Nugent: Gun-free zones are recipe for disaster

By Ted Nugent
Special to CNN

Editor's note: Rock guitarist Ted Nugent has sold more than 30 million albums. He's also a gun rights activist and serves on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. His program, "Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild," can be seen on the Outdoor Channel. Read an opposing take on gun control from journalist Tom Plate: Let's lay down our right to bear arms

WACO, Texas (CNN) -- Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.
Anybody see what the evil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.

Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.
A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.
At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.
More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.

My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby's Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden "feel good" politics.

She has since led the charge for concealed weapon upgrade in Texas, where we can now stop evil. Yet, there are still the mindless puppets of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations insisting on continuing the gun-free zone insanity by which innocents are forced into unarmed helplessness. Shame on them. Shame on America. Shame on the anti-gunners all.
No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate restrictions or a "cult of agriculture fertilizer" following the unabashed evil of Timothy McVeigh's heinous crime against America on that fateful day in Oklahoma City. No one faulted kitchen utensils or other hardware of choice after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught drugging, mutilating, raping, murdering and cannibalizing his victims. Nobody wanted "steak knife control" as they autopsied the dead nurses in Chicago, Illinois, as Richard Speck went on trial for mass murder.

Evil is as evil does, and laws disarming guaranteed victims make evil people very, very happy. Shame on us.

Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.

Thirty-two people dead on a U.S. college campus pursuing their American Dream, mowed-down over an extended period of time by a lone, non-American gunman in possession of a firearm on campus in defiance of a zero-tolerance gun ban. Feel better yet? Didn't think so.
Who doesn't get this? Who has the audacity to demand unarmed helplessness? Who likes dead good guys?

I'll tell you who. People who tramp on the Second Amendment, that's who. People who refuse to accept the self-evident truth that free people have the God-given right to keep and bear arms, to defend themselves and their loved ones. People who are so desperate in their drive to control others, so mindless in their denial that they pretend access to gas causes arson, Ryder trucks and fertilizer cause terrorism, water causes drowning, forks and spoons cause obesity, dialing 911 will somehow save your life, and that their greedy clamoring to "feel good" is more important than admitting that armed citizens are much better equipped to stop evil than unarmed, helpless ones.

Pray for the families of victims everywhere, America. Study the methodology of evil. It has a profile, a system, a preferred environment where victims cannot fight back. Embrace the facts, demand upgrade and be certain that your children's school has a better plan than Virginia Tech or Columbine. Eliminate the insanity of gun-free zones, which will never, ever be gun-free zones. They will only be good guy gun-free zones, and that is a recipe for disaster written in blood on the altar of denial. I, for one, refuse to genuflect there.

Cho Killed 30 in 9 Minutes

You've heard the numbers before -- most active-shooter scenarios last between 4 and 17 minutes...

According the the Associated Press, initial police estimations are that the Virginia Tech murderer, Cho, killed 30 of his victims in the engineering within nine minutes.

Nine minutes.

Is nine minutes a short time or a long time? Depends on which side of the equation you are on. If you are a campus cop or local constable, then nine minutes is a flash when you have to respond to a confusing and chaotic situation that may be completely across campus. It's impossible for the SWAT team to suit-up and deploy in that time frame.

It's an eternity if you are one of the students trapped in the engineering building. You hear the loud shots ringing out. All of you look at each other, what is that -- gunshots? You are trapped in a classroom that only has one doorway. Do you flee? Do you hide under a desk? Your mind is reeling, what are you supposed to do?

Some witnesses reported several encounters with Cho as he approached, tried the classroom door handle, and returned to shoot into the classroom door. That entire cycle could have happened in just 20 or 30 seconds. Think about how long it must have felt like during that entire massacre. Cho may have fired anywhere from 50 to 170 shots during that time.

Nine minutes and 30 students lay dead.

We've said it before and we'll say it again -- the cops can't save you during an active-shooter scenario. There's just not enough time.

You have to save yourself.

Virginia Tech Murderer

"Let's also drop the nearly universal moral absurdity of counting murderers among the dead. As of this writing, eight hours after the massacre, I see on all the networks "32 dead." It should read "31 murdered." I do not know when exactly this notion of counting murderers along with their victims began, but it is a moral travesty.

"No news organization would have imagined giving the number of dead at Pearl Harbor so as to include Japanese pilots shot down. But in our age of moral neutrality, all dead are given equal weight -- the terrorist along with his victims; the shooter along with the students.

"Why is the Virginia Tech murderer always referred to as the 'gunman' and not the 'murderer'? Had he stabbed a dozen students to death, would he be the 'knifeman'?

"And why is it always referred to as a 'tragedy'? Virginia Tech wasn't hit by a cyclone. That would be a tragedy. This was evil. Call it that."

Dennis Prager

Wanted: A culture of self-defense

Wanted: A culture of self-defense

By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

There's no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated 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.

Get the whole article here.

Eyewitness Accounts at Virginia Tech

Check out these eyewitness accounts:

"I saw bullets hit people's bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don't know whether from shock or pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured." [The shooter looked like]"just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit. He wore a tan button up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something."

"[I was listening to my iPod when I heard] a big bang. I recognized the sound of gunfire but was mostly confused .... I looked around at the other students on the drillfield, most of them confused like myself....it clicked in everyone's head immediately the sound we heard was a gun shot and everyone started running. I went back to the dorm, locked the door, and turned on the news."

"[We were walking to class when] we heard a couple gunshots and we started running. Everyone was sprinting away. There were literally, like, 300, 400 students just running away from the site. They just told us all to get going, and we started running."

"He (Cho, the murderer)looked, I guess you could say, serious. He didn't look frightened at all, he didn't look angry. Just a straight face. He didn't say a single word the whole time. He didn't say get down, he didn't say anything. He just came in and started shooting."

"I was in class when we heard loud bangs coming from the hallway. The girl sitting by the door peeked out and saw the shooter, so she immediately closed the door. Three other students moved a table and barricaded the door. A few seconds later, the shooter tried to open the door, but my classmates kept it well shut. The shooter shot the door twice, one of which hit the podium in the front of the classroom and the other continued out the window. At this point he reloaded, shot the door again - this shot did not penetrate - and moved on to the other classrooms. Thankfully, nobody in our room was hurt. The shooting continued for several minutes, until the police arrived, and the shooter must have shot at least 80-100 rounds. As we heard the police arrive outside the building, the shooting continued, and the officers eventually came through the building. Even though it seemed to take quite a long time, the timer on my phone seemed to indicate that the whole sequence of events was over in only 25 minutes."

"I was working in my office and then I heard three "bang bang bang" sounds and I looked outside and I saw a bunch of police officers, guns drawn, hiding behind trees."

"We [saw armed police officers running by and we] were like, 'What's going on?' Because this definitely is a quaint town where stuff doesn't really happen. It's pretty boring here."

"[We initially thought the gunshots were construction noise until we heard screaming and police officers with bulletproof vests and machine guns entered our classroom]. "They were telling us to put our hands above our head and if we didn't cooperate and put our hands above our heads they would shoot. I guess they were afraid, like us, like the shooter was going to be among one of us."

"...she was in class and they heard a banging, her teacher opened the door to find out what was going on, and after not seeing anything, closed the door. Not more than two seconds later, a gunman entered her room, to which the class responded by getting underneath the desks and basicly hiding as well as possible from this guy. He then shot at the class somewhere between 8 to 12 times and then left. She said that the gunman, who looked Asian, left and She and another classmate barricaded the door while others attended to the wounded and injured. The gunman came back and tried to get in, but because of the barricade couldn't and proceeded to shoot at the door at hip level, while kate was and the other classmates were at ground level."

Source: Various published accounts

You have to save yourself

According to the Secret Service, most mass shootings -- when not ended by the criminal's suicide -- were ended by citizens intervening. This means the minority of situations were resolved by the police.

You cannot count on the campus cops to help you. Or the city/county/state SWAT team to help you. Even if they can find where the shooter is on a sprawling campus, they won't be able to make it in time.

You have to have the will and the skill to save yourself when no one else can save you.

The heroic actions of the passengers on Flight 93 on 9-11-01 changed our way of thinking about resisting against skyjackers/terrorists.

I contend that the horrific murders at Virginia Tech on 4-16-07 will change the way we think about resisting active shooters at schools.