A weapon might have saved lives

Alan Caruba

is the founder of

The National Anxiety Center

The killings on the Virginia Tech campus, the worst such rampage in our history, might have been mitigated if just one member of the faculty or a student had the means to return fire.

I have owned guns for decades. On rare occasions, I have had to "show" one of my guns to people with bad intentions. Not surprisingly, they changed their plans to take my money and do me harm. The Virginia Tech killings confirm the value of empowering ordinary citizens to carry concealed weapons.

A recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in the case of Parker v. District of Columbia restored Second Amendment rights to the citizens of the District and, by extension, to every citizen of these United States. Not since 1976 had residents of the District had the right to defend themselves with force of arms.

Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman wrote: "In sum, the phrase 'the right of the people,' when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual."

As Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, noted: "The right of self-preservation was understood as the right to defend oneself against attacks by lawless individuals, or, if absolutely necessary, to resist and throw off a tyrannical government."

That is precisely why the Second Amendment says, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Many states refused to ratify the proposed U.S. Constitution until this amendment and nine others were included. As Silberman noted in his decision, the Second Amendment acknowledges "a right that preexisted the Constitution" in the same way freedom of speech did.

In Greenwich Village, barely a week after the Parker v. District of Columbia ruling, a man named David Garvin, carrying two semiautomatic firearms and a bag with 100 rounds of ammunition, killed Alfredo Romero, a pizzeria employee, firing 15 rounds into him. Auxiliary police officers Nicholas Todd Pekearo and Eugene Marshalik, unarmed, confronted Garvin, and he killed them as well. They were volunteer civilians who wear uniforms nearly identical to those of regular police. Finally, Garvin - a man with no psychiatric history - was shot dead by full-time police officers.

I could not help wondering how that event would have been altered if any of his victims had been able to shoot back.

After Sept. 11, 2001, one thing a lot of people did was to go out and buy guns. A lot of people decided that, if a bunch of fanatical Muslims could hijack four commercial airliners, destroy the World Trade Center towers, fly one into the Pentagon, and if they intended to fly the other possibly into the White House or the Capitol Building, well then, being able to shoot people with similar intentions was a very good idea.

Since then, we have seen numerous incidents of "instant jihad syndrome," in which an Islamist decided to kill infidels out for an hour at the local mall or otherwise peacefully going about their lives. And, yes, there are still criminals who use firearms. But Americans are not bound by some gun-banning law to be nothing more than victims.

Responsible gun ownership is a good idea. The writers of the U.S. Constitution understood the necessity for an armed citizenry. When only the government has guns, everyone else is just a slave. Gun-banners who would turn everyone's life and liberty over to the care of an all-powerful central government don't understand and don't agree with that.

As gun-law expert John M. Synder, put it: "Gun rights are human rights. Gun rights equate with the right to defend life and, therefore, with the very right to life itself."