BLACKSBURG, Va. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- After children reported seeing a man walking school grounds with a possible firearm, Virginia Tech on Thursday activated the longest, most extensive lockdown and campus-wide search since the 2007 massacre that left 33 people dead. The university’s enhanced emergency notification system worked flawlessly, immediately alerting over 45,000 subscribers via phone and text messages. Although the school banned weapons from its campus years prior to the 2007 incident, the state of Virginia still allows concealed handguns to be carried everywhere, including churches, day cares, Obama rallies and public schools. State officials said that the state’s progressive gun ownership policy, not Virginia Tech’s robust notification system, thwarted the gunman, who was “too intimidated to act.”

Despite the horror of facing another bloodbath on a U.S. campus, which the school tried to prevent with what local politicians called a “paranoid and counter-intuitive” gun ban, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli made the most important argument on behalf of American freedoms and rights this afternoon, clarifying that state law takes precedence over Virginia Tech’s “bureaucratic and silly” policies. Therefore, those with permits may continue to legally carry handguns on campus, regardless of what effete school administrators have to say.

After hours of interviewing passersby, all of whom were packing loaded guns, police abandoned their search for a suspect, chalking the misunderstanding up to a gun owner’s careless flaunting of his piece.

“That’s why we encourage concealed carrying; it’s less likely to stir up nonsense like this,” said one Virginia lawmaker. “More crucially, I think this situation represents a victory in support of our constitutional rights. Because criminals know that everyone on campus has a loaded Glock stuffed in a purse or backpack, you’re not going to see any more funny business like that mess four years ago. It’s the best deterrent, and had the school been less insistent on trying to subvert state law back in ‘07, I think that could’ve been avoided too.”

(c) 2011. All stories are works of satire and parody.