Illinois university shooting

From The New York Times:

DeKALB, Ill. — With minutes left in a class in ocean sciences at Northern Illinois University on Thursday afternoon, a tall skinny man dressed all in black stepped out from behind a curtain on the stage of the lecture hall, said nothing, and opened fire with a shotgun, the authorities and witnesses said.

The man shot again and again, witnesses said, perhaps 20 times or more. Students in the large lecture hall, stunned and screaming, dropped to the floor. They crouched behind anything they could find, even an overhead projector. They scattered, the blood of victims spattering, some said, on those who escaped injury.

Five people, all of them students, were killed, John G. Peters, the president of Northern Illinois University, said at a news conference late Thursday evening. Sixteen others were wounded, two of them critically, Mr. Peters said. Hospital officials said several of the students had been shot in the head. One of the injured has since been reported to have died.

The gunman, whom the authorities did not identify, also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mr. Peters said. The gunman, he said, had been a graduate student in sociology at the university in 2007, but was no longer enrolled here. Records suggested that the man, who had more recently attended a different state school, had no previous police contact, the authorities said.

Police officers from the campus, which sits in a snow-covered community 65 miles due west of Chicago, said three weapons had been found with the man’s body: two handguns, including a Glock, and the shotgun. The man’s body was found on the lecture hall stage, the police said. He had ammunition left over.

If the shooter was on a stage and the victims were down in the audience seats there was much less chance of rushing him than there would have been in a normal classroom. The only hope for the students other than crawling to a door or a campus cop happening by would have been if one of them had defied the law against carrying a concealed firearm into class that day.

Whenever you mention letting students and staff at a college carry concealed on campus the usual response from left-wing student spokesmen is that this would destroy the educational experience. When you strip away all the BS what is left between the lines is something like this.

"We students are far too fond of getting blind drunk or stoned on the latest fad drug to be trusted with firearms."

To which I say, if you're that irresponsible you should not be allowed to live outside of parental supervision. Let colleges do random testing to weed out the stoners and the drunks and give the rest of the students access to the most effective tools for self defense.

Stop making colleges disarmed victim zones and you'll stop having the campus shooting sprees. After all when was the last time you heard of someone walking into a police station and opening fire (outside of a Terminator movie)?