The Wall Street Journal's editorial page says today that:
Reading a summary of European editorials yesterday, we couldn't help but wonder if they all got the same New York Times memo, so uniform was their cultural disdain and their demand for new gun restrictions.
To some extent, they're right - the Norwegian newspapers - and presumably public opinion - immediately took this incident as further proof that American values and gun laws leave too much to be desired. But they're not all wrong, either. One op-ed in the Roanoke Times, which must have been penned within minutes of the massacre, that:
Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.... That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.
At the same time, there is a raging debate in Norwegian politics about criminalizing prostitution. Here's how these issues intersect:
The Norwegian Socialist Left party decided that prostitution should be criminalized, because this, they said, would signal society's disapproval of the practice ... and discourage pimps, whores, and johns from getting into it. Which has to be the most naive position you could possibly come across.
The same reflexive urge to prohibit undesirable behavior guides the European response to the Virginia Tech massacre; but in this case it isn't that off the mark. If Cho Seung-hui didn't have ready access to guns and ammo, his rampage wouldn't have cost as many lives. The Wall Street Journal points out, rightly, that with so many handguns in circulation, any kind of ban would have made little difference to someone hell-bent on getting and using them
But if the worst of European culture is all about banning unpleasantness, the Roanoke Times op-ed is alarming in another way. The writer - a graduate student at Virginia Tech - sincerely believes that if he'd had a gun, he would have been safer. I don't doubt that he would have felt safer, but the writer is obviously way too enamored by his own fantasies of being a hero to realize that the best thing to do in a situation like that is to seek cover and get away.
The real hero, it seems, was a 76-year old professor who put himself between the shooter and his students by keeping a door closed, even after he had been shot. This was an Israeli Holocaust survivor who probably had witnessed more psychopathic and evil behavior than most of the people who are weighing in on this issue.
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