Another Voice and View on Virginia Tech Shooting

After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, a survivor - Colin Goddard - and the mother of a survivor - Lori Haas - became very engaged in the gun ban movement.  Goddard went to work for the Brady Campaign and Haas is the Virginia Director of the Campaign to Stop Gun Violence.  Haas was recently appointed to Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe's transition team.

But not all of those affected by the Virginia Tech shooting turned to the gun ban movement to try and change things.  The December Issue of America's First Freedom (AFF) featured the story of Holly Adams, who lost her daughter that April 2007 day in Blacksburg, VA.  While Goddard and Haas have fought any attempts to allow students or staff with carry permits on college campuses, Adams' is a different  quest:

I ask a simple question: Would the other parents of victims be forever thankful if a professor or student was allowed to carry a firearm and could have stopped Seung-Hui Cho before their loved ones were injured or killed? I would be. I also suspect that the tragedy may not have occurred at all if Cho knew that either faculty members or students were permitted to carry their own weapons on campus.

While Colin Goddard and Lori Haas chose to make gun control their life's focus, Adams makes it clear they don't speak for her and offers an explanation for why that is the case:

Colin is a survivor. He doesn’t look at it from the point of view I do. He can travel the country and speak out on these issues. He’s not the parent of a child who died. So I have trouble with it, the ones who get together as Virginia Tech victims. There are two separate camps—the ones who stand in one corner, who lost our child and will never see them again; and there’s this other group who are celebrating their child made it through. If I were to go back and relive that day, I would give anything if that day, that morning, somebody in the classroom was armed and could have stood up and taken Cho out before he got 32 victims. I wish there had been a gun in the classroom.

And, she makes it clear that she has a cause of her own:

Affiliating myself with the NRA, doing some target shooting, answering the call if anybody wants to talk about why I believe what I do—why I don’t support tighter controls on guns, why I do support classroom concealed carry. From day to day, I’m open to answering the same kind of questions we just discussed. I’m not hiding from it, but I don’t pretend to represent a whole group of people. These are my views, and I’m not afraid to tell you.

If it weren't for the AFF article, you probably would not know there is someone associated with the Virginia Tech shooting that supports campus carry, because the mainstream media doesn't want to tell that story.