It’s only natural for remote college towns to be at odds with their surroundings. University students and teachers come from ungodly places. They’re “rich,” and they think they’re superior. But Virginia Tech does everything possible to avoid this conflict, to integrate with and contribute to southwest Virginia. A large portion of the student body is from nearby. In one way these efforts are successful: the public face of the university—its football team—is adored by practically everyone.

But from my freshman year at VT to graduation in 2000, I never felt entirely at ease off campus. I often sensed resentment when people outside Blacksburg would quickly determine that I wasn’t a student of local origin. Unlike most out-of-staters I actually was from the south, but I must not have been the kind of southerner they could relate to. I had a TV accent, and was gay-looking. I did appreciate their countryside and enjoyed it frequently on rock climbing trips, but the sport probably made me seem only more “extreme” to them, not less.

Soon enough, I watched as Virginia’s spite for out-of-state students evolved into an institution. The state legislature imposed a freeze on in-state tuition without increasing state funding. Virginia Tech (like all large colleges) is addicted to construction, improving “technology,” promoting the school, expanding programs, and money in general. Those fiends have no choice but to spend more cash every year, so the in-state freeze-out had to be compensated for with huge out-of-state tuition raises. (Meanwhile, VA was repealing a hated “car tax” that was apparently the worst thing since sodomy.)

Speaking of sodomy, those were the years I was dipping my toe in the waters of coming out—within praying distance from Jerry Falwell. Every year or two I’d hear about some enraged man storming into a Virginia gay bar and killing a bunch of people (whose families would later say were not gay but just visiting). Prudently, I’d take my toe back out. The most incredible of those murderers was Ronald Gay, who killed gays because he was tired of people making fun of his name, an absurdity we hope no gay murderer will ever be able to top.

Onlookers, being aware of its Sic semper tyrannis (death to all tyrants, huzza!) motto and Jeffersonian ideal of liberty won through bloody revolution, might assume that Virginia has a restrained police force. This is not the case. Perhaps in response to a population constantly threatening to revolt, it’s hard to go anywhere in the state without feeling the presence of the law. Its low speed limits get a double-take from those brought up in similarly uninhabited regions, as do the paved and immaculately maintained patrol car hideouts you encounter every few miles. On climbing trips to West Virginia we always looked forward to the moment we could cross the border and stop fretting about accidentally going over 45 mph.

I did get a speeding ticket on one such trip, and was forced to exert my sacred constitutional rights (Sic semper tyrannis!) when the officer asked to search my car for no reason. In fact he even had a “drug dog” with him, which he insisted on trotting around the car. Because drugs are such a problem in southwest Virginia! (This was before the whole countrified country apparently became meth addicts/entrepreneurs.)

And then there was the time a friend and I thought it would be fun to practice driving and spinning out my Sentra in a recent snowfall. It was on a deserted street late at night, and everything was fine until some cops who’d seen my headlights from a distance drove over in an SUV. I naively explained what we were doing and was rewarded with a suspended license. Oh and let’s not forget when us boys got caught drinking beers at the age of 20 years and 10 months—only had to do community service for that subversive act! My last semester at school I got two speeding tickets in one month, at night, on a campus street with a limit of -5 mph, or something. After that I was ready to empty my bank account and get the hell out of there.

That sequence paints me as a reckless, thrill-seeking collegiate bad boy, which is complete nonsense. I’ve always been a careful person, and have never caused a car accident or any harm to anyone. My inexperienced driving years were spent in Georgia, but you wouldn’t guess it by comparing my clean record there to the rap sheet in Virginia. That beat down was almost worth it, as a lesson in automobile dependence as a channel for governmental control and intrusion into citizens’ daily lives. Living car-free now in New York, I still can’t get over how liberating it is to not have to “look out for police” because you aren’t breaking widely broken laws every day. You don’t even have to display an identification plate when you leave the house. Sic se… whatever.

My freshman year dorm room 5068 West A.J. after some mischief directed at my loner, immigrant, raised-in-the-U.S.A. roommate.

Gun loving Virginia Tech grads and windbags around the country have suggested that armed students might have stopped or slowed Monday’s slaughter. They’ve brought up a “similar” incident where a gunman killed three people in an academic building, then left and was stopped outside by two guys who’d retrieved guns from their cars. That is so eerily similar!—except for the part where the assailant left the building after killing three people.

Given that even handgun permit holders would rather leave their weapons in cars when going to class, the “similar” example (which also happened, hmm, in Virginia) reinforces the improbability of an armed samaritan helping out at Norris. The doors were chained shut, Cho was a homicidal badass in a bullet-proof vest, and even in the unlikely event that a good-guy student would have had a pistol concealed under his athletic outerwear if permitted, the odds are still against him being able to—for the first time in his life—aim it at another human’s head and pull the trigger before being shot himself.

Gun advocates can get some rhetorical mileage from the principle that the victims should have a chance, no matter how slim, to fight back. Everyone should have a chance! I can even agree that a campus “gun ban” is stupid (though not nearly as stupid as a state law to ban the ban). A gun-free zone is an empty gesture, like the call boxes scattered across every campus that can afford them, to reassure fretful parents that their adult children will survive outside their grasp. A special gun ban for colleges is patently useless and, like drinking laws, insulting to the legal adults we (incorrectly) call minors every second they aren’t voting or being drafted for war.

So there. Gun rights advocates are right: a university cannot hope to regulate weapons—but that doesn’t mean that no one can. The entities with the power and responsibility to control deadly weapons are state and federal governments. We should all be hoping to abolish gun bans in American schools when we have made guns as irrelevant to them as they are to schools in other wealthy countries.

And just as much as the law (or U.S. Constitution, depending on whom you talk to) needs fixing, glorified gun culture has got to go. Not virtual gun culture, not movie gun culture, I mean real gun culture. Like the uncle who has a hand-painted box full of assault rifles in a shed out back, solemnly explained by arguments relevant only to the Revolutionary War. (Good luck against those heat-beaming weapons, unc!) Gun glory accomplishes nothing, and is inevitably adopted by the dangerous few along with the harmless many. When a xenophobic gun culture surrounds a child but won’t accept him because he’s from somewhere else, for example, he might try ever harder to embrace it, to outdo even the extremists in a fruitless bid for acceptance. He could just go nuts. It could happen!

Virginia is a disappointment. It is not poor. It is not Mississippi or Alabama. It has great wealth and historical stature. Yet compared to even the Georgia I’ve given up to Newt Gingrich, it is obstinately backward. It is the state whose senator proudly disregards gun laws in the nation’s capital. It is the state whose rambunctious citizenry eggs on an agressive police force instead of reining it in democratically. It is the least welcoming place I’ve lived, and I’ve lived in France so that’s saying something. Until Virginia finds a calmer path to modernity, parents living outside the Dominion would be wise to keep out their young as well.