The fringe right wing has always, always, blamed the victim. If you were clever and ruthless you'd be rich, so it's your fault you are not a billionaire; if you are really feckless, you're homeless and deserve your condition; if America's military has the greatest firepower in history then America is entitled to use it and bully whomever they please.  If you believe in the proper god, god loves you and rewards you with all sorts of material goodies, i.e., the affluent are chosen of God... and so on. Sort of a modern version of the Job question.

If the righties have their way we will see concealed weapons carried not only on college campuses but in high schools and probably even middle school and elementary school, and we will have a return of dueling over honor and respect. That is: Might Makes Right, the basic underlying rightwing philosophy. Even worse, it is all sanctified by self-righteous religiosity.

...I've been getting a bad feeling about the knee-jerk reactions to offensive speech since Imus.  This is the Hollywood Ten blacklisting all over again.  Eradicating free thought and expression we don't agree with is hardly an answer to moving this debate forward in a civil manner.  Once you start down that path, where does it end?

and complain that they don't want to listen to a radio station that carries Boortz....then that's free speech also!

...as long as that's where it ends.  As the Dixie Chicks found out, a right to free speech does not guarantee a right to be listened to in the open market.  Let's let the people make up their own minds without any group of elitists on either side telling us what is offensive and what is not.  The lsteners of those stations aren't stupid and they'll decide for themselves.

And the only reason they had any problem is the right-wing authoritarians threatened their corporate buddies if they didn't back them to remove the Dixie Chicks album from the McStores.

Come on, the Dixie Chicks rock!  Their message was not one of blaming victims or others, but an appeal for people to wake up and demand that the President listen to the people and get the hell out of a war we never should've gotten into in the first place.

Them's apples and oranges....

...and it follows nicely in this string.  This had nothing to do with "right wing authoritarians" threatening anyone and that suggestion is crosing into the "Grassy Knoll" range.  This was consumer-fan driven, period!  The American consumer isn't completely stupid (OK, there was that Pet Rock thing), so when anyone expresses their "opinion" they should understand, whether you're Boortz or the Chicks, that there's a consequence to speech as well in the marketplace.  Expressing an opinion about the war is very American and everyone does that.  Personalizing it and disrespecting the Office of the President is something a lot of C&W fans, who tend to be quite a bit more patriotic than many groups, found particularly repugnant and that's what drove the reaction.  The little Dixie Dunces, as good as they are, should have been smart enough to understand their fan base.  Of course, them saying it to a bunch of wimpy Eurotrash instead of in front of an American audience didn't help them any.  As with Boortz, people have a legitimate right to express an opinion of "speech" they don't like.  With entertainers, that means no one buys what you're selling...literally.

Boortz, did not state his case  good at all.
We need to teach folks to rush a gunman, to lay down there lives{Just like Prof Liviu}  It is a very hard thing to do, very controversial.
I would also lower the number of bullets in a clip on a handgun. And put in a delay between shots.

Meanwhile, Ive known boortz was a wright wing wackjob for many years now.

Thompson panders to the NRA and gun fetishists and also implies the victims were at least partly at fault. 

n/t

a well-armed individual if you yourself are not armed is available. Actually, one of the students at VT who was in another classroom was so trained. His comment: he was not sure he'd have been able to re-act fast enough to do any good had Cho come into his classroom...  To say nothing of whether or not he would have needed help from another classmate. What about the young men AND woman who, wounded, closed the classroom door and held it shut with their feet while Cho returned and began shooting through the door? They may have been caught unawares in the beginning but had the presence of mind and courage to fight back later.

Some righties have pointed out another shooter (in Tennesee?  Kenutcky?) was indeed rushed by three young men recently; two of the young men ran to their cars and retrieved their own weapons and returned to stop the shooter... and the other young man (named Ted, which I remember as that is my own nickname) was NOT armed, and he was the one who actually grabbed the offender.

What if only women and children or disabled older people were at the flash point? What if no agile, rash young men were available? I notice that all those who contemptuously are blaming the victims have not put themselves in harms way in, say, Iraq. The odor of hypocrisy is overwhelming.

"What if only women and children or disabled older people were at the flash point? What if no agile, rash young men were available?"

Then they're all dead...that was easy.

only because it was first easy for a wacko to get a Glock and loads of ammo in the first place. 

I grew up in a household with plenty of guns: my father, a Southerner, hunted regularly and was an Army officer so we had rifles, shotguns, and side arms under our roof. I am not against guns per se.  Only against the insanity of overly permissive distribution thereof. If having weapons in the hands of every citizen everywhere at all times actually made us safer, why Iraq would be the safest country in the world. I personally believe that if several students had been armed in that French class, and began firing, a lot more would have ended up dead ("friendly fire" sure helped Tillman).

Take note of the fact that the records show that 95 percent of mass murderers and of serial killers are male.  Looking at that single common element, maybe we should, ahem, just keep guns out of the hands of males, and only allow women access to what Damon Runyon called the great equalizers. Heh.

...where the gunshop owner said he had the word "whacko" tatooed across his forehead. 

I'm not real clear on what "overly permissive" means.  Unless you're willing to lean the other way and start actually limiting and restricting individual freedoms and liberties and increasing governmental intervention in personal matters (something you were unwilling to do with the Patriot Act) I'm not real sure where you're going with this.  For those of you upset with "Big Brother" do I really understand you want him to be even stronger?

Your Iraq analogy, with due respect, is absurd.  Unless you believe their organizaed tribal and ethnic fights are somehow equivalent to Columbine and Blacksburg...can't wait to see that quantum leap.

Just to be sure I understand you, you believe that Cho would have gone into that class in exactly the same way to do what he did KNOWING that a third of those students were likely armed?  I still don't understand the difference between a "gun free zone" and a "free fire zone" that eliminates all the risk for the bad guy.  Dragging Tillman into this seems odd...unless you believe that guns don't belong on a battlefield either because we might hurt someone with them?

Those were intersting statistics but the only conclusion you can draw from them is we need to ban males.

I'm not a gun owner and could probabaly take both sides of this debate but I think it needs to have some of this petty political rhetoric erased from the dialogue and kept serious.  It'll be interesting to see which candidates pick up the banner and which run from it like it was the plague.

you reference the Appalachian School of Law shootings here in VA...basically people who were in the area have told me the same thing.

Why would you all think a sea change in our country would be "easy"

I said very hard, controversial, maybe not possible.

Most worthwhile results are worth the effort.

In Alexandria the cops have a new technology... they are deploying small  devices that will recognize a bullet being fired , then triangulate with other devices to find the location within 5 seconds. This will be one of the technologies that the  Law will develop.

Maybe the next mass murder will be avoided, I dont know.  To sit by and  do nothing as a society is criminal.