Yes, there is a Constitutional angle on the sad events at Virginia Tech. Our Founding Fathers understood that the basic right to self-defense had to be protected. The Second Amendment is one statement of that. As a strong supporter of the right to bear arms, it was refreshing to see Alan Keyes's take on the incident in Virginia:
Excerpt from Defending ourselves: The constitutional strategy
Lessons from Virginia Tech shootings
Alan Keyes, 4-19-07
Right now, the American people are understandably caught up in the emotional reaction to the horrifying events at Virginia Tech University. Leftist pols and media manipulators around the country and the world fanatically clamor that we should round up the usual "suspects" — that is, the guns responsible for all this violence. They want to distract us from the issues of human responsibility that are at its core. The responsibility of the killer. The responsibility of the police and university officials. The responsibility of gun-ban advocates whose success at Virginia Tech made certain that no one in Norris Hall was armed to interrupt the killer's methodical spree by forcing him to defend himself, or slow down in fear of his own life....
Far from suggesting that we should restrict or ban possession of firearms, the Virginia Tech killing spree illustrates two points often made by supporters of the Second Amendment: 1) Disarming the population leads to a higher death toll from violence. 2) The police cannot or will not protect people from deadly assault. They are organized mainly to enforce the law, not to protect our persons from harm....
Given the very real likelihood of terrorist infiltration and action, nothing we do by law can eliminate the gunmen. They will always be a threat. Instead of pretending to do what we can never achieve, we should concentrate on doing what is certainly within our power. We can make sure that our population is enriched with a leaven of defenders, so that no gunmen, lone or otherwise, could ever again act with the calm assurance that he is in no danger from his intended victims....
Our Constitution already provides the concept we need to achieve this strategic objective — the militia. In its proper constitutional sense, the term means all the able-bodied people who can be trained and disciplined to act in the community's defense when it's attacked. Since it encompasses every able-bodied person, it does not refer to those — such as the police, the military, or even the National Guard — who formally compose the official defense forces of the nation. Every citizen able and willing to act in an emergency becomes a potential defender against attacks aimed at the general population....
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