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.

MAIG Rolls Into Blacksburg

It was the same old song as Mayors Against Illegal Guns pulled into Blacksburg on their "No More Names" tour.  The Roanoke Times used the same discredited numbers (probably fed to them by MAIG) in discussing the percentage of firearm sales that are completed without a background check:

Currently, about 60 percent of gun sales are subject to background checks. Earlier this year, the Senate defeated legislation that would have required that all commercial gun sales be subject to checks.

That's another way of saying that 40% of sales are completed without background checkes.  That number has been discredited by none other than the Washington Post - not really a bastian of pro-rights information:

In other words, rather than being 30 to 40 percent (the original estimate of the range) or “up to 40 percent” (Obama’s words), gun purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent. And since the survey sample is so small, that means the results have a survey caveat: plus or minus six percentage points.

But never let facts get in the way of a political agenda.  After the speeches by Neil Heslin, whose son was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, Peter Read, whose daughter killed at the Virginia Tech shooting, and Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin survived Tech shooting and now works for the Brady Campaign, names of those "killed by gun shots" since December 14th were read.

We don't know whether they removed the names of all those criminals that had originally been included on the list. 

Colin Goddard Releases E-Book Just in Time for Presidential Debates

WTVR-TV6 reports that Colin Goddard, a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting and gun control activist, is scheduled to speak at the University of Colorado in Boulder, just two hours before the first Presidential Debate between Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama in Denver. At 7 o’clock Goddard will formally release “10 Minutes That Changed My Life.”

Goddard is purposely holding the release on the same day as the presidential debate, hoping he can draw attention to the issue of gun control and the need for the candidates to take a decisive stance on the issue, instead of just talking about it in the wake of mass shooting like Virginia Tech or the Aurora theater shooting.

“Neither Mitt Romney or Obama have given thoughts on what they would do to reduce the number of us that are shot and killed every year,” Goddard told CBS 6. “During the next presidential term an average of 48,000 of us will be murdered by someone with a gun.”

Romney has stated that he does not support additional laws which do nothing more than burden law-abiding citizens while being ignored by criminals. Obama in August of this year reaffirmed through his spokesman support for renewing the ban on modern sporting rifles.  It remains to be seen if gun control will come up during tonight's debate. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are scheduled to appear at a rally in Fishersville, Virginia on Thursday with the NRA's Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox.

Twisting Words to Make a Point

Virginia Tech shooting survivor and gun control advocate Colin Goddard has an Op/Ed on CNN's web site calling for colleges to remain self-defense free zones.  To his credit, Goddard begins the piece by listing the main failures in the system that allowed Virginia Tech to happen - Tech failed to notify students of the original shootings earlier that morning (previously cited by USDOE as a failure on Tech's part), weaknesses in the mental health system in addressing Cho's problems, and the courts, who failed to appropriately note a judge's ruling that could have prevented Cho from purchasing his firearms.  But, he eventually gets around to what he and his employers at the Brady Campaign view as the real culprit in the mass shooting, and indeed most mass shootings - the lack of background checks on private firearm sales, especially those at gun shows.

Goddard finishes his OP/Ed by pulling a 12 year-old quote from Wayne LaPierre out of context to make his point - that if the head of the NRA says there should be zero-tolarance for guns at schools, then carry on college and university campuses is a bad idea.

The head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, said it well after the Columbine tragedy in 1999: "We believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period ... with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel. We believe America's schools should be as safe as America's airports. You can't talk about, much less take, bombs and guns onto airplanes. Such behavior in our schools should be prosecuted just as certainly as such behavior in our airports is prosecuted."

Never mind that LaPierre was talking about K-12 schools.  College students are adults and most states require concealed carry permit holders to be 21, meaning most students would be juniors or seniors before they would even qualify.  The point is, if a 21 year-old is able to carry concealed if they are anywhere else other than a college campus, then why not allow that same person to do so on campus?

Mike Adams had different message last week over on Townhall.com.  He later talked about his article, Full Metal Yellow Jacket ,with NRANews host Cam Edwards:



Adams' message is, keeping law abiding students disarmed makes them a sitting duck at the mercy of any criminal that they may happen upon.

Texas is currently considering allowing concealed carry on it's college and university campuses. Goddard says proponents of carry on campus have not explained how such a law would be enforced and states that adding carry on campus will complicate how police deal with an active shooter on campus. What Goddard does not say is we have a model for college carry - Utah. There have been no incidents on the campuses in that state. Nor have there been any problems right here in Virginia on the campus of Blue Ridge Community College.

Texas has the votes to pass the legislation and Governor Perry has said he would sign the bill. Arizona may also consider college carry during its legislative session. Bills in Virginia so far have never gotten out of committee. My guess is once we have more states with successful college carry, Virginia may well join the list of those allowing carry on campus.

Brady Happy for Symbolism Over Substance

If one was looking for coverage of yesterday's "forum" on H.R. 2324, the Closing the Gun Show Loophole Act, they would have to look pretty hard because the only coverage I could find was on the Washington Post's Virginia Politics Blog, this UPI wire report and a couple of TV stations that had a very brief mention of the meeting. The UPI story was more a rehash of the Brady press release issued the day before. One TV station did do a report but as you will see in the video below, the reporter could not even get her facts straight, attributing the so-called loophole to state law. It is actually federal law that allows individuals who are not FFLs to sell one or more firearms from their personal collection without requiring a background check.



The fact the only extended coverage that can be found in the print media is on a newspaper blog shows just how far the gun ban lobby has fallen in recent years.

It was basically an opportunity for Brady to play videos you can see on their web site of their activists using Brady money to purchase firearms at gun shows from unwary private sellers, all in an attempt to show how easy it is for a criminal to buy at gun shows. For his part, Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke was happy to have a little symbolism to get attention to his group's rallying point:

But it was also as much about symbolism as lawmaking, because the gathering was a forum, and not a full-blown hearing. ..."We're just happy to have this," Helmke said during a break. "The fact that they're giving it this much attention is a positive step."

The "forum" was put together by Virginia Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA3) and featured a number of the same folks that turn out at the Virginia General Assembly every year to push for the annual gun show bill.

Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) chaired the forum, and panelists included Gerald Massengill, former superintendent of the Virginia State Police, and Colin Goddard, a former Virginia Tech student who told of surviving four gunshots during the April 2007 mass shooting. Lori Haas, whose daughter also survived the Virginia Tech shooting, also attended.

Apparently only the anti-gun members of the committee attended. There were no reports of questions to the participants about the other side of the issue. Freddie Kunkle, who covered the forum and wrote the blog post, did offer this for the gun owners side however (likely based on his coverage of the General Assembly's gun show bills):

Gun-rights advocates who oppose requiring background checks at gun shows have argued that the checks are not necessary because only a tiny fraction of guns have been traced from crimes to private sales at gun shows. They also argue that there is no such loophole because non-dealers can still sell or transfer a firearm without conducting a background check on a stranger they met through a want ad or in some other way.

Above all, they fear that requiring such checks at gun shows would clear the way to requiring universal background checks for every firearms transfer, whether between friends or family -- and ultimately, to de facto registration.

I have spoken with Kunkle in the past on Virginia's gun rationing law. He seemed genuinely interested in giving both sides of the issue he is covering.

Update: This report was on a local Richmond TV station. Even these folks can't get it right. There must be a template for reporters to constantly repeat the term "unlicensed dealers."



At least this Tidewater station got it right when they correctly referred to private sellers instead of "dealers."



The video below is from the DC Fox TV station. It is an interview with Colin Goddard and Congressman Scott yesterday morning before the House Judiciary meeting was held. Scott refers to private individuals and "unregistered dealers." He even says you can buy "military assault weapons" at gun shows. His staff has done a good job of making sure he is sticking to the Brady talking points.

Anti-gunners Holding Forum on Gun Shows

On Wednesday, July 14, at 2:00 PM, Congressman Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-VA), Congressman Mike Castle (R-DE), Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Congressman Mike Quigley (D-IL) will be hosting a forum on H.R. 2324, the "Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2009." The gun ban lobby, led by the Virginia Center for Public Safety and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, is promoting this forum as open to the public. That means we need to have a good show of pro-gun folks in attendance to counter the antis that are certain to attend.

The usual suspects will be in attendance and scheduled to speak:

• Mayor Larry Gilbert, Lewiston, Maine
• Kenneth E. Barnes, Sr., MS, Founder/CEO ROOT (Reaching Out to Others Together), Inc.
• Colonel Gerald Massengill, (Former Superintendent VA State Police, Chair of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, Sutherland, VA.
• Michael J. Carroll, President, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Alexandria, VA
• Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, Professor and Co-Director, Center for Gun Policy and Research at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore MD
• Tom Mauser, father of Daniel Mauser who was killed at the Columbine School shooting, Littleton, CO
• Gerry Nunziato, Youngstown, OH
• Colin Goddard, survivor of the Virginia Tech shootings, Richmond, VA

VSSA has a large number of members in the northern Virginia area so if you can be in Washington on Wednesday, your attendance would be appreciated.

What: Anti-gun Forum Attacking Gun Shows
Where: 2141 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC
When: June 14, 2010, 2:00PM