Yesterday's shootings at Virginia Tech were a horrible tragedy. One thought remained in my mind the entire time I learned more about it.

What if students, faculty, or administrators at Virginia Tech had been allowed to carry firearms using a concealed weapon permit?

Predictably, the gun control lobby was out in full force yesterday, calling for stricter gun control laws. But this is a great case in point of how gun control makes people vulnerable.

Just a few months ago, the Virginia General Assembly considered a bill that would have allowed students, faculty, and administrators who have a concealed weapon permit to carry weapons on state university campuses. It died in subcommittee. The state of Virginia ensured that no one on that campus would have the ability to defend themselves with lethal force when confronted with yesterday's assault.

Cho Seung Hui, the 23-year-old senior who killed 32 people yesterday, didn't bother to follow the law. But the fact is, all of his victims did. If one of his victims, or any of the other people within hearing range of the gunshots, had been in possession of a gun the massacre could have ended much sooner. It only takes one criminal with a gun to cause a massacre. It only takes one hero with a gun to end it.

When the bill that would have allowed concealed weapons on campus was defeated, the Roanoke Times reported that Larry Hincker, spokesman for Virginia Tech, announced that "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." No word yet from Larry Hincker that he wants to retract that statement.

Read more:
Boortz' Comments Today: He rightly takes to task the gun control lobby, the "blame and fire" crowd, and the Virginia legislature. He also points out that "Do you know, for instance, that at least three shootings in high schools were stopped by civilians with guns? Civilians, not law enforcement."

Gun Bans Are The Problem, Not The Solution: "When will we learn that being defenseless is a bad defense? All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last ten years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen -- a potential victim -- had a gun."

A Disarmed Campus: "Perhaps some school administrators still think that declaring a 'gun-free zone' makes a campus safer; that was what legislators thought when they started passing gun bans at high schools in response to the late-'80s youth-crime spike. But it's likely that at the college level, fear of litigation plays a large role in shaping such policies."

Labels: politics

In The Crucible of Korea, my brother Britt has been posting about what He learned from His years in Korea and traveling abroad. The whole thing is good, but this quote is a great summary of what we've all been learning over the years:

Community is the most important aspect of the Body of Christ. You will grow to the degree you have intimate relationships with other believers. Without them it is only an organization. It is not the Church.

Labels: church

An excellent column today on OpinionJournal.com, Climate of Opinion: Why we believe in global warming.

In any case, evidence of warming is not evidence of manmade warming.

It would surprise the public, and even the Supreme Court, to know how utterly the science of global warming offers no evidence whatsoever on the central proposition. What fills Mr. Gore's film, books, speeches and congressional testimony are scientific observations and quasi-scientific observations, all right. They concern polar bears, mosquitoes, hurricanes, ice packs and everything but whether humans cause global warming.

Some of this evidence may suggest, weakly or strongly, the existence of warming trends in particular parts of the world (such local trends, both cooling and warming, have been observed in many places and many times). More dubiously, some may indicate a generalized warming. But none offers any evidence that carbon dioxide is causing warming. Mr. Gore's method is the equivalent of trying to prove that Jack killed Jane by going on and on about how awful it was that Jane was killed.

Polemicists in favor of human-caused global warming liken skeptics to tobacco lobbyists who denied the link between smoking and lung cancer. In fact, it makes a useful analogy.

Suppose the world consisted of exactly one smoker who could be observed only from a distance to test the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. If he died of cancer, it wouldn't prove smoking causes cancer. If he failed to die of cancer, it wouldn't prove smoking doesn't cause cancer.

The link between smoking and cancer is made by observing millions of smokers and nonsmokers. Indeed, what led scientists to seek systematic evidence of a link in the first place was anecdotal evidence that smokers, of whom there have been millions, appeared to die in unusual numbers from lung cancer.

Nothing remotely similar has been involved in developing the hypothesis that carbon dioxide creates warming. The relevant observations are a mess: Measured global temperature has both risen and fallen for considerable periods during the past century, even as CO2 has risen steadily. The geologic record suggests the world was much cooler in the past despite CO2 concentrations higher than today's. Unlike smoking and cancer, there's no anecdotal observation for the hypothesis that CO2 causes planetary warming. It may or may not be true, but to believe it is a "scientific truth" is to make a leap of faith, not science.

The consensus that human activities are causing global warming is purely a social invention--there's no way of showing it to be so, and no self-evident reason for preferring to believe it's so. The "consensus" is, in truth, a product of itself.

I'm becoming more and more encouraged by the amount of rational, reasoned discussion that is going on about global warming, despite the number of alarmists there are out there. It is very true, as the column says, that "many people believe in manmade global warming because many people believe in manmade global warming." It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The "consensus" is that "everybody" knows it is true. That's a complete fallacy. The fact that most people can't spot it as such is likely the byproduct of another favorite topic of mine, the failure of government-led education.

Labels: politics