THE DAILY BLADE: Hunting Hokies
By The Heel
A young male student, seething with rage, storms into a classroom at the engineering school he attends, brandishing a weapon. He barricades the door, orders his classmates to line up against the wall, then methodically mows them down one by one. Before the police can arrive to rescue his hapless victims, the madman succeeds in shooting dozens of defenseless innocents, a good number of them fatally, before turning the gun on himself.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2007? No, École Polytechnique de Montreal, 1989.
Although the Montreal Massacre remains obscure to most Americans, it was an epochal event in Canada, inspiring a national holiday. More perniciously, the shootings also led to poorly-conceived and hastily-enacted gun legislation which soon proved to be a billion-dollar boondoggle with negligible public safety benefits.
Prior to the tragedy at Virginia Tech this past Monday (which could itself be the mysterious motive the media seeks), the school was best known for its championship-caliber football team. Interestingly, Virginia Tech forms half of the Hokies vs. Wahoos rivalry, matched rivals only by the fictional Jigaboos v. Wannabes (a la Spike Lee and Don Imus) in terms of humorous nicknames.
Among legal circles, however, Virginia Tech is better known for the off-field hijinks of such student-athletes as "Ron Mexico" and his felonious frère. Perhaps most notorious, Antonio J. Morrison, a student-athlete who not only allegedly engaged in non-consensual interstate intercourse, but also lent his name to United States v. Morrison, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Violence Against Women Act as an impermissible overreaching of federal legislative authority under the Commerce Clause. (Had Mr. Morrison instead dispelled his aggression with homegrown happy herb, he would then be affecting interstate commerce and thus be a federal felon. See Gonzales v. Raich.)
More interesting for our purposes, however, is the predecessor case to Morrison, United States v. Lopez, in which the Supreme Court voided the Gun Free School Zones Act - the first time the Supreme Court circumscribed Congressional power to legislate under the Commerce Clause since the much-maligned, pre-New Deal Lochner Era, specifically the "Sick Chicken case," A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). Of course, Congress swiftly re-enacted this foolhardy law.
And while the Supreme Court was deliberating over Lopez, Ralph J. Tortorici, a disturbed student brandishing a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, barricaded the doors and held a Greek history class at SUNY-Albany hostage for two hours while making irrational demands and incoherent threats. The standoff finally ended when several heroic (and unarmed) students overpowered him - but not before one was shot and another stabbed. Had Tortorici not been the only one of the 36 people in the room with a gun, this incident could have ended far more quickly.
Experts agree that it is impossible to prevent school shootings. Police are often slow to respond, with tragic results in Montreal and Columbine. At Virgina Tech, the police dismissed two murders in a dormitory as a "domestic matter" and an "isolated incident" which ended when the shooter left campus. Rather than taking precautionary measures, or notifying students of the shootings, police did nothing until the perpetrator returned to campus two hours later and killed 30 more students.
The lackadaisical response is particularly galling given the notoriety of the earlier incident in which a student murdered two loved ones before ascending the University of Texas Tower to begin what was, until Monday, the nation's deadliest school shooting. (The incident inspired later well-known ballads by Harry Chapin and Kinky Friedman.) More recently, this pattern where the killing begins at home before reaching campus has happened again and again. Note that in both of these cases, the targets' resistance (rather than police response) ended the massacres.
The authorities are powerless to stop such incidents either before or after they start. It's worth noting the lessons learned from what was, before Monday, the deadliest spree killing in American history - the 1991 Luby's massacre in Killeen, Texas, which claimed 23 lives. Inspired by an survivor of the shootout who believes she could have saved her parents' lives had she only been allowed to carry her gun, the Texas legislature legalized concealed carry rather than seek tougher gun laws. And Texas hasn't seen such a mass murder since.
Nonetheless, Dems, who control both the U.S. Congress and the Virginia Statehouse, will propose and likely pass knee-jerk anti-gun legislation. The New York Times has already concluded - premature though it may be - that tighter gun laws are the answer:
Yesterday's mass shooting at Virginia Tech - the worst in American history - is another horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain.
Not much is known about the gunman, who killed himself, or about his motives or how he got his weapons, so it is premature to draw too many lessons from this tragedy. But it seems a safe bet that in one way or another, this will turn out to be another instance in which an unstable or criminally minded individual had no trouble arming himself and harming defenseless people. [Emphasis, The Heel.]
Of course, The New York Times sidesteps the issue of why the victims were "defenseless." As others have noted in the aftermath of this tragic incident, restrictive gun laws only render students more vulnerable to the whims of the homicidal and the irrational, who are unlikely to be deterred by the illegality of their proposed actions. After all, in a state with notoriously permissive gun culture, where even the Democrat Senator brings a gun to his office (then again, so do Sens. Schumer and Feinstein), it is highly probable that, but for the Gun Free School Zones Act and other similar legislation, at least one of the students in the classroom targeted by the perpetrator of Monday's massacre could have ended the killings and thus saved the lives of his classmates - especially as the campus has its own Corps of Cadets.
Instead, misguided gun legislation rendered these Hokies as defenseless and vulnerable as their avian namesakes and contributed to these tragic deaths. We must hope that our leaders will learn from their mistakes and finally grant our nation's best and brightest their Constitutional right to defend themselves. Only then will our schools be safe for the hunted rather than the hunter.
Editorial Note: The Heel is an Ivy-educated attorney with a prestigious New York firm. He can contacted at GoToHeel@gmail.com.
Braniacs In Love
The Washington Post chronicles a new dating trend in New York, D.C., Boston and other northeastern cities: "late-night museum prowls, Oxford-style debates with pre-feud cocktail parties and book readings with cash bars and after-hour bands" instead of the standard dinner-and-a-movie.
"Intellidating," first coined in England in 2002, sprang from "Intelligence Squared," a live discussion series launched by a couple of British moguls whose professed aim was to make debating "sexy." Heated debates on topics ranging from "Monogamy Is Bad for the Soul" to "Maggie Thatcher Saved Britain" brought in the London glitterati, including actor Hugh Grant and, until their split in February, svelte girlfriend and socialite Jemima Khan.
The concept leapt across the pond to New York last year with the American version of Intelligence Squared - IQ2US - launched by philanthropist and businessman Robert Rosenkranz. Housed inside the Asia Society building on the Upper East Side, the popular events have lured a following including conservative pundit Monica Crowley and her boyfriend, the venture capitalist Bill Siegel. The cheaper seats are peppered with budding young brainiacs who find heightened stimulation in verbal joust.
A 45-minute cocktail reception precedes each debate, after which comes a cranial lucha libre where, on one night, author Michael Crichton sparred with other panelists on global warming. For the right set, it can be quite the aphrodisiac. ...
If Woody Allen were Cupid, one of his romantic inventions might be a New York singles spelling bee night with categories including "sex," "medical conditions" and "uncomfortable things." But he would no longer have to invent it, because Makor - a Manhattan social center popular with a young, Jewish crowd - has done it already. ...
"One guy had to spell 'chlamydia' and then 'erectile dysfunction' - and he got both right," [Dorron] Lemesh said. With a chuckle, [the software writer] added, "But then the women have to worry about a man [who] knows how to spell 'chlamydia.'"
For her part, The Stiletto finds those political panel discussions The Federalist Society organizes from time to time quite, um, stimulating. Thankfully, the topic of chlamydia has never come up.
Interesting,
Keep up the good work,
Anyway, thanks for the post
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