The Republicans can't manage student visas, either.

According to Sara over at the Next Hurrah, the shooter at Virginia Tech was a Chinese immigrant who came to the U.S. on a student visa but was not enrolled in any school. He was apparently upset by a girl in the dorm he first went into. His guns were black market weapons with the serial numbers removed.

Back during the Clinton era, the failure to control individuals in the U.S. on student visas was recognized as a major problem, and legislation was initiated to maintain control of individuals here on student visas. The Republicans in Congress killed it. Then after 9/11 the Republicans attempted to resurrect the legislation, but the program was transferred from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security, where it got lost in the shuffle.
his was not an illegal immigrant. This was a student on a legal student visa which the Republican government did not want to control, then was not competent to control when 9/11 proved that such control was needed.

The problem here was not illegal immigration, or even legal immigration. It was not a problem of gun control. It was a problem, like the response to Katrina/Rita, of total failure of the corrupt and incompetent Republican Party to provide the effective government they promised when they were elected.

Why?

Largely because the Republicans have kowtowed to Grover Norquist and his effort to destroy effective government, especially since Reagan was elected in 1980.

Thirty-two deaths were directly the responsibility of that one foreign individual. But the responsibility for stopping him from killing lies on the shoulders of Grover Norquist and his ilk in the Republican Party.

Just watch them all try to blame someone else now. I'm sure they have already started.

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Addendum 9:32 AM
Turns out that the killer (or one of the killers - this apparently hasn't been determined yet)was a student on a legal student visa. That contradicts the information I had earlier. So visa control could not have prevented this tragedy.

However, visa control remains a problem, and it is more of a problem than it would have been had the Republicans not stymied the Clinton effort to improve it, and then after 9/11 when even the Republicans realized student visas were a problem they have still screwed up resolving the issue.

I am old enough to remember when Charles Whitman went up to the top of the Tower of Texas in 1966 and killed at last 14 people. This is worse only in the numbers of people killed and wounded.

How long do we wait for Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and/or several of the prominent Republican politicians to blame the Democrats (or Liberals or Secular Humanists or the big one - "Leftists") for this tragedy in Virginia. Watch for it. It's coming.

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I was too late. It has already come.
From Answers in Genesis: The problem is Atheism.

Sadly, when it comes to what people would call “natural evil” (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.), I’ve heard many Christian leaders on television make statements such as: “We don’t know why such things occur—we just have to have faith—and we just have to trust God.” When it comes to “moral evil,’’ such as a person shooting fellow human beings, I’m sure most of these leaders would say that it was because of sin. However, if really pushed, many (just like the secular world), would not take all of Genesis 1–11 as literal history.

There’s an inconsistency here in taking Genesis literally to accept sin to explain moral evil, such as the shootings at Virginia Tech, but not taking Genesis literally in their acceptance of millions of years of “natural evil” before man (e.g., death, violence, catastrophe, and extinction of animals). [Snip]

You see, when we accept Genesis as it was meant to be taken—as literal history—then we understand that death, disease, and violence are intrusions into this world, and that they occurred after Adam was created. Paul tells us in Romans 8:19–23 that the whole of the creation is groaning because of sin. [Snip]

We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals—and humans—arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as “cheap.”

I’m not at all saying that the person who committed these murders at Virginia Tech was driven by a belief in millions of years or evolution. I don’t know why this person did what he did, except the obvious: that it was a result of sin. However, when we see such death and violence, it is a reminder to us that without God’s Word (and the literal history in Genesis 1–11), people will not understand why such things happen.

As long as people like this person take the Bible as literal truth in history and science, then we will never know either how or why events like the shooting at Virginia Tech occur. And as a person who is aware of several race riots that occurred in East Texas in the late 50's and early 60's that never appeared even in the local papers or any other media, I find that this man's belief that things are getting worse is based on nothing more than just hot air.