Gunning For A Repeat

Virginia Tech review panel leaves us questions, not answers

By: Antonio Ciaccia

Posted: 9/19/07

The Virginia Tech mass murder committed by student Seung-Hui Cho is now a thing of the past. In order to gain a better understanding of the tragedy and prepare for the possibility of a repeat, a panel was created to review the bloody events that transpired April 16, 2007.

The review panel, composed of state-appointed officials, spent considerable time in their report highlighting the egregious errors made in the lack of communication between school officials, counselors, and faculty. In fact, it was found that students and faculty were not made aware of the shootings until hours after Cho's first attack. After this, the panel focused their attention to other aspects of the shooting, and their ensuing recommendations leave many scratching their heads.

The panel's findings contained a chapter entitled "Gun Purchase and Campus Policies" discussed Cho's access to the murder weapons, Virginia Tech's gun policies, self-defense issues, and gun regulations - each analysis more perplexing than the next.

At the beginning of the chapter, the panel highlighted how Cho came into possession of his firearms. Cho, who was legally recognized as mentally ill, purchased two handguns. The first, a Walther P22 .22 caliber pistol was purchased over the internet on February 9th. The second was a Glock 19 9mm pistol purchased locally on March 13th. Due to his mental history, federal law should have prohibited him from making those purchases. However, even after his background check, he was still cleared to purchase both weapons. As per President Bill Clinton's Brady Bill, Cho waited 30 days to receive both of his pistols.

Neither the background check nor the 30-day waiting period was effective in prohibiting Cho's premeditated genocide. Furthermore, in the panel's recommendations section, they suggest that loopholes that exist at gun shows, where back ground checks are not strictly enforced, should be closed. While this seems like a somewhat reasonable request, it bears no relevance to the Virginia Tech shooting, where Cho obtained all of his weaponry through conventional channels.

Both guns were semiautomatic weapons, which meant that one bullet could be fired with an automatic reload each time the trigger was pulled. Cho had 15-round magazines for each of the guns. The panel discussed the federal Assault Weapons Act of 1994 that banned clips or magazines with over 10 rounds. They concluded that the larger magazines that Cho used had little to do with the high death toll, and "that 10-round magazines that [used to be] legal would have not made much difference in the incident. Even pistols with rapid loaders could have been about as deadly in this situation"

Yet later in the report, the panel somewhat contradicted itself saying, "Having the ammunition in large capacity magazines facilitated his killing spree." Well, Virginia Tech, which is it?

Next the panel dove into the gun policies at Virginia Tech stating that, "Virginia Tech has one of the tougher policy constraints for possessing guns on campus among schools in Virginia." In fact, with approval from the state Attorney General's Office, Virginia Tech had totally banned guns from campus before and at the time of the shooting. The complete ban of firearms happened years ago, when someone discovered a student carrying a concealed weapon during a first aid drill.

That student, now a Virginia Tech graduate with a master's degree in engineering, stated to the panel that he started carrying a weapon after witnessing several assaults and hearing about other crimes on the Virginia Tech campus. He and other students told the panel that, "they felt it was safer for responsible people to be armed so they could fight back in exactly the type of situation that occurred on April 16. They might have been able to shoot back and protect themselves and others from being injured or killed by Cho."

The panel seemed skeptical that more guns on campus would solve the problem, but the students provided the panel with statistics showing that overall there are fewer killings in environments where people can carry weapons for self-defense. The panel retorted by saying that, "campus police said that the probability would have been high that anyone emerging from a classroom at Norris Hall holding a gun would have been shot." This seems like a trivial point considering anyone emerging from a classroom at Norris Hall on April 16 already had a high probability of being shot.

Perhaps the most glaring error made in the report was the panel's section regarding other school shootings. According to the report, "the panel knows of no case in which a shooter in campus homicides has been shot or scared off by a student or faculty member with a weapon." The panel failed to check perhaps the closest source for one such case - their own report's appendix. In that section, the panel cites the 2002 incident at Appalachian School of Law, where three students, two of which who were armed, confronted and restrained a fellow student who had already murdered three people on campus.

This major contradiction, along with other problems within the panel's report is what leaves many people confused, and rightly so. It is understandable that the panel seemed hesitant to loosen gun regulations on college campuses. Yet, the truth is that all of the gun laws and all of the gun legislation didn't stop Seung-Hui Cho. The concerns over his magazine capacity and Virginia Tech's gun rules seem absurd once he was dead-set on going on a killing spree. Cho waited his 30 days and underwent his background check. Had he hit a roadblock with either of these laws, it can be reasonably assumed that he could have obtained a gun illegally. And when it came time for Cho to do his worst, all of the laws in the books weren't going stopping him. They only stopped those who could have stopped him.