I know I’m a few days late, but may I please be the one who gets to pry the gun from his cold, dead hands?

Forgive me if I decline to mourn last weekend’s passing of Charlton Heston. He was an occasionally decent, often ridiculous and altogether overrated actor. He marched with Dr. King and he headed the Screen Actors Guild, but then he wound up a despicable figure after marching the NRA into Denver for a national convention not a month after the Columbine shootings. Still, as I pondered this column’s publication date, which arrives about midway between the moment he shuffled off this moral coil and a certain upcoming, unhappy anniversary, I couldn’t help but mentally morph Heston’s chiseled visage into the face of this guy:

I’ll have much more to say next week about Seung-Hui Cho’s visitation of evil upon my hometown of Blacksburg, Va., last April 16. For now, I’ll say one thing about him: Without the Walther P-22 semiautomatic he bought over the Internet in February 2007; without the Glock 19 semiautomatic he casually picked up at a Roanoke gun dealer a month later (so much for the efficacy of Virginia’s one-a-month law); and without those 17 magazines of bullets (many of them hollow-point to allow for extra carnage)…

…without all that weaponry, Cho would have been just another loony toon hanging around the Virginia Tech dorms, and 32 innocent students and faculty would still be alive today.

Just as 6-year-old Chalris Fleming Jr. of Memphis would still be with us had he and a little friend not stumbled upon a loaded revolver while playing in an apartment bedroom last month. Instead, he became one of the nearly 1,000 Americans who will be killed accidentally by a firearm this year.

Here come the usual excuses: But Cho was insane, and the various authorities didn’t share information that might have turned up in a background check… and the owner of that revolver in Memphis (a 19-year-old who was in the next room at the time of the accident) should have put a lock on it, or at least left it unloaded… and anyway, more kids drown every year than are killed by firearms, so why don’t we ban swimming pools?… guns don’t kill people, people kill people…

And my new favorite: …if only some of those Tech students had been packing heat, too, one of them could have taken Cho out before he did so much damage. (more…)