The online weapons dealer who sold one of the guns used in the Virginia Tech shootings visited the campus Thursday, a decision the school's spokesman called "terribly offensive."
Dealer Eric Thompson spoke at the school Thursday night as part of a weeklong demonstration in favor of allowing people to carry concealed weapons at colleges.
"For people who want to arm themselves, there shouldn't be policies in place to stop them," Thompson told about 60 students who attended his talk. There were only a few anti-gun questions posed to Thompson, and none of the protests school officials had prepared for.
I've generally been pro-gun rights, but the more I encounter the boobs and creeps and paranoid goofs in that realm, the more I begin to doubt my assumptions. I can't imagine what sort of halfwit thinks it would be a good idea to have a college campus armed to the teeth with concealed weapons. I think these Walter Mitty types have become drunk on their own save-the-day fantasies, replaying in their mind "what they would have done" had they been packing when Cho went on his rampage.
And that's what is especially disingenuous about Thompson. The argument shouldn't even be about whether everyone should be packing in public, reprehensible as that argument is. The real issue -- and Thompson, now having sold to not one but two unbalanced people who went on killing sprees, is a textbook example -- is background checks and waiting periods, licensing requirements. It's ridiculous that deranged goons like Seung-Hui Cho and Stephen Kazmierczak could arm themselves without even rudimentary checks. Frankly, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.
If Thompson has a conscience, maybe he should find another line of work, perhaps start by volunteering in an urban hospital emergency room for a month, see how much of a hard-on he has for a gun-drunk society then. I'm genuinely surprised that someone didn't go up to him at VA Tech and just clock his ass out of common decency.
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