virginia's Concealed Carry Law Changed From "May Issue" to "Shall Issue" in 1995, Swelling The Number of Permit Holders From a Few Thousand in 1994 to Over 110,000 as of Mid 2002
- working with the Henrico Board of Supervisors to get ban on permit holders in parks removed
- grandfathering permit holders so they are totally "protected" ;while while carrying or possessing a firearm.
- distributing literature at The Stand For Children Rally in Washington, DC
- engineering Fairfax County's "Hunting Laws" to exempt gun carriers from County hunting restrictions
- derailing "Operation Scarlet Letter" in Bath County
- stopping a proposed gun ban in Harrisonburg, Virginia
- pressuring Lowe's Stores to allow concealed carry on premises
More tomorrow. The library's closing.
UPDATE: CD Mitchell (yahoo 360 blog with 99 page views as if 1/25/08 including two by me), the only total stranger to ever weigh in on my blog, posted this comment on 5/2/07:
I do not see everyone wanting to take away the public's driver's license because another drunk dirver killed an entire family. To remove the right to have a gun becuase some depraved fool pulls a stunt like this is another attempt to restrict freedoms in an effort to prevent something that cannot be stopped. If one student at VT had had a gun, maybe the attack could have been ended. But fools who espouse gun control will never debate that question.
You need to go find Utopia and live there.
