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Adriana Seagle
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Diane Edbril and Daniel Loeb / The Philadelphia Jewish Voice
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2007-07-01
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<p>Lessons learned on the 8th anniversary of Columbine.
<i>-- Diane Edbril and Daniel Loeb</i>
Yet another American gun massacre, and though the scale is more horrific, it is not surprising. The Virginia Tech massacre is not unlike the Amish schoolhouse shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, late last year. Both of these, while unbearably sad, are hardly unexpected in this country. Our weak gun laws make it a certainty that the United States will continue to suffer recurrences of such preventable tragedies. There is a crying need for Americans to understand - It's about the guns!
Phil Goldsmith, President of CeaseFire PA, said "Since the Columbine shooting tragedy it has become even easier to obtain guns, as well as high capacity ammunition magazines. Many states, including Pennsylvania, have passed pre-emption laws that have undermined the ability of local governments to enact stricter gun laws. (Pennsylvania has preempted local regulation of firearms for over a decade.) Concealed carry laws have multiplied. In addition, for the last six years, the US Department of Justice has required the destruction of gun purchase background check records after just 24 hours, a measure that has prevented a comprehensive review of those who may have acquired guns despite falling into a prohibited category."
Currently:</p>
<p><ul id="obj"><li>Most of our states do not require gun owners to be licensed and for guns to be registered.</li><li>Most of our states have not closed the gun show loophole, so thousands of guns are purchased without background checks.</li><li>Most states impose no limits on the number of firearms one individual can acquire, making it easy for illegal gun traffickers to supply the criminal element.</li><li>Many of our states do not update criminal history databases in a timely manner, making it easy for criminals to obtain firearms.</li></ul></p><p>Imagine how much worse this tragedy could have been if Cho Seung-hui had been in possession of a military assault weapon as is his "right" now that Congress has allowed the Assault Weapons Ban to expire.
Cho Seung-hui was able to obtain firearms despite his psychological record since the burden of proof is on the government to prove that he was a danger to himself and those around him. However, when I get a driver's license, the burden of proof is on me to prove that my eyesight is adequate and that I understand the rules of the road. When I send my children to school or to summer camp, the burden of proof is on me to show that my children have been immunized and are not carrying any communicable diseases. Why not shift the burden of proof and require a recent attestation of sanity from a psychiatrist or psychologist before anyone can handle a firearm?
Will the American people stand up to the gun lobby and demand change, or will the administration simply blame the media for not concentrating their coverage on the majority of universities which do not have gun violence at any given moment?
As Phil Goldsmith observed: "Congress called for a Moment of Silence in response to this massacre. Indeed, a moment of silence is appropriate for such a devastating tragedy with such pain for families and students. But we also need loud, uncompromising noise, particularly in Pennsylvania, where too many of our citizens are being shot and killed in urban areas. The majority of Pennsylvanians favor sensible handgun laws, including Governor Ed Rendell. It is time for the majority's voices to be heard loud and clear."
<i>For information about the Stop Gun Violence Through Peace, Action & Education - A Community-Based Interfaith's Conference on May 20 and the weekly vigils. See last month's article on <a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/v22/22007guns.aspx">Interfaith Initiative Against Guns</a>.</i>
<b>Liviu Librescu Links:</b></p>
<p><ul id="obj"><li><a href="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/virginiatech.shootings/victims/profiles/liviu.librescu.html">CNN Tribute Page</a></li><li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liviu_Librescu">Wikipedia</a></li><li><a href="http://www.esm.vt.edu/~llibresc/RESUME%20L.%20Librescu.pdf">61 page resume</a></li><li><a href="http://www.chabad.edu/templates/articlecco.html?AID=504498">Family Condolence Page</a></li></ul></p><p>--
© 2007. Permission is hereby granted to redistribute this issue of The Philadelphia Jewish Voice or (unless specified otherwise) any of the articles therein in their full original form provided these same rights are conveyed to the reader and subscription information to The Philadelphia Jewish Voice is provided. Subscribers should be directed to <a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/Subscribe.htm">http://www.pjvoice.com/Subscribe.htm</a>.
Original Source: <a href="http://www.pjvoice.com/v23/23001vatech.aspx">http://www.pjvoice.com/v23/23001vatech.aspx</a></p>
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eng
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Daniel Loeb (daniel.loeb@verizon.net)
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Never Again?
background checks
firearms
gun control
gun violence
guns
librescu
moment of silence
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Sara Hood
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Editorial Board
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2007-07-16
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<b>More gun control doesn't infringe on right to bear arms</b>
By: Editorial Board
Posted: 4/23/07
It took little time for the journalists and political pundits to start talking gun control.
This editorial is not just about last week's Virginia Tech shooting. It's also about the North Mecklenburg High School student who brought a gun on campus last Wednesday, threatened two other students and then left and shot himself. It's about the rumors of a planned shooting that circulated around Orange County High School last Friday and about the student who killed his father, then injured two others at that same school last fall.
This editorial isn't about the Second Amendment or taking away Americans' right to bear arms. It's about how to keep guns away from those who are unfit to use them. It's about taking away an easy means of suicide for the roughly 16,000 Americans who killed themselves with a firearm in 2004. It's about limiting the 14,000 murdered by guns in 2005 and the 650 fatal accidents the year before.
One reason to study history is to avoid making the same mistakes as in the past. Stricter gun control laws might not prevent tragedy from striking, but they can make it far less likely.
Even simple regulations such as background checks can make a huge difference. If somebody has a history of mental illness, that should certainly show up in a background check and prevent that person from buying a gun. And there is no sense in destroying information gathered during those checks after 24 hours, as is mandated by national law, when, in some states, that person can return to buy another gun 30 days later.
A comprehensive registration system of gun owners would not hurt anyone but criminals. In Texas, residents do not need a permit to own a gun and do not have to register their firearms. The authorities don't even know how many guns are in the state. In addition, 80 percent of prisoners who own guns received their gun from family or a friend or bought it on the street or illegally. These person-to-person transactions go unrecorded.
Automatic and semiautomatic weapons - for instance, a 9 mm Glock - only are available to police in almost every other country. You can buy an AK-47 online for $379.99, and nobody in their right mind - and certainly nobody not in their right mind - needs one of those. The assault-weapons ban, which expired in 2004, should be renewed.
Gun-related crime has fallen since the mid-1990s, but rose sharply again in 2005. Unfortunately, the rates are still exorbitantly high. The gun-murder rate in America is more than 30 times that of England. Tighter gun control won't necessarily bring that down. If somebody has a strong enough inclination to kill another, that person likely will find a gun regardless of how strong the restrictions are, but it sure won't hurt to conduct thorough background checks and ban automatic weapons.
We're not trying to take away Americans' rights to hunt or own a gun in case anyone feels the need to start a militia and revolt against tyranny. But nobody should complain if America is a safer place.
--
Original Source: <a href=http://media.www.dailytarheel.com/media/storage/paper885/news/2007/04/23/Opinion/The-Right.To.Life-2873036.shtml> The Daily Tar Heel - April 23, 2007</a>
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eng
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The Daily Tar Heel
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Kevin Schwartz <kschwartz@unc.edu>
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The right to life
background checks
gun control
unc
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Sara Hood
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KONRAD KLINKNER
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2007-08-19
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By: KONRAD KLINKNER
Columnist
Posted: 4/23/07
The intricacies of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech are proving to be very enduring media fodder, with NBC lapping up Cho's media package and the investigations probing deeper and deeper into the background of the gunman, savoring every juicy drop of sordid drama. It's been so lasting because, as the act of an irrational psycho, it's riddled with questions that will never be answered - and that always keeps an audience.
Almost grudgingly, one of the few concrete issues that the tragedy has forced back into the national spotlight is one of America's least favorite debate topics: gun control. One might think that the massacre naturally lends itself easiest as an example of how guns are too easy to acquire here in the States. But, pro-gun rights advocates are already quick to turn it into a case for more self-defense.
Indeed, some gun-rights proponents are even suggesting that Virginia Tech's campus policy of prohibiting the possession of firearms on campus should be reviewed. A fair number of students are quoted as saying they wished somebody had a gun with them on that day. Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said, "All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last 10 years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen - a potential victim - had a gun. The latest school shooting at Virginia Tech demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation's schools at the mercy of madmen."
So Pratt is suggesting here that allowing guns on campuses would be a big step toward curbing shooting outbreaks. Really? Who thinks to bring a gun to class on a regular basis?
Beyond making a strong case for having more vigilant background checks, though, it's very unlikely that the Virginia Tech tragedy will spur any significant gun control initiative within the United States. It's not like any previous mass shooting has.
To many people elsewhere in the world, the recent tragedy is yet another bloody stain on America's generally ugly reputation. European critics, as to be expected, particularly express their never-ending bafflement that Americans never seem to do anything about their gun laws.
And well they may wonder. But as much as I don't care for guns and identify more with the ethos of gun-control advocates, I can't believe that gun control alone is going to fix things. Serious gun control legislation, like what Europe has, is doomed to fail in the United States as it is today, and that's because guns are just too embedded in American culture for laws alone to make lasting changes about it anytime soon.
History has shown us that prohibition laws are rarely ever effective when they run up against big cultural institutions. A real attempt to bring our gun control laws anywhere near the standards of Western Europe would be disastrous today. If someone ever miraculously pulls off an outright ban on general gun ownership in the United States, that person will probably get shot, and I'd fully expect ferocious, widespread defiance of the law across the entire nation. You'd have to pry those guns from America's cold, dead hands. Before law reform can be used effectively to curb guns, our gun culture must first undergo reform.
Gun ownership is often trumped up in the United States as a testimony to the hallowed virtues of individualism and self-sufficiency. The civilian's gun embodies vigilante security and is about as literal as "power to the people" gets - this harkens all the way back to the Revolutionary days when militias actually mattered, which is indeed where we got this Second Amendment from in the first place. It was an assurance to those suspicious of the new federal government that they'd always have their guns to protect them should the feds ever get too tyrannical. Even today some pro-gun rights people will talk about a civilian's firearms as the last line of defense against governmental tyranny, which really can't be anything more than just a psychological comfort, since I can't imagine today's citizenry armed with handguns and hunting rifles having any chance against our government's tanks and bomber planes.
But of course it's naive to say that gun enthusiasm in America mainly comes from a militant devotion to liberty. On a more simple level, people just like shooting things, and having guns makes you dangerous and therefore potentially cool.
I get somewhat torn when it comes to this, because on one hand, I'm not a fan of real guns, but I honestly also think guns are quite awesome when kept to the realm of fiction, as in video games. Most U.S. politicians tend to take an inverse stance, being way more comfortable supporting restrictions on the mere depiction of guns rather than restricting guns in real life. Personally, I would rather there not be necessary restrictions on anything, and that American culture could just chill out with the guns out of its own volition. That, I think, will bring more peace than any law will bring about, but it will be a long time in coming.
--
Original Source: <a href=http://media.www.pittnews.com/media/storage/paper879/news/2007/04/23/Opinion/Gun-Control.Wont.Work.In.U.s-2873292.shtml> The Pitt News - April 23, 2007</a>
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eng
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Annie Tubbs <annietubbs@gmail.com>
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Gun control won't work in U.S.
background checks
gun advocates
gun control
laws
pitt university