That's a great first step, but I think more broadly we have to face our culture of violence. We keep driving home to kids be it by gang violence, video games, music, movies, tough guy rhetoric, or images of war, that if you have a problem, the biggest gun you can find will solve it.

I too am opposed to civilian possession of armor-piercing ammunition and semiautomatic versions of high-capacity military weapons, but most of the killing in this country is done with pistols and revolvers. And it doesn't appear that limiting the killer's pistol magazines to seven rounds would have made much of a difference.

What would you suggest? Requiring all gun purchasers to undergo a psychiatric evaluation?

Maybe the place to start would be recognizing that in the hands of inept and deluded education careerists, and under school boards more interested in property values than in human values, junior high and high schools have become social voids, places without any context for the development of peer relationships freely and according to each student's individual nature.

Welcome back Rep. Harman... 

I am probably not going to be highly rated for this comment (and really I don't care because I don't post for ratings or to echo the prevailing sentiments) but I will state, as I always do, that guns don't kill people...people kill people.  This isn't a 2nd amendment issue and shouldn't be made into one.

We live in a culture that if a person if "different" or "weak" they become the prey of society.  And tragically when the flight or fight instinct kicks in sometimes the hunted becomes the hunter.  It has nothing to do with guns or their availability...an individual like the VA Tech shooter would blow up people if he had to, to make his statement.  I am in NO WAY defending the shooter or saying persecution, real or perceived, legitimized his actions in the slightest.  But we do live in a cruel, mean spirited christian nation...

No corallein. But I would do better backround checks on gun purchasers including history of MAJOR psychiatric disorders(note word MAJOR)

Also please spare me the irrational responses of second amemendment "right to bear arms zealots"

Dr. Rick Lippin

Please give us some major disorders, that would disqualify, and some minor ones that would not.

Wigmar1

Thxs

What about the model we currently use for known sex offenders?

Let the community know that a known legitamtely diagnosed MAJOR psychopath is living among you?

(I know ACLU would not agree)

Dr. Rick Lippin

See DSMR- Latest edition to differentiate major from minor psychiatric disorders

Dr. Rick Lippin

(I am fully aware of the response from ACLU and related groups and I too cherish freedoms they espouse)

Luigi Vampa

The current Philadelphia Mayor's race is about crime -with recent record homicides in my beloved city.

It is not a trivial issue. But I DO agree the war,education reform and heath care reform trump it

Dr. Rick Lippin

And the relevance to this Tech student is what? His English teacher wisely thought he had major problems, and referred him to the school psychologist. If the kid didn't go, what recourse is there? An English teacher makes a "diagnosis" and his/her future is spent defending him/herself in court and every cent saved for retirement is gone because he/she just wanted to help the student... There is such a thing as a citizen's arrest. Maybe there should also be a citizen's diagnosis. I am often struck by how wise everyday people are when faced with the pathology of their neighbors.

What BETTER BACKGROUND CHECK would you do? What would that involve? Be specific (and also realistic) now. Interviewing a potential buyer's teacher? This kid was obviously (and in retrospect) sick, but it had not been diagnosed and now 32 people plus himself are dead. It is not because of diagnostic problems. It is because guns are everywhere; clips are everywhere. The NRA is nothing but a lobbying effort for gun manufacturers.

But you say the problem is not adequate background checks? Drricklippen, heal thyself.

Jan Knaus

I am skeptical that every DSM "major disorder" is a definitive basis for disallowing gun ownership. How about a link, or a list?

And how would that capture undiagnosed people? Or would we all pass thru your "mental detector"? This sounds like a full employment act for psychiatrists, except that there aren't enough of them to screen the whole population.

Your mention the ACLU, and the fact that "you cherish the freedoms they espouse," but how would you preserve them during your psychological dragnet?

Well of course it was a college, but he graduated from a high school, probably not as a well-adjusted kid with lots of different friends. It is more likely that his junior high and high school time contributed to this.

We could certainly devote more funding to research better ways to screen for mental illness early on and alternatives for delivering mental health care. Mental illness is often diagnosed in young adults and once they are adults it's difficult to require them to seek health care and their illness often makes them unable to consistently hold the kind of job that would provide them with health care if they seek it.

Wigmar1

There are 33 dead students and faculty at VT and their grieving families who deserve some answers and our prayers.

The faces of the dead are beginning to appear on the media.

Ask their families your question about what could have been done better?

Dr. Rick Lippin

(Board Certified in Preventive Medicine-Not Psychiatry)

not worthy of a response

Rick Lippin

Not a substantive reply.

Boston, too, has seen record murders this spring.

Ben Cronin

not everyone is as sentimental about the details as you are. katrina killed many, many more people. this event surely isn't that major.

the politicians are jumping on it out of political opportunity.

imagine if the house and senate had reacted as seriously when the war turned the wrong way and realized that it was based on fabrication and lies...

if I died at VT, I'd want people to know: "not in my name will you exchange liberty for security..."

Here is another perspective from CCHR

Cho Seung-Hui May Be 9th School Shooter Under Influence of Psychiatric Drugs --

Documented to Cause Homicidal Ideation, Suicide, Psychosis, Mania and Hostility

In the wake of yesterday's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech by gunman Cho Seung-Hui, state legislators, civic and human rights activists are asking why Congress has failed to investigate the link between psychiatric drugs and school violence, given the high rate of psychiatric drug use by the shooters. According to breaking news from investigators at Virginia Tech, Cho may have taken depression drugs—documented by the Food and Drug Administration to cause suicidal behavior, mania, psychosis, hallucinations, hostility and “homicidal ideation.” (link) If Cho Seung-Hui’s psychiatric drug use is confirmed, it would bring the total to 61 killed and 77 wounded by psychiatric drug-induced school shootings.

In September 2005, following confirmation that Red Lake Indian Reservation school shooter, Jeff Weise, was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac, the National Foundation of Women Legislators, together with American Indian tribal leaders, called for a Congressional investigation (link) into the correlation between psychiatric drug use and school massacres. To date there has been no response to this request despite documentation that at least eight recent school shooters were under the influence of psychiatric drugs at the time of the shootings.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog that initially discovered the psychiatric drug connection in the Columbine shootings, warns that the psycho-pharmaceutical industry will once again try to obscure the violence-inducing nature of psychiatric drugs in order to protect the billions in profit from drug sales. CCHR says that Congress must demand a full investigation into the link between senseless acts of violence and psychiatric drug use in the wake of recent FDA warnings on the documented drug risks.

In eight recent school shootings, psychiatric drugs were the common factor, in other instances, the shooter’s medical records were never made public and their psychiatric drug use remains in question.

September 28, 2006: Bailey, Colorado: Duane Morrison, 53, entered Platte Canyon High School and shot and killed one girl, and sexually assaulted 6 others. Antidepressants were found in his vehicle.

March 21, 2005: Red Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota: 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac when he shot and killed nine people and wounding five before committing suicide.

April 10, 2001: Wahluke, Washington: 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage while on a high dose of the antidepressant Effexor.

March 22, 2001: El Cajon, California: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants, Effexor and Celexa, when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five.

March 7, 2000: Williamsport, Pennsylvania: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on the antidepressant Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.

May 20, 1999: Conyers, Georgia: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with a mix of antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded 6 of his classmates.

April 20, 1999: Columbine, Colorado: 18-year-old Eric Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox when he and his partner Dylan Klebold killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 23 others before taking their own lives in the bloodiest school massacre to date. The coroner confirmed that the antidepressant was in his system through toxicology reports while Dylan Klebold’s autopsy was never made public.

April 16, 1999: Notus, Idaho: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school narrowly missing students; he was taking a mix of antidepressants.

May 21, 1998: Springfield, Oregon: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his own parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Kinkel had been on Prozac.

Read this report by CCHR to find out more about the dangerous connection between violence and psychiatric drugs.

For more information, contact the Citizens Commission on Human Rights at 800-869-2247 or email humanrights@cchr.org.

You can help CCHR urge congress to demand an investigation into the link between psychiatric drugs and violence.

Contribute to this urgent campaign now!

Link to: https://www.cchr.org/store/index.php?cPath=

Dr. Rick Lippin

I would have done more than VT did to possibly avoid this tragedy...

Be specific. Be honest. Be aware that many students would call their parents and threaten to sue you for impinging on their rights, or for making a "drive-by diagnosis." But you, with the benefit of Monday morning knowledge, and looking back at this horrible mess would have done more...

What precisely would you have done to possibly avoid this tragedy?

Jan Knaus

now these things interest me much more than having the government snoop into my intentions...

I've always liked Dr. Breggin's assessments of the drug industry.

Mental illness, if the VT student was suffering from it, is a terrible thing since, here in the US, it's a financial death threat-- especially at his age!

Your previous posts seemed to make the student a criminal and even with "sexual preditors," I don't even think of them as criminals but, instead, as "struggling mentally."

In general, I think that society should reach out to them... not closet them.

And this seems likely to be mixing up cause and effect.

The kids are on antidepressants (effect) because they are disturbed (cause), but what is the actual cause of the shooting? Is it because of the antidepressants or simply because they're abnormally disturbed?

All too predictable...politicians have a distasteful habit of trying to capitalize on tragedies to further their agendas.

Sex offenders, by hypothesis, have committed a crime.

In some jurisdictions, laws prohibit persons against whom a domestic-violence restraining order has been issued from possessing firearms.

Expanding this to persons named in restraining orders issued for certain other reasons (not including, for example, restraint of trade) might be a better basis for what you seem to want (and because there are legal protections built into the issuance and maintenance of such orders, I might even go along with such a scheme), unless you really just want everyone examined by "experts."

Jane Harman excepted, of course.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP!

you seem a little fiesty lately....

Like Jack Thompson and video games

And how do you know that some one who writes blood drenched fiction is a psycho and not Brett Easton Ellis?

After Columbine, way too many people were singled out for antisocial attitudes and goth style. We shouldn't be singling out people for having dark thoughts, dark style or for loathing rich kids when they go to college in Virginia (everyone I know who went to college in that state has had harsh words for rich kids...)

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

well, what about this article which appeared in USA Today about a year ago:

As many as 98000 Americans still die each year because of medical errors (source)

thus, it looks like my chances of dying from a freak gun accident like the one at VT is almost negligible when compared to the issue of medical errors... and I'm assuming that they're always committed with absolute no bad intentions whatsoever.

in my opinion, both high school and college can be depressing places; while I was at the University of Minnesota, I gained 70 lbs because I felt like my creativity was suppressed. Once I left, I felt free again and the weight came off.

I know that some people thrive on institutional structure, but others, like me, die.

and that's a real problem when academia works as the gateway to employement and you have to go that route.

Of course a killer armed with a 33 round magazine is going to be a more efficient killing machine than one with five 7 round magazines, the more bullets fired faster the more targets hit. The time it takes to unlock, detach, retrieve another magazine and insert it could be the time it takes to run away or physically take down the shooter.

I watched NBC News tonight. The very next day after 35 of their fellow students and faculty were killed, a memorial service featuring Bush, was held. And, incomprehensible to me, the students were shown doing a VT cheer. This sounds more like a reaction to losing a football game than to losing dozens of lives.

Bush should have stayed away from the "memorial service", which shouldn't have been held for at least a couple more days, during which the college should have been shut down to allow everyone time to grieve and come to grips with what happened. After that, Bush's appearance would have been appropriate, even though he never bothers with attending such services for the ten times as many his war has cost, nor has he been willing to step up for New Orleans.

My impression is that everyone wants to rush thru this "thing" and get back to normalcy, for whatever reasons. I find that a lot more bothersome than the "fact" that the administration of VT might have predicted the classroom carnage after the first two shootings at the dorm.

As far as restricting guns is concerned - once someone shoots another person they are a criminal in most instances, thus should not have been allowed to have had a gun. My creative engineering mind is now at work devising a fool proof time machine to be used in cases just like this.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Forget schools.

15,000 murders by gunfire last year. Now, if everyone carried a loaded gun everywhere they went, would that number go up or down? Take a guess.

freak gun accident like the one at VT

Are you out of your mind?  A "freak gun accident" doesn't involve a gunman stalking around forcing doors open.  Dematerializing this murder is just more NRA propaganda. 

I have gone a whole week, I think, without posting a comment that brought heaps of scorn my way, so I'm overdue. The second amendment refers to "bearing arms". It has nothing at all to say about ammunition. So, let's take the amendment as it stands, let everyone have a gun, but as the amendment says, this is in the context of a militia. So, we limit possession of ammunition to armories set up for the state militia, which I believe is the National Guard today. We can all keep as many guns as it takes to satisfy us, if we can afford to buy them, but we can have no ammunition at all, unless it is issued by the local armory, which is state government controlled. Now, if the federal government gets out of hand, the states can secede from the union, issue ammunition to the local citizenry, and fight off the feds. This works for me.

Hoppy in Sacramento

So you're saying that by arming more of our violent, indifferent, and un-empathic citizens, our level of violence will go ......down?

Brilliant! The NRA is looking for admen with your outlook.

Jan Knaus

"... guns, I like them..."

I don't.

Tom

"...gun control isn't an important enough battle to blow efforts on. Let's focus on the important things first..."

I wonder if the families of the dead at Virginia Tech would agree with this.

Tom

Brilliant Wigmari, you just multiply by (2).

The more bullets in a magazine the more bullets fired, one gun or two. If you can count that means two guns with seven rounds allows 14 shots before reloading, two guns with 33 rounds means 66, the ratio for reloading stays the same knucklehead.

Er, just because they are both amendments does not mean they are equally important. The first amendment covers basic human rights that are incorporated into the constitutions of just about every other liberal democracy, and which are guaranteed by the United Nations Charter of Human Rights as well, I believe. The 2nd Amendment is a weird idiosyncratic American thing with pretty much no parallel anywhere else.

Freedom of expression and freedom of worship is a basic human right, whether or not it's expressed in the U.S. Constitution. The right to own guns is not a basic human right, whether or not that right is given in the U.S. Constitution. I don't care about the First Amendment because it's in the Constitution. I care about it because it's genuinely important, and would be, whether or not it was in the constitution. Likewise, I don't care about the Second Amendment at all, regardless of whether it's in the Constitution, because I think it's stupid bullshit, and doesn't even make any clear sense on its own terms.

Perhaps I don't know much about guns. Heavens knows I little understand or appreciate the US gun lobby and the extreme culture of violence in this country that shrugs off 30,000 gun killings each year (which, by the way, exceeds by many multiples the deaths attributed to the criminal negligence connected with Katrina.)

Nevertheless, I struggle mightily to comprehend why any individual, regardless of mental status or diagnosis, should be permitted to purchase a semi-automatic weapon with or without the type of ammunition that can fire off 19 or so rounds in a matter of seconds. What other possible use is there for such a weapon but mass killing, whether of humans or animals? What possible justification could there be for such legalized massacre? Should not the sanity and motivation of any person wishing to purchase such a weapon at a minimum be seriously scrutinized?

In this instance, and perhaps in other school shootings as well, the killer would have devised other ways to wreck his terrible destruction. Maybe, maybe not, or maybe not at the same level. But we'll never know, because, out of the fear of politically alienating members of the gun lobby, we refuse even to enter into a honest discussion of the issues much less experiment with possible solutions.

Given this, I remain totally mystified how anyone in this country could in good faith support the Bush administration's grotesque annihilation of so basic a protection as the writ of habeas corpus (among others), which dates from the 12th century, as one completely inconsequential weapon drug out to prosecute the much maligned and failing "Global War on Terror," while at the same time refusing even to consider reasonable limits on the sales of semi-automatic weapons. In these circumstances, the true nature of the slippery slope argument invariably waved like a magic talisman to quash any debate on gun control is revealed for what it truly is: The fearmongering and hypocrisy of an extremist and morally bankrupt agenda.

"But we must ask ourselves why this keeps happening. The answer, I believe, partially lies in the near ubiquity of hand guns and other assault weapons in this country."

While I agree that the easy availability of handguns helped enable Cho Seung-Hui to do what he did, I believe the real problem lies in a type of mental illness that has insinuated its way into our entire culture. There is no doubt about it--we are a violent society. We love violent films, violent games, violent sports. We just plain love violence. And as long as this culture continues to find some value in violence, we will continue to be subjected to its very real effects on those members of society who cannot tell the difference between a film or a video game and the real world. Truth be told, our enlightened society is really not so enlightened as we would prefer to believe it is.

Everyone keeps talking about whether or not this "will happen again". Of course it will. Striving for an incident rate of zero is admirable, but not necessarily realistic. The question should be, how often does it happen?

Specifically, what is the probability that my life would be shortened by something like this? Practically zero. Or by getting shot in general? That's a larger probability, but still, pretty close to zero. This event is not indicative of a larger policy problem requiring "solving" by giving every plane passenger a gun or giving every gun buyer a psychiatric evaluation.

(The real solution, of course, is to fix the doors. Makers of doors should stop making door handles and knobs with closed loops that can be chained shut by crazed gunmen. Technology exists for knobs without loops for chains to go through. How many more must die?)

Guns kill 40 people a day in this country. More people have died from guns today than died at Virginia Tech yesterday. It was a tragedy for all involved, but at the end of the day, still a human interest story. If it happened in Iraq it wouldn't even be that. If we need additional gun legislation, Virginia Tech may provide a nice political impetus to get started- but it should NOT be considered by lawmakers as THE reason for legislation, or we will get a law fixing door handles.

Not that I disagree with gun control in general, but we only have a limited amount of congressperson-hours available and we can save more lives by having politicians work on (say) fixing health care instead of writing legislation having to do with guns. There was a time when we could afford to waste time on such issues but those days are gone.

One could probably prevent more gun murders by legalizing drugs than banning guns.

This evening when I came home late from work, my 4-year-old woke up, cried and puked on me about half-way through my dinner. Sammy and Dada both got an unexpected shower.

But I am more comprehensively disgusted by the bodies-still-warmer-than-room-temperature timing of this politicization of a mass murder, beginning sadly with the comments of the Congresswoman whom I do indeed respect, than I was with my son's puke on my hands, sleeve and hair.

It is unfortunate that Josh did not have the foresight to add a "puke" rating in addition to the mere numerical ratings. If we were "all Hokies" to quote the Congresswoman - which we need not all be - this discussion would not be taking place now.

Crablaw Weekly

Legislating corporate responsibility in the form of specific liability for deaths from weapons they manufacture or sell might go a long way towards reducing death.  Cities can't do it, but states or the feds can.  Corporations would figure out who to sell to, or whether it is worth being in the business.

I am a zealot about protecting all of our constitutional rights.  Because if someone can come up with a "compelling" reason to limit our rights under the 2nd, for example, then it opens the door to limiting any of them...including, and most importantly, the 1st...

Personally I don't like guns but I understand what is at stake...