Mass murderer Used Green Card as ID to Purchase Guns Should That Have Been Legal?
From Jennifer & Peter Wipf,
Originally published April 20, 2007
On Monday, a Virginia Tech student, Cho Seung-hui, carried out his insidious plot to commit mass murder. And that he did.
Seung-hui emigrated from South Korea with his family in 1992, and he used his green card as ID to purchase the two guns he used to systematically wipe out 32 teachers and students, injuring another 12. People are shocked and angry that a non-citizen was cleared to purchase two lethal weapons using his driver’s license and green card. But does Seung-hui’s immigration status have anything to do with this tragic event? We don’t think so. Not that racial or economic profiling should be part of it, but based purely on crime statistics, a suburban-raised Asian-American immigrant attending a prestigious college is probably about 99.9 percent less likely to commit an act of violence than the typical American-citizen is. Seung-hui came to the States 15 years ago, and was eligible to become a citizen just five years after receiving his green card. So, his legal status was just a technicality. He could easily have been a citizen.
Of course, many people are thinking about terror threats and the fact that terrorists might be able to purchase weapons in the United States. Or drug dealers. Unfortunately though, career criminals have their own underground means of getting weapons. Terrorists don’t just walk into the local gun shop to buy a hand pistol. Secondly, immigrants are more likely to have been screened and examined by the government than the average citizen is; a better chance of being “on the radar” of the FBI, and therefore more likely to be rejected when trying to get a weapon legally.
The right to bear arms is a constitutional right afforded to U.S. citizens, and Seung-hui was not a citizen. In this one case, disallowing a green card holder from purchasing weapons might possibly have saved lives, although a determined killer will almost always find a way. Gun advocates, though, would argue that green card holders have the right to hunt for food, and to protect themselves and their families from, say, a mass gunman. Imagine if the gunman had been a citizen, and some law-abiding green card holder with a gun had shot him down at the onset of his rampage. No one would be questioning the law then.
I hate hunting, and guns terrify me, although I’m not convinced that a 100 percent ban would be the answer. Still, the laws need to be dramatically stricter. A history of severe mental health issues should certainly be on the disqualifying list before anyone even thinks about immigration status.
