A Loaded Issue (VaTech-guns) .....by Marie Cocco for Truthdig

[marmar]

A Loaded Issue


Posted on May 22, 2007
By Marie Cocco

ANNANDALE, Va.—The question hovered around the suburban government center, though it was never directly asked. There was no need.

It was spoken in the emblems that both sides carried. The members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League had their handguns; some sported one on each hip. The parents of the murdered Virginia Tech students brought their children’s pictures; the cameras had captured the energy that radiated from their smiles.

What is a community? How does it reconcile what seems unreconcilable?

“This is enough to tell you why I’m here,” said Joe Samaha, holding a poster-sized photo of his daughter, Reema, who was among those murdered in last month’s campus massacre.

She was in the same French class as Mary Read, whose parents, Peter and Cathy, stood alongside Samaha as the members of the gun-rights group filed into the community room of the Mason District Government Center, a complex that includes a police station. The league had come to celebrate its success in getting the Virginia Legislature to crack down not on guns, but on New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg—because the mayor used private undercover agents to expose suspicious sales after the city traced guns used in New York crimes to dealers in Virginia.

...(snip)...

Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, had been a law-abiding citizen. He was able to purchase his arsenal because an order for his involuntary mental health treatment wasn’t in the database used for background checks. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has ordered that such reports be entered. But there is no way to track the millions of mentally disturbed individuals who have never received treatment—voluntary or not—and so are law-abiding citizens who can become purchasers of guns.

“There’s a right to bear arms,” Cathy Read said softly. “There’s a right to go to class and be safe and to live. Mary had a right to do that.” ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070522_a_loaded_issue/