Can You Legislate Against Evil?

What would have prevented tragedy at Virginia Tech?

I've been reticent to comment on the Virgina Tech horror. It's a time for families to grieve, bury their dead and heal the wounds of the injured.

However, it's regrettable that the incident has become immediately politicized by people with a gun control agenda.

Virginia Tech already had a strict no gun policy in place, only recently penalizing a student with a permit to carry a concealed weapon on campus. Perhaps if that licensed individual had been allowed to carry a firearm Monday's tragedy would have been muted.

But that example points up the fact that no law can legislate against evil intentions. We also have laws against using automobiles in a conscious effort to injure or kill people but that didn't stop Iranian born Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who attacked students at the University of North Carolina last year by driving an SUV into a crowd on campus.

As some have pointed out, it would make as much sense to ban foreign students as it would to ban guns. Millions of guns are in the hands of law abiding citizens and those persons don't go on killing sprees.

I realize in the haze of thinking where one can only see shades of gray use of the word "evil" is about as black and white as you can get. But is it not EVIL to go on a killing spree?

Any attempt to legislate on moral grounds is shot down by the hazy gray thinkers, the same folks who would now impose restrictions on the very same law abiding gun owners who might have put a stop to this nightmare at Virginia Tech.

What's clear is that at most academic institutions, what is lacking is not gun control, but any effective form of moral guidance, religious or otherwise, which forms a bulwark against evil intentions and PREVENTS such shocking and horrible events from occurring.

And perhaps that is an issue which needs to be addressed in the larger community as well. What a shame the same folks posturing on gun control will refuse to permit that debate!

For now, it is a time for Virginia Tech and the nation to mourn and a time to heal. But in the days ahead, let us not shrink from an honest debate on the causes of this evil act and what would really have prevented this nightmare.

Our hearts, our thoughts and our prayers are with you Virginia Tech. We remain as always "One nation, under God Indivisible."