Newt Gingrich says students at Virginia Tech should have been packing heat, then says they shouldn't have

In his best John McCain imitation, disgraced former House Speaker, FOX News analyst and potential GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went on ABC's This Week morning to talk about the Virginia Tech massacre. Gingrich, like many far-right conservatives, suggested that the solution to massacres like Virginia Tech is to have all the students and their teachers packing heat.

Apparently having 30 (or 300, depending on the lecture) hormone-drenched kids, with next to no experience aiming a gun, firing weapons at each other simultaneously, and during a high-stakes emotional crises, in class is a good thing. Then again, watch the clip below and you'll see how Gingrich first says that the fact that VA Tech is a "gun-free zone" led to the mass death because students and teachers couldn't take each other out with their concealed weapons. But then, oddly, and very McCain like, at the end of the clip note how Gingrich does a 180 and says it would be okay for schools to make themselves gun-free zones. Uh, so the problem is that schools are gun-free zones and Gingrich's solution is to pass laws letting schools be gun-free zones.

Methinks someone is still trying to convince the soccer moms that he's not the far-right extremist he really is. But to so blatantly contradict himself in the same sentence - perhaps I should be comparing Gingrich not to McCain but to Mitt "I was for gays, gun control, abortion, and the environment before I was against them" Romney.

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