George,

"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is the mantra of the National Rifle Association.

At 7 AM yesterday morning a twenty three year old South Korean man was, by all appearances, a law abiding student at Virginia Tech....at 7:15 AM, he became an outlaw, he used a gun to murder a young man and woman.

Some two hours later, using the same gun, he murdered twenty eight students and two professors before taking his own life.

Not only did he become an outlaw, he became a terrorist on the level of the suicide bombers in Iraq.

The irony in this is, he probably would not have been allowed to buy or own a semi-automatic 9 mm handgun in his native country!

The NRA spin and propaganda machine has already swung into action, and any politician with the temerity to question the senselessness of 35,000 gun deaths in the USA annually, will come in for a lesson in vindictiveness and smearing of monumental proportion.

When one nation with senseless, permissive gun laws has more gun deaths than the rest of the nations of the world, combined, a reasonable human being must question cause and effect.

Looking for blame at Virginia Tech is really an obfuscation of the real culprit, the easy availability of a hand gun! A device meant to kill other human beings...period!

And, a Congress, all too willing to surrender our security and safety to the crackpot leadership of the the NRA.

Harry Tenney (Electronic mail, April 17, 2007)