The Tragedy of Misrepresenting Violence

The essay below addresses the issue of violence in our schools in the last 10 years. Below that is a Nikitas3.com editorial from April 19, 2007, The Intellectuals and the Gunman, written in response to the massacre at Virginia Tech.

The horrific murder of five students by Stephen Kazmierczak at Northern Illinois University on February 14, 2008 has become far too routine an occurrence. From the killing of two fellow students by Luke Woodham on October 1, 1997 at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, through Columbine and Virginia Tech to Northern Illinois, America has been convulsed by a wave of youth violence that has accelerated in the last decade. This is not inner-city gang violence among the poor, but middle class violence in “safe” schools.

These types of incidents were virtually unheard of in the 1950s or 1960s, when guns were more readily available than they are today as 20,000 state and federal laws currently regulate the manufacture and distribution of guns. Yet every incident since Pearl has raised the call for simple gun control, while ignoring the bigger, more complex and more comprehensive picture about the debasement of social standards that is the real cause of violence – the wholesale move away from the cohesive family structure and away from our sustaining Christian faith; toward ever-increasing violence in television and movies (yes, “pacifist” Hollywood); the advocacy of occultism and false new-age spirituality that represent a selfish “whatever” ethos with no moral center.

Also the rapid spread of environmental paganism which deems all human activities as destructive and which paints a bleak picture of the future; the violence and social chaos that is a permanent and underlying theme in promiscuous sex;  and the routine acceptance of abortion—the cheapening of the most innocent life in the name of convenience -- which also is a result of permissive sexual license. The cumulative effect of these social shifts, along with others discussed below, is the real underlying cause of this rise in violence among the kids involved.

No, it is not guns that kill people. People kill people. Guns have been available since the beginning of American history, yet it is in our morally relativist culture of today that students are finding the motivations and rationales to make murder their vehicle of choice for settling scores with a society from which they say they feel alienated.

Below is a summary of incidents since Pearl, Mississippi. After each, and in summary at the end, Nikitas3.com will offer an analysis which will be made only on the evidence presented here, and without further knowledge of the more extended stories of these killers. That will be a future project for Nikitas3.com, to investigate cases individually in order to unmask this wave of violence for what it truly is, a social movement that is a natural outcome of permissive atheist liberalism.

The Events

*At Pearl High School, Pearl, Mississippi, on October 1, 1997, Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven with a hunting rifle. He had stabbed his mother to death before the rampage.

Woodham blamed his actions on his breaking up with his girlfriend, and on his fascination with the occult. He fell under the spell of an older occultist, who told Woodham to kill his mother.

Analysis: The hunting rifle is a legal firearm requiring no special permit. Notice that Woodham came under the spell of an occultist. Nazism was based on occultism, and Christians have warned for thousands of years about the devastating effects of occult paganism. 

*At James W. Parker Middle School in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, Andrew Wurst, an 8th grade student on April 28, 1998, used a handgun he had obtained from an unlocked drawer in his home to kill science teacher John Gillette at a school dance. A month before the incident, Wurst told classmates that he wanted to kill people and commit suicide. A classmate noticed that Wurst had become short-tempered and hostile in the time leading up to the incident.

Analysis: Warning signs were ignored. Why? What are people afraid of?

Answer: Of seeming politically incorrect, that's what.

The gun was taken from the home, not purchased. The argument that liberals will make here is that all legally-owned guns thus should be confiscated, which would leave only criminals with guns.

*At Thurston High School, Springfield, Oregon, May 2, 1998. Kip Kinkel, age 15, was expelled on May 1 for bringing a gun to class. He came to the school on May 2 and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle, killing 2 and wounding 25. The bodies of his parents were discovered later in the day. 

Kinkel said that he heard voices in his head that made him kill the students, and kill his parents after he had told his mother that he loved her. Kinkel was described by experts as depressed and stressed.

Analysis: You will find insanity common, and also depression as a link in most of these cases, and in most other cases of violence. While Americans have some of the highest standards of living in history, young people are made depressed and disoriented by the manipulations of the media, particularly satanic/rock music, which is funded by liberals and off which liberals in Hollywood and in the recording industry make large amounts of money. The environmental movement also causes young people to become depressed by painting a bleak picture of man's activities.

*At Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. They were said to have been acting on the basis of the Hollywood movie Natural Born Killers starring environmental activist Woody Harrelson.

Harris suffered from depression while Klebold followed Harris’ lead. Harris warned on his internet web page that “I don’t care if I live or die in the shootout.” The police were aware for more than a year that Harris was making death threats to other students on his website yet did not act.

Analysis: Where were the police? Were they politically-correct cops in a liberal Colorado town afraid of being sued for violating Harris’ “free speech rights”? Or just another group of incompetent, overpaid civil servants?

What influenced Harris and Klebold most? A Hollywood movie. Yet liberal Hollywood is full of anti-Iraq Democrat “pacifists”, is it not?

Harris and Klebold venerated Adolf Hitler and spoke German and about Nazism openly to each other in the hallways of the school. Nazism was an occult, violent and anti-Christian ideology. Where was the school administration? Are they blind and deaf? Could they not have launched an investigation?

Meanwhile, the environmentalism preached by Woody Harrelson and others in Hollywood teaches young people that man is doomed, and that the future is bleak, leading to more depression. This in fact is the “background music” of modern day pop culture and education, both in public schools and colleges, and in elite academia, that man is “screwing everything up” and that critics of the enviro movement are evil, just as environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that anyone who disagrees with the theory of so-called 'global warming' is guilty of "treason". This apocalyptic scenario offers kids another rationale to see life as hopeless and to destroy people.

And where were the parents as these kids planned these attacks and stored weapons in their bedrooms in their homes? Answer: Parents often are no longer engaged with their children, and often are told that they have no right to intervene in their children’s lives by people like Hillary Clinton who published the book called It Takes A Village. That book described only the importance of the outside world (teachers, friends, government agencies, clubs etc.) in guiding children as they grow, while marginalizing the influence of family and parents. This is part of the anti-family agenda of liberal socialism

*At Buell Elementary School, Mount Morris, Michigan, on February 29, 2000, a first grader brought a gun to school and killed a classmate. Police found the boy living in a “flophouse” living with his aunt, a place full of guns and drugs. The boy had found the weapon in a tenant’s room. He said he only meant to scare the girl.

Analysis: Obviously this is another case of a child who has been devastated by the breakdown of the family. That breakdown is celebrated and popularized in much of the American media, in rock music and in popular culture, all controlled by liberal leftist activists and Democrats. The nuclear family, defended by conservatives, is disparaged as an Ozzie and Harriet fantasy from the 1950s.

*At Rocori High School, in Cold Spring, Minnesota, Jason McLaughlin killed two classmates on September 24, 2003 using his father’s pistol. McLaughlin was angry at one of the victims for having teased him about his acne. A special-ed teacher said that McLaughlin was permanently harmed by the bullying, while McLaughlin’s mother said her son suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. McLaughlin was sentenced to life in prison with parole possible after 30 years.

Analysis: McLaughlin used his father’s gun so you can’t blame the National Rifle Association for this incident. The boy was a paranoid schizophrenic. But according to liberals, that is no reason to restrain him or to put him in a mental hospital. That would be violating his “rights”, they say. That is why our homeless population exploded after liberals fought to shut down state mental institutions in the 1970s, because they said that these institutionalized people had to have their “rights”, when in fact many of these people were not able to take care of themselves in any way, and ended up on the streets.

*At Dawson College, Montreal, Canada, September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill used a rapid-fire rifle and two other weapons to go on a rampage, killing one student, and injuring 20. Gill then killed himself.

The gunman’s mother said her son had been treated for depression, and that she knew he had the guns, but that they had been acquired legally for use at a local gun club.

Analysis: Canada has strict gun-control laws, but that did not stop this person. And again, depression.

*At Platte Canyon High School, in Bailey, Colorado, on September 27, 2006, Duane Morrison, a 53-year old drifter held seven girls hostage, sexually assaulted some students, killed one girl named Emily Keyes with a handgun, and then killed himself.

Morrison wrote in a suicide note: ”I have no idea what’s real and what is not real”. He said he had been abused both mentally and physically as a child and began to think about killing himself starting at the age of 21. In the note, he said that he was unable to control his thoughts and urges.

Analysis: Again, the breakdown of the family and the abuse of Morrison in his youth was a key factor in his incident, leading Morrison to insanity. The strong family, advocated by Christians and conservatives, keeps people sane and feeling “safe”. Today the nuclear family is ridiculed by popular culture while any aberrant behavior is misrepresented as "personal freedom" and is advocated by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union which, for instance, is openly defending the North American Man-Boy Love Association, a pro-pedophilia group, while maligning and filing lawsuits against the Boy Scouts for barring homosexuals from their organization.

*At Weston School in Casenovia, Wisconsin, on September 29, 2006, Eric Hainstock, 15, killed his high school principal John Klang. Hainstock was armed with his father’s shotgun and a .22 revolver. Hainstock said he was angry that the principal had done nothing to stop other students from abusing him. He was said to have suffered from attention deficit disorder and was abused at home.

Students at Weston were said to have shoved Hainstock’s head into a toilet, stuffed him into a locker and thrown him into the bushes.

Hainstock was said to be angry at Klang for having suspended him for throwing a stapler at a special-ed teacher and for having given him in-school suspension for bringing tobacco into the school.

Analysis: Wouldn’t it be nice if these public schools treated the violence by classmates against a student like Hainstock with the same concern that they treat cigarettes? Where were the school administrators to stop the violence against Hainstock in the first place? This is a case where you have to feel badly for a troubled young boy who was severely mistreated by other students, although that obviously is no excuse for murder.

Also note the abuse of Hainstock at home. This does not happen in strong families. But strong families are either absent from, or relentlessly marginalized by and ostracized by the media. How many cohesive Christian families do you see on prime-time TV or in the big Hollywood movies? Answer: Practically none. The insistent portrayal of dysfunctional families encourages them and their anti-social and abusive behavior.

*At the West Nickel Mines Amish School, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006, Charlie Roberts arrived at the school with firearms, tubes of sexual lubricant and other locks and hardware designed to lock himself inside. He shot 10 girls, killing 5, and then killed himself.

In a call to his wife and in a suicide note, Roberts said he was angry with God over the death of an infant daughter, and full of guilt over having molested two girls 20 years before.

Robert had no criminal history and never had been treated for mental illness.

Analysis: Again, a child molester. Sex and violence are closely linked. Most violent offenders have sexual crimes in their lives, and the sexual license of the 1960s has spread throughout society, encouraging the abuse and other crimes linked to it.

Roberts did not follow the real laws of God by trusting in God even in times of trouble, as Christians do, but instead he turned away from God, and to murder and mayhem. This all was obviously sparked by his earlier sexual molestation of the two girls, which destroyed his ability to function, and certainly destroyed the lives of the two girls. His molestation of the girls probably came out of a broken home.

*At Foss High School in Tacoma, Washington, January 3, 2007, Douglas Chanthabouly shot and killed a fellow student in a hallway. Chanthabouly had a history of mental illness and schizophrenia and was found to be suffering from depression and hallucinations. He had attempted suicide two years before the incident.

Analysis: Mental illness used to be treated as a real condition that needed to be quarantined and treated if possible. Today, mental illness is treated only as a social shortcoming while liberals in the fields of law, “human rights” and psychiatry/psychology are accumulating political power and making billions of dollars by treating and representing deranged people as normal, and suing and intimidating people who disagree.

*At SuccessTech Academy in Cleveland on October 10, 2007 14-year old Asa Coon shot and wounded two teachers and two students before killing himself. A week previous, Coon had threatened to harm fellow students.

Coon was abused at home and had an adversarial relationship with his mother. He said he chose to worship the satanic and virulently anti-Christian rock “musician” Marilyn Manson rather than God.

Analysis: Notice that the warning was ignored 8 years after Columbine. Where are the teachers when a student threatens violence? And no mention is made of Coon’s father who probably was absent. Remember the father, the responsible male that once headed the family, but who is maligned and defamed by modern-day feminism and media? Just observe how many TV shows and commercials today make men look stupid. You will be shocked.

*At Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16, 2007, Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 students and then himself in a rampage. Hui was known around campus as having mental problems and for penning violent plays.

On the day of the massacre, police failed to notify students in a timely manner about two separate murders that Hui committed two full hours before the massacre, a warning that would have saved all the subsequent 30 lives.

In 2005, a Virginia court even had declared Hui an imminent threat to others. But Special Justice Paul Barrett decided that Hui was not crazy enough to be committed to a mental-health facility, which would have red-flagged any gun purchase by placing his name in a background-check database. The dealer who sold Hui one of the guns said that he sometimes refused to sell guns to people just on his suspicion of their instability.

Hui left notes and videotapes behind condemning “rich kids” and even Christianity itself.

Analysis: At the time of the murders, Virginia Tech was – and still is - a “gun free” zone, to which killers never pay any mind. If a fellow student had been armed, he/she may have been able to kill Hui before he killed others.

Notice that the incompetent campus police (state-government employees) at the school (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) apparently did not have enough common sense to warn students about the first two murders before the main massacre. This happened 8 years after Columbine. Where were the police?

Hui was a very crazy person, but on a college campus, the “non-judgmental” atmosphere would allow somebody like Hui to exist without challenge. Notice that the Special Justice did not think Hui was dangerous enough to be committed to a mental-health facility, which would have sent his name into the database.

The highly liberal Democrat professorial class at Virginia Tech knew Hui and his problems well, but did nothing. Yet these are the same people who warn us repeatedly about abstract crises in the environment and elsewhere, while they are unable to manage even their own small, closed societies.

And finally, notice that Hui reflected the bigoted frame of mind on college campuses these days with his rage at “rich kids” and Christianity, both targets of the relentless barrage from the anti-capitalist and anti-Christian political left that controls our universities. Notice he was not angry at the Internal Revenue Service for overtaxing citizens, or at Hollywood for offering morally vacuous and violent entertainment.

*At Northern Illinois University, February 14, 2008, 27-year old Stephen Kazmierczak killed five students in a lecture hall.

Kazmierczak, who was praised for his intelligence by other students and professors, had studied sociology, and was said to be concerned about issues of prisoner rights, political violence, peace and social justice.

Kazmierczak once had been discharged from the Army for unknown reasons. He had worked briefly in an Illinois prison.

In a final package sent to his girlfriend, Kazmierczak included the book The Anti-Christ by atheist philosopher Nietzsche. Kazmierczak also had become fascinated with horror movies and had had several horror tattoos etched on his arm including a pentagram, a sign of the devil and the occult.  Kazmierczak was living with his girlfriend at the time of the shootings. He was said to have stopped taking his anti-depression medications before the shootings.

He was said to have spoken frequently about two television shows that he enjoyed, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Analysis: Kazmierczak was depressed. Note the atheist book he sent to his girlfriend (and probably read himself) by Frederic Nietzsche, the philosopher who went insane late in his 56-year life after advocating atheism and railing against Western culture. And notice Kazmierczak’s fascination with violent horror movies, certainly produced by “pacifist” liberal Democrats in Hollywood.

Living with your girlfriend outside of marriage is an anti-Christian lifestyle that is likely to lead to confusion. He is said to have been living with her even though they no longer were involved in any relationship.

Also note that he had studied sociology at a public university, a course of study that is dominated by left-wing thinking. And that he allegedly was concerned with issues of “peace and social justice.” The pursuit of these ideas in modern academia is code for radical socialism, and is undertaken virtually exclusively by liberal leftists. In these courses, students are inculcated only in the leftist interpretation of what “peace” and “justice” are, which are usually opposite to what they really represent in the real world (i.e., a dictatorship like Cuba would be called “peaceful” because it has not militarily attacked other nations).

But those same liberals, with their anti-Christian and anti-family agenda, are covertly advocating violence through their perpetually violent media; through the advocacy of sexual promiscuity (often linked to violence); through advocacy of adult-child sex (which is part of the worldwide leftist agenda, and represents violent exploitation of children); and through instigating the breakdown of the family as advocated by modern-day media, films, television, rock music and the American Civil Liberties Union which, among other groups, champions “children’s rights” above the rights of their parents.

Finally, the two television shows that Kazmierczak often discussed, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, are frivolous entertainment-industry programs that slyly blur the line between comedy/satire and serious news, and that subtly and not-so-subtly mock and degrade the virtuous society that built America. 

Conclusion

America in the late 20th century and the early 21st century is not a 2nd Amendment nation. The National Rifle Association is marginalized in the media while guns are portrayed as instruments of death and destruction. Meanwhile 20,000 federal and state gun laws have not managed to stem violence. The reason is simple: Violence has social causes, as is demonstrated in the few examples given above, which could be extrapolated to the millions of crimes committed every year. And that violence is sparked within people by the conditions in and under which they live.

If America truly granted gun rights to its private and law-abiding citizens, those citizens would be allowed to carry weapons more freely, and the 500,000 crimes a year that are said to be prevented by gun-wielding citizens would increase geometrically. And the media still would refuse to report on it. And crime would drop substantially because criminals would see a real cause and effect.

But today, the media ignore the real social causes that allow violence to flourish while stigmatizing those who lawfully bear arms or who advocate the right to bear arms.

If a homeowner kills an intruder today, that homeowner will be prosecuted. In short, Americans do not have the natural right of even self defense any longer, which is a principal right granted to free people under Natural Law, the basis of our liberty

America no longer is a 2nd Amendment society. The cards are stacked against self-defense and in favor of bad people and degraded social conditions that produce crime and violence, all of them emanating from the left side of the political spectrum. At the same time, liberal lawyers defend criminals when they commit crimes, and those lawyers have been the driving force behind weakening our justice system over the last 50 years, offering more and more rights to criminals while ignoring the rights and needs of crime victims.

The editorial below was posted in the Public Square section of this website on April 19, 2007

The Intellectuals and the Gunman

The events of April 16, 2007 in Blacksburg, Virginia will reverberate in our  public consciousness for years to come. The "worst mass murder in US history" has a ring to it like "9/11" or "a day that will live in infamy". And the political reaction to 4/16/07 will play itself out on a stage that has been set for decades.

Within hours of the shooting, the second-guessing and political sniping began, some of it justifiable and within the bounds of reason, some of it beyond the pale. But in the highly-charged and closely divided political climate that exists in America today, every nuance and advantage counts. Minds can be swayed at any point in any crisis by any person like those critics who, on the very day of 9/11, began savaging President Bush for reading to the Florida schoolchildren for 8 minutes while the North Tower of the World Trade Center burned, even though nobody really knew what had happened, including all the enlightened people 1,200 miles away in New York City.

Regarding Virginia Tech, the most obvious question is: Why did it take university officials two full hours to alert the campus community about the first two murders? Was this not a serious circumstance?

The answer is that yes it was serious and indeed, under pressure, the system failed. And heads will roll. And lawsuits will ensue. And ironically - or perhaps expectedly - while the warning about the first murders was delayed, the declaration of a convocation for the very next day to begin to "heal" the grieving community was announced almost instantaneously in order to mollify all the wrong people. Is something wrong here? Was something being covered up or "over-compensated" for? Could not the convocation have been delayed a few days while the damned dust settled? Certainly, it could have been. But in a world where feelings trump rationality, like on the average college campus today, emotion prevailed.

Immediately after the shootings, the media went on the attack with the usual agenda. Within hours, the issue of the "gun control debate" was raised with the suggestion that this time it will be settled forever in favor of a complete ban, never mind that guns are the most regulated commodity in America today, with more than 20,000 federal, state and local laws. One smarmy New York journalist, smelling blood and allowing his media hysteria to run wild in the heat of the moment, even wrote a how-do-you-like-it-now-Virginia commentary, blaming easy gun access in Old Dominion laws for all the guns and crime in Utopian New York City. Typically, a liberal never is quite able to accept blame for failures in his own community, and must point fingers. Then Rep. Jim Moran, a kooky, hair-trigger liberal Virginia Democrat who once was charged with roughing up a little boy, immediately blamed Bush, the Republican party and probably God Himself for the Virginia massacre. And so 2nd Amendment supporters, knowing what was coming down the pike, immediately ramped up their PR machine in order to counter the expected liberal firestorm.

Europe, of course, went nuts. On a continent on which 75 million souls perished in two world wars in the 20th century alone, they took a break from their espressos and unemployment lines long enough to again disparage America as a nutty, gun-toting place while conveniently forgetting the role that nutty, gun-toting America played in saving Europe twice. Or does saving their bacon in the Cold War count too? Yes, three times.

But a look at the Virginia Tech gunman himself, his alleged motives, and his gun purchase offers us some insight into where our culture is coming from. And the picture is not at all what the media and the intellectual classes wish for us to see.

Virginia Tech certainly is not Harvard or Berkeley. It is located in a conservative part of the nation; has what appears to be a decent, level-headed, and somewhat religious student constituency; and even sponsors a military cadet corps and strong ROTC program, both of which are routinely run off liberal campuses run by the enlightened elite on the coasts. But this is not to say that Tech has not come under socialist influence. School poet Nikki Giovanni started railing about disease in Africa and something about loose boulders crushing houses in Appalachia (apparently a gratuitous swipe at the mining industry) during a memorial tribute to 32 dead students. More tellingly, however, is that Tech officially had been declared a "gun free" zone, which the murderer conveniently managed to ignore, as they always do. Why can't these criminals behave?!

The next sign of trouble was the profile of the murderer, and the college's reaction to it. Obviously a distressed loner, Cho Seung-Hui was said to have passed mostly wordlessly through life at Tech, showed signs of extreme mental disorder, and even wrote grossly violent plays for a creative writing class. But on many of today's college campuses we can expect psychosis and violence to be considered normal, rather than suspect. After all most colleges preach abortion (anger at children); disdain for God and His order; and extremist environmentalism (anger at humans and their activities) while nurturing a self-indulgent ethic that is "non-judgmental". Hey man, whatever. If he wants to write about killing his step-father, that's cool with us! says academia.

The radical 1960s agenda that has taken over many colleges in America, including greedy tuition demands from the "selfless" and "non-materialistic" Woodstock Generation of professors and administrators, has normalized chaos and marginalized rational thinking. So killer Hui's "1st Amendment rights" to be a nut and to pen violent plays were scrupulously observed, while the 2nd Amendment - the right to bear arms - was cavalierly run out of town. See  how selective the academic elite has become? This is the same laissez-faire mindset toward violence and criminality that allowed investigations of the two Columbine killers to lapse for more than a year even after one had made death threats on a computer website, and both were openly suspected of planning something sinister. After all, today's politically-correct police departments don't want to invade anyone's karma.

Hui's former English professor, Lucinda Roy, speaking in a British accent, condescendingly dismissed the rabble of "this country" (America) as troubled, dispirited people. Yet despite Hui's extremely erratic behavior and violent writing, Roy ultimately did nothing. After all, who has time for a troubled college kid when you can be bashing America, demeaning the coal companies, or jetting off on sabbatical.

In 2005, a Virginia court even declared Hui an imminent threat to others. But Special Justice Paul Barrett decided that Hui was not crazy enough to be committed to a mental-health facility, which would have red-flagged any gun purchase. This is part of the "therapy culture" pushed by liberals in America, in which derangement is normalized, and nobody wants to "offend" anyone by describing truthfully their condition. The same liberals shut down hundreds of state mental institutions in the late 1970s, putting hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people on the streets.... uh, homeless people, that is.

Meanwhile the eggheads at Tech - like many college professors and administrators everywhere who purport to tell us what the global temperature is going to be in 100 years; who wish to dictate where and when to drill for oil; who seem to know exactly how much in taxes we  all should pay - the same academics who had had years-long relationships with Hui didn't do a damned thing.  Is there something wrong with this picture?

Meanwhile the gun dealer who sold Hui one pistol said that in their brief encounter Hui was perfectly normal and passed all the background checks.  So who knew Hui better? Who should have been aware of his behavior? The gun dealer even said that he routinely denies sales to people he deems suspicious.

The killer left notes and videotapes behind condemning "rich kids", "debauchery" and even Christianity itself. Well, well, Hui had learned his lessons well, had he not? Is this not the anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity and class-warfare tactic advocated by many leftists in academia and in the media today, and even seen in terrorists' jihad videos? Obviously America made him do it, they always say. Thus the liberal socialists who virtually control both the media and academia are complicit in these murders and in much of the violence in America today just as radical environmentalist Woody Harrelson, who starred in the film Natural Born Killers - which directly influenced the Columbine killers - is complicit in that act of evil.

Who, me? Yeah, you...

If Cho Seung-Hui were employed at Home Depot or a coal mine or another manly bastion of American capitalism, some real men would have taken him aside and checked him out good. But radical feminism has all but banished real men and their real  judgments from college campuses today, while the academic elite is more worried about the concocted crisis of 'global warming' or starvation halfway across the globe than about lurking crises in its own front parlor. This is the great conceit of academia today; they are blind to themselves while ruthlessly criticizing others.

One psychobabbler prattled on about how males like Cho Seung-Hui in today's society are feeling alienated by lost job opportunities and lack of self-esteem. And where, oh where does this anti-man attitude come from? Yes, from the feminist media, and academia, and "poets" (and that word is used advisedly) more worried about tumbling boulders than about murder in their own field of view. What is today's emasculated male but a punching bag for all the reactionary theology of modern-day socialism/feminism.

If the first two murders on the Tech campus instead had been a tripped 'global warming' alarm that announced a one millidegree rise in the planet's temperature, the campus would have been cleared immediately. But Tech is two things: a college campus and a government institution, run by the state of Virginia. Therefore rational thinking and accountable decision-making increasingly are pushed to the margins, while professors and administrators have produced an onerous, bureaucratic state where no action can be taken without committee approval.

This is the great danger posed by the intellectual community today. This is not to say that there are not millions of good kids studying hard at colleges and universities across America today, and lots of proficient, honest professors. Many of them were courageously on display at Virginia Tech in the wake of the shootings. But young people are shaped by what they see and hear, and this evil act will echo around college campuses for years to come. And they will see only the result that is hammered into them by the academic elite and the media: Some guy bought a gun in Virginia and killed people, so let's get the guns out of the public's hands.

What young people are not learning about is how abominably they are being taught. We need to re-define the approach that academia had imposed on our youth, perhaps teach them that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution gives us access to firearms in order to keep at bay the repression of the State. All tyrannies disarm their publics as their first official acts. This is why gun-controlled Britain is said to have a lower crime rate than America (much of it for external reasons that have nothing to do with guns), but in point of fact is at infinitely higher risk of tyranny than America is. World War III anyone?

How's that for a "high concept" to be taught in college?

And by the way, gun ownership in America prevents 500,000 crimes per year. You'll never hear that statistic in the mainstream media.

The 2nd Amendment comes out of a rational thing called Natural Law, which declares, among other things, that humans have the right to personal safety. While this may sound perfectly logical, it is not normal for the political left. If you kill an intruder in your home in America today, you are subject to prosecution by leftist activists for denying the civil rights of the aggrieved criminal. In other words, personal safety is not on their agenda, and never has been, because leftist state power negates personal power. If a student had violated Virginia Tech's gun ban and had shot and killed Hui before Hui killed anyone else, that student would be targeted by left-wing activist groups for murder and for breaching gun laws.

But in fact the state (the police) failed the students at Tech, not only physically by failing to stop the 32 murders, but procedurally by failing even to alert students in a timely manner about the first two murders. State power indeed. How about some 1960s "power to the people" in the form of armed self-defense?

From the bogus Duke University rape case, to a former Taliban member attending Yale, American academia is out of control. 88 Duke professors essentially found the three innocent defendants there guilty in absentia by calling them guilty in a newspaper ad, and then refused to apologize when they were proven wrong. This is the type of arrogance that permeates academia today.  The evil murder of 32 students at Virginia Tech will reverberate for many years to come. But only those who look beyond the hype will see that it is reason and rationality that will prevent such incidents in the future.