The Virgina Tech Grad You Don't Hear About

When you mix the words guns and Virginia Tech grads together in the media, you are mostly likely to hear about Colin Goddard of the Brady Campaign or his movie Living for 32. The other alternative usually is Omar Samaha of MAIG's Fix Gun Checks. If you are in Texas you might also hear about doctoral student John O. Woods and his campaign against guns at the University of Texas-Austin.

I'd like to add another name to that list - Dr. Ken Stanton who earned his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 2010 and who is now a Research Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State. He was on campus in Blacksburg on that day in 2007 when the madman killed 32 students and faculty. He, too, lost a good friend to the madman (whose name I choose not to publicize). However, as Stanton explained to a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for an article on campus carry published yesterday, he took a different lesson from the shootings than did Goodard, Samaha, and Woods.

But Ken Stanton, a Virginia Tech Ph.D. student at the time of the shooting, said he decided to become a research scientist at Colorado State University because he wanted to be on a campus where he could legally carry a gun to class. The Virginia shooting, which killed one of his friends, left him convinced that concealed weapons should be permitted on campuses to allow people to defend themselves.

"It is not a force field, but it just means that if something bad does happen, we can fight back," said Mr. Stanton, an advocate for gun rights on campus. "At Virginia Tech, no one had a chance."

Dr. Stanton decided not to be a victim. I'm sure there are many other Virginia Tech grads who were on campus that fateful day in 2007 who have made the same decision and of whom we will never read about in the mainstream media. That Dr. Stanton was even mentioned is an aberration because when the media has to choose between promoting self-defense or victim-hood, it is almost inevitable that victim-hood wins.