Sooner Be Blue

For the record -- I am a Democrat who respects the rights of gun ownership. I would do away with those rat-a-tat assualt rifles .. like the kind used by that killer in the CA fast food place a long time ago. He just walked in and mowed down over 20 people .. little kids and all.

I respect the rights of hunters to own shotguns and rifles .. the rights of law-abiding citizens to own rifles and handguns to protect their homes and families.

And I speak as one who grew up with a raging father who snapped after the Korean War and liked to wave around loaded pistols when he was drunk .. sometimes shooting my pets ...

The tragic shooting and killing at Virginia Tech will no doubt start everyone jawing about gun control again .. they'll go at it on cable news and the Internet 24/7. Just like they did after Columbine. And nothing will change. Just like after Columbine.

The media will exploit raw emotions and before this is over we will even know what those kids had for breakfast that morning.

Politicians will jockey for face time on TV to analyze the availability of guns in our society. Some will wring their hands and ask for tighter background checks and other restrictions on gun ownership .. they know this will never happen. Others will bash "liberal" Hollywood and blame Quentin Tarrantino movies, violent video games and working mothers.

The rest of the world will wonder what makes a rich industrial democracy like the US so uniquely vulnerable to such carnage in our schools.

Lefties among us will pick apart Virginia's gun control laws  .. and say see we were right about gun control all along .. this tragic event proves it .. if only the other side could take off their blinders and see ....

Righties will lecture us on being responsible for our own actions .. they'll say guns don't kill people, people kill people .. and so do motor vehicles, knives, clubs, fists, elbows, etc. ....

The truth is -- unbalanced crazy people bent on killing will always find a gun to do what they want.

But I don't want to think about all that. I want to think about those poor dead kids at Virginia Tech. TV says it's the largest school shooting rampage in US history.

There was Columbine High School, where 12 students and one teacher were killed .. Nickel Mines, Pa., where five little Amish schoolgirls were shot to death. And up in Montreal, a gunman shot up 20 or so kids at a college there.

No matter how remote these tragedies are, they're starting to feel too close to home.

Our children aren't safe anywhere. What more can we do to protect them?

Let's not forget that a gunman has violated the sanctity of the Virginia Tech's campus once before .. last August on the first day of class. An escaped killer was tracked to a trail near the campus. The campus was locked down, with sharpshooters positioned on campus buildings.

Why didn't they do that this time? This time there wasn't even a public-address announcement after the first burst of gunfire. Students said the first word they received from the university was the email more than two hours after the first killings -- about the same time the gunman struck the second time. An email.

Some students were still wiping the sleep from their eyes on their rush to class. How many of those kids could have been saved if the campus had locked down? After all, the campus police didn't know for sure if a killer was roaming loose.

The university president and the school's police chief said they made the best decisions they could based on the information they had at the time. I don't know if the parents of all those dead and wounded kids are going to accept that.

My feeling is that once this event was triggered, Va Tech administrators were not prepared for it .. they were caught without a plan for this type of assault on the student population.

I want to take time and mourn the senseless loss of all those promising young lives .. each one with dreams and plans .. who were laughing one minute and dead the next. My heart goes out to their families .. and to the survivors and their families. I hope they can feel our nation's collective hug.