“Gun-free zone” policies which disarm everyone (except the perpetrators) facilitate murder rather than precluding it.
Last month marked one year since the massacre at Virginia Tech by mentally-disturbed student Seung-Hui Cho. In April, the university offered anguished parents a settlement of $100,000 per murdered child.
There are three things wrong with this: First, even in financial terms, it is hopelessly inadequate to redress the deaths of these talented young people.
Second, it does nothing to correct the useless, symbolic policy which facilitated their deaths.
Third, if you don’t think that the policy is wrong,Virginia Tech has no liability for the deaths it facilitated.
That policy is the “gun-free zone.” Even if the victims had possessed permits to carry a gun, Virginia Tech forbade them to have that means of self-defense while on campus. This ensured that only the killer (who, of course, violated the “gun-free zone” policy just as he violated the laws against murder) and uniformed police would have guns. Obviously the university could not afford to station officers in every lecture hall.
Yet nothing less would substitute for the victims themselves having had the power to stop the massacre.
Israel has a better alternative. Decades ago, Palestinian terrorism was being directed at schools. Yasser Arafat calculated that small children can’t shoot back, and that killing them was the best way to terrify parents into fleeing Israel.
Israel’s response?
They armed schoolteachers and school bus drivers. Now, even suicide terrorists don’t attack schools — lest they be shot down before they can reach their helpless victims.
Thousands of civilians are armed all across Israel, as the following incidents illustrate:
* Shavei Shomron — A Palestinian shot into a kindergarten, but did not dare to enter. Next he attacked neighboring buildings, where he was killed by a civilian gun owner.
* Bethlehem — A terrorist threw one bomb into a supermarket, but was prevented from throwing another when a shopper shot him in the head with a gun from her purse.
* Tel Aviv — William Hazan, his wife, and some friends were eating in a restaurant when a terrorist began machine-gunning the establishment. Ducking under a table, Hazan killed him with a pistol he had carried for years.
Such incidents are numerous not only in Israel but in the U.S. as well. Last December, a woman parishioner shot and killed a gunman who had just slaughtered four unarmed people in a crowded Colorado church complex.
Three separate school massacres have been ended when good citizens violated the schools’ “gun-free zone” policies by rushing to their cars for guns with which they were then able to arrest the perpetrators.
But for those policies, they might have been carrying their guns, and the massacres could have been ended earlier — and with fewer deaths.
Since 1980, the majority of states have adopted laws under which five million law-abiding responsible adults have gun-carry permits.
Contrary to dire predictions, permit-holders have not abused the privilege — and murders and other violent crimes have been sharply reduced.
Everyone opposes violent crime (except the perpetrators). “Gun-free zone” policies which disarm everyone (except the perpetrators) facilitate murder rather than precluding it.
Universities and businesses who facilitate murder by imposing such empty symbolism should be held strictly liable for the killings those policies facilitate.
Originally publihsed in the Alexandria Daily Town Talk (LA), The Mountain Mail (CO), and the Crookston Daily Times (MN). Republished with permission of the Indenpendent Institute.
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Read more articles by Don B. Kates, Jr.
A good article. It is based on common sense and tells us what is obvious except to terminally brain dead. Which brings us to the left and their minions.
Lets start with the minions who think emotionally. Common sense and reasoning hold no sway with them. Emotion blots all logical reasoning and analysis of the problem. They are living in, or expecting, an ideal world that simply doesn't exist. Unfortunately you can't convince them of that since they can't see the forest because those damn trees are in the way.
Then we have hard core leftists. They, too, are looking for the ideal world but they believe they alone can make it.
They are fanatical about this and brook no opposition.
For the left there is only one way: their's. It's their way or else! To them any opposition is not only not tolerated but is to be ruthlessly surpressed. And this brings us to the point of the anti-gun saga.
Not allowing law abiding citizens to be armed reduces the citizen to a government subject. This is exactly what the left wants. Subjects are mere vessels of the state, to be used as the state wishes like game pieces. The state of course is the leftist elites who see themselves as the sole directors of society and individual lives.
Render the citizen defenseless and he is totally at the mercy, whims and caprice of the government. In other words he has become a mere serf to serve the needs and desires of the state elites and no more.
That's the bottom line and that is object of the anti-gun crowd with the help of emotionally based idiots.
Comment by NHGrouch | May 3, 2008
NHGrouch,
You've neglected at least one group in your condemnation of the gun-control crowd – power elitists (aka, statist politicians). These are, unarguably, the most threatening actors in this whole charade. The useful idiots (liberal kool-aid drinkers and hard-left socialists) only provide the pretext, but it is statist politicians who exploit the fear of guns to grow their own power; and it is they who have power to confiscate our guns, the better to keep us in line. Now, we can accuse leftist politicians specifically of this (and they have led the charge), but so-called conservative politicians are just as guilty of pandering to gun-control advocates, funding studies aimed at proving the need, introducing legislation, supporting calls for stricter penalties, etc. At best, they can be said to have been less aggressive in the pursuit of it. Very few have actively sought to halt the stampede.
Most politicians are basically lawyers with a lawyer’s opinion it is their job to safeguard society. Most politicians, Democrat and Republican, take the view security is the state's job; and that a ‘surfeit’ of guns must be brought under control as dangerous to both security and stability. The idea that safety (as opposed to security) is better served when private citizens are armed for their own protection is as anathema to the control-freak politician as is Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to the managed-economy socialist.
Now, the ‘conservative’ politician suffers from a deep-seated ideological dilemma with regard to gun-control that liberal-politicians manage to evade. He/she still believes in the Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights as articles of faith; and has sold himself to conservative constituencies on pledges of that faith. For him, there is no getting around the 2nd Amendmen, at least to the degree some gun ownership must be preserved. So, unlike the liberal pol, he is looking for a formula whereby he can control guns and strengthen the state’s role, yet without betraying principle or loosing face; hence, all the dancing around the ‘well-regulated militia’ phrase. For many of these, gun ownership for 'sport' provides an answer.
Every politician knows, perfectly well, the 2nd Amendment is only incidentally about ‘militia’ and that its main thrust is the people in their capacity to act against a rogue government (i.e., the politicians). Beyond that, it recognizes the inherent right of self-protection, which no government can abrogate. In other words, the 2nd Amendment was not written to ‘grant’ us a right of self-defense for the simple reason the founders understood it was not theirs to give. All they could do was to promise the new government would not usurp that right (nor our capacity to resist) through a confiscation of arms. So, although the 2nd Amendment does not state this right as its foundation, the right exists and trumps all other considerations and legalisms.
Comment by Bob Stapler | May 4, 2008
Bob you make a point. But don't confuse Conservative with Republican. There are many "Republicans" who should be either in the Democrat or Socialist party. Don't get confused with what they say at election time as opposed to how they vote.
Another point to bear in mind is that most politicians, assuming they were honest in first place, are corrupted by office. As Thomas Acton said: Power corrupts.
It is this latter group I believe you are referring to.
When it comes to political office Conservatives are few and far between unlike the public in general. I have long said, When looking for the enemy look no further than your own government.
Comment by NHGrouch | May 5, 2008