Columbine Revisited

We don't know enough about the awful slaughter at Virginia Tech to make any intelligent conclusions. At this point we don't even know the name of the murderer. Regardless of this, the left is already calling for a new round of gun control.

Since we don't know much about Virginia Tech, I'm going to review the last major school shooting which happened eight years ago at Columbine.

Most people haven't bothered to read the sheriff's final report report on the tragedy. I have and what transpired is not what was planned.

The two killers wanted to go out with a big splash, taking as many people as possible with them. Their original plan was to hijack an airplane and crash it into a tall building (and this was years before 9/11/2001). They gave up on this as impractical and decided to blow up their school instead.

They built a bomb out of a propane tank and hid it in the cafeteria. They carefully timed lunch periods in order to figure out when the room would have the most people in it - over 1,000. The library was on the next floor and the bomb was likely to cave in the ceiling, killing or injuring people there, also.

They set their bomb and waited. They planned on killing as many survivors as they could with their guns and pipe bombs. They even set off a bomb on the other side of town in order to lure the police away.

Fortunately, their bomb failed to go off. After giving it some extra time, they decided to trigger it manually. This is when they entered the school and killed people they encountered. They barricaded themselves in the cafeteria and tried to set off the bomb. Failing that, they finally killed themselves. While the final result was terrible, what they had planned was 100 times worse.

The lesson here is that these guys wanted to kill themselves and as many others as possible. Guns were not their primary weapon.

The only similarity I can see with Virginia Tech is a marbid determination to kill people before dying. While this killer depended on guns, without them he might have resorted to bombs or other lethal weapons.