I don’t have much to add to what’s already been said, and I’m late to the story anyway not having caught it until I got home from work today.  It’s a real tragedy.  Daily News Rush has a good post on the story over on the reader blog.

The only thing I’ll add is this: Were we a society that promoted the personal use of firearms as a tool for self defense (as our founders intended) rather than poo-pooing it at every turn the death/wounded toll from this shooting wouldn’t have made it to the double digits.

No doubt about it.  The maniac would have been shot down minutes after starting this spree.  As it was, the students/faculty/visitors at Virginia Tech were stuck fleeing from him like the unarmed sheep they were.

And yeah, I know.  The grab-the-guns nuts are going to be saying “if we had better gun control this kid never would have gotten his gun in the first place.” Well that’s a bunch of crap.  Guns exist.  They’re everywhere in our society.  We can’t make them disappear, even if we wanted to.  The proverbial toothpaste is out of the tube and there’s no putting it back.  So the best defense against this sort of thing is to arm ourselves as well as the criminals are.