New Talking Points...

The gun culture is girding for total war.

I want to give you some of the best talking points...everyone needs to read this material and get ready.

What the others side really wants, from Slate today:

Repeal the Second Amendment

The best way to reduce the odds of another blood bath like the one at Virginia Tech is to amend the Constitution and abolish the right to bear arms.

By Walter Shapiro
April 18, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- Fifteen unambiguous words are all that would be required to quell the American-as-apple-pie cycle of gun violence that has now tearfully enshrined Virginia Tech in the record book of mass murder. Here are the 15 words that would deliver a mortal wound to our bang-bang culture of death: "The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed."

The talking points on our side. First, from Eugene Volokh:

What Exactly Is the Reason Not To Allow Professors To Carry Guns?
Consider two scenarios:
1. An armed madman comes to a place and starts shooting people. None of the people who's around is armed.

2. An armed madman comes to a place and starts shooting people. Several (say, five) people in the vicinity are armed.

Which madman is more likely to be stopped quicker — the one who outguns everyone else 1-0, or the one who is outgunned 5-1?

If this weren't a madman but Jack Bauer — or even an average highly trained soldier — the five may well be unable to stop the one. But otherwise, the odds would seem to be more against the madman in situation 2 rather than 1, no?

No-one can prove anything, of course. Maybe the five would be the first to be shot. Maybe they'd run away. Maybe they wouldn't be around. Maybe they'd shoot and miss. Still, if you had to bet, which would you bet would be the worse scenario for the madman, and the better one for his victims?

From James Bowman in the National Review Online:

Heffer’s question could also be asked, I think, about the Virginia Tech students who fled as the Korean gunman, Cho Seung Hui, went on his homicidal rampage on their campus Monday — or who, like Jamal Albarghouti, instead of fleeing, took out their cell phones to record the sights and sounds of the massacre. “This is what this YouTube-Facebook-instant messaging generation does,” reported the Washington Post of Albarghouti’s exploit as if it were a matter for pride: “Witness. Record. Share.” And, as the Post might have added, not fight back.

It appears to have occurred to no one to do that. Or even to wonder whether or not it might have been desirable to do that. “You are one brave guy Jamal,” wrote someone on his Facebook site after his video had run on CNN.com. But the idea that any greater bravery than his might have been possible — the kind of bravery that could have saved lives by taking down the gunman earlier in his murderous career — is one that seems not to have been picked up on the LCDs of the YouTube-Facebook-instant-messaging generation.

From Mark Steyn, also in NRO:

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected.

We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

From Michelle Malkin:

There's no polite way or time to say it: American college and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregrated dorms, politically correct academic departments, and designated "safe spaces" to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions—while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University's anti-Minuteman Project protesters).

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

From Fox:

Virginia Tech Murders Gives GOP Candidates Chance to Prove Gun Rights Credentials

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
WASHINGTON — Forget sporting a hunting rifle and camouflage flak jacket -- Republican candidates wanting to prove their credibility with the gun rights lobby may have that opportunity as the Virginia Tech murders this week begin reviving a national debate over gun laws.

"(The Republican candidates) must appeal to folks like me to get my vote. I don't expect them to be calling for further gun control," said Jeff Soyer, who runs www.Alphecca.com, a Web log popular with supporters of the Second Amendment guarantee for individuals to bear arms.

"Simply put," Soyer said, "there is no law that could be enacted that would have prevented this tragedy. You can't legislate against insanity."

While leading Democratic candidates like Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did not raise the specter of gun control legislation in recent statements about the Virginia Tech tragedy, which ended in the deaths of 33 people on Monday, Republican sources, including the White House, have already waded into the thorny issue of gun rights.

There are things I can't tell you yet; the Dems are profoundly scared of stepping into this. And I believe one of the reasons is they're looking at a wholesale mobilization on our part. More later...