I remember my first day of college biology class.  My professor, Doctor Claflin, said something about the scientific method that I shall never forget.  When publishing results from your experiments and your research, he said to always be respectful of the inquisitive nature of the scientific method.

He used to say of this process…:

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

And it was from that that I learned my respect for the rigorous inquiry of the Scentific Method.

(more…)

I had a conversation with AVERY LIBRELLE.  Avery is an associate professor of Victimization Studies at Saint Thomas, and still votes for Paul Wellstone every election.

LIBRELLE: So are you gun nuts really demanding that we arm all teachers?

ME: Well, no.  Some conservatives merely want to allow teachers that qualify for carry permits – pass the background checks, take the training and so on – that wish to, to bring their legally-purchased firearms to school.  Concealed, anonymous, no publicity.

LIBRELLE: That’s just madness.  That just adds more guns to the situation.

ME: Well, yeah.  Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.  Which, the past 25 years of experience have shown, is at worst neutral and very likely a good thing, and which current police doctrine shows is the best way to deal with mass shooting situations.

LIBRELLE: What?  That’s insane!  Teachers are trained to teach!  It’ll take years to train them to be soldiers!

ME: Soldiers?  Huh?  You don’t have to be a “soldier” to defend yourself.  When a regular citizen is faced with a life-or-death situation, it’s usually pretty cut and dried; there is someone right in front of you providing an immediate threat of death or great bodily harm to you or the people around you.  You pull a gun, you point, you shoot.

LIBRELLE:  That’s so not how it works.

ME: Well, yeah.  It is.  The record is full of 14 year old kids and septuagenarians and elderly women and pregnant women, teenage single moms and just plain folks successfully defending themselves against violent – indeed, by definition, lethal – crime.

LIBRELLE:  Well, mass shooters are different.  They are white, young, male, and very, very smart.  They plan their shootings out to a “T”.  There is no way the regular citizen can stand up to them!  Only the police can deal with freaks like this.

ME:  Again, Avery, no.  For starters, cops have their own problems; the policeman at Columbine wasn’t able to stop Klebold and Harris, although someone should tell David Gregory that the cop likely saved quite a few lives – and the SWAT team didn’t go into the building at all until hours after everyone including Klebold and Harris were dead.  After that, cops changed their tactics, and we’ll come back to that.

In the meantime, we have several instances of armed citizens stopping mass-shooters in mid-shooting, including the guy in Portland Oregon two weeks ago, and Jeanne Assam in Colorado Springs a few years back.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  Now I know you’re parroting NRA talking points!  Both of those shooters killed themselves!   The armed civilian Rambo-wannabees didn’t kill them!

ME:  Now, hang on, Avery.  No need to be so bloodthirsty.  The goal isn’t necessarily to get a notch on one’s handgrip.  It’s to end the shooting.

And that brings us to police tactics.  Guess what they train police to do about mass shooters these days?  Not wait for the SWAT team. but go in and get after the shooter as fast as they can – because since mass shooters do tend to be intelligent, but narcissistic and disturbed and and to live in fantasy worlds, once you disrupt the fantasy and derail the plan, they do tend to stop, re-assess, panic and kill themselves.  The goal is to cause that derailing when the massacre has just started, rather than when they’re standing up to their waists in dead bodies and hearing the sirens coming, like Harris and Klebold and Seung-Hui Cho and Jeffrey Weise.  And depending on the killer, that disruption can be pretty minor; in Portland last December 11, Nick Meli didn’t have to fire so much as a shot to get the Clackamas Mall shooter to slink away into a store and polish himself off.   These people are narcissists and cowards; once their master plan gets off the rails, they almost always either kill themselves or, like the Aurora shooter, give up.

LIBRELLE:  But the Brady Organization says arming teachers would only make things worse.

ME:  Oh, you mean that if a teacher had shot back at Lanza, things might have gotten bad?

LIBRELLE:  Well, yeah…that’s what Brady says!  Anyway – Teachers are not soldiers.  They spend their careers mastering pedagogy and nurturing, not soldiers!

ME:  Wait – do you think the guy in Portland trained his whole life to get ready for that moment in that mall?  Don’t be absurd! You’ll labor in vain to find a single civilian who shoots, successfully, in self-defense, that spent an entire working career preparing for the moment.  But go ahead and try!

But let’s just say for argument’s sake that you’re right; that by the nature of a teacher’s job, they should never, ever be armed, even if their states of residence have duly issued them carry permits for which they’re qualified.  That’s what we’re saying, right?

LIBRELLE:  Yes.

ME:  Even if they have a carry permit, which according to nationwide statistics means they’re a couple of orders of magnitude more trustworthy with firearms than the general public?

LIBRELLE:  Of course.  No armed teachers.  It’s just not right!

ME:  Because being gentle-bred, lotus-eating teachers, the whole subject of killing in self-defense is beyond them?

LIBRELLE:  No need to be so snide – but yes.  Basically.

ME: So the schools then opt to follow current law-enforcement procedure, and follow President LaPierre’s idea of hiring guards to try to carry that out in our schools?  To try to disrupt the shooters’ plans, just like law enforcement advises.  Just as Israel has done for some time now against a real, constant threat.

LIBRELLE: Oh, no.  The NEA has said that that’s insane!

ME:  So let me get this straight:  a union comprised of people that you just said were incompetent to see to their own and their childrens’ defense (notwithstanding potentially having carry permits that show they are competent) is nonetheless expert enough in self-defense tactics to reject current law-enforcement practice out of hand?

LIBRELLE:  …

ME:  Well?

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate the children?  And women?

(And SCENE)

Most “gun control” laws have nothing to do with controlling crime; they are about making gun ownership not merely onerous, but legally perilous.

And they work – where “work” means “scare law-abiding people out of their sacred duty and privilege to defend themselves, their families and their society from the scum around us“:

Prior to yesterday, I never would have thought that possession of an empty magazine, kept separate from ammunition or a weapon, would violate the law, so I sympathize with Gregory on that point.

But I’m less sympathetic than you might expect because fear of unintentionally violating gun laws is one of the things that has kept me from purchasing a handgun. As you know, I took the NRA safety course over a year ago. But I’m a legal resident of Rhode Island who lives much of the year in New York, so there’s an issue of whether I could obtain a NY permit, which is needed even to keep a gun in the home. And then there’s the issue of transportation back and forth, and complying with the requirements to avoid prosecution as I pass through Massachusetts.

It all became such a bureaucratic jungle that I just deferred for the time being.

That’s attorney William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection in a piece on the importance of prosecuting NBC News’ David Gregory – who is a rabid anti-gunner and makes no “journalistic” bones about it, and whose kids attend a school protected by the same armed guards that he and his industry decry for the proles – produced a 30-round NATO STANAG magazine (which fits the AR15 and most other NATO rifles of the same caliber) during a segment haranguing for gun control on one of the Sunday Morning shows last week.

Jacobson, by the way, cuts Gregory some slack in assuming the “infraction” was inadvertent.  NBC apparently asked DC police for permission to possess the magazine for use in the “story” (heh), and were denied.   Gregory – or at least several people in his editorial chain of command – knew that they were breaking a law…

…that was designed, like all of DC’s gun laws, to ensnare and make criminals out of as many law-abiding gun owners as possible.

Against that?  Howard Kurtz – a center-left journalist – responds (with emphasis added by me):

Was it a stunt? Yep, and an eye-catching one. Was Gregory being aggressive with the NRA chief, or seeming to push gun control in a confrontational interview? All that is up for debate.

But a police probe over what I assume was an empty ammo clip is a total waste of time. What it demonstrates above all is that journalists are getting ensnared in the political war over gun control.

No, Howard.  “Journalists” who are actively working to destroy a constitutional liberty they don’t believe to be in fashion broke a law.  If it had been any other citizen – Wayne LaPierre, or (occasional NRA spokesbabe) Sarah Michelle Gellar, or you or I – the DC police would be going over them right now with all the grace the NYPD used in going over Abner Louima.  Rhetorically speaking.  Probably.

If it’s a “waste of time” for Gregory, then what is it for every other otherwise honest citizen in DC and the area that’s gotten snagged up in DC gun laws’ byzantine picayunities over the past 40 years?

Like these guys, Mickey Kaus:  the DC Police didn’t consider it a “waste of time” with two of the people who were wounded defending our worthless federal government overseas:

After being injured on foreign soil while defending his nation’s freedom, Lt. Kim returned home to find that, in DC at least, there is very little of it left to defend. Lt. Kim was transporting his legally owned firearms from his parent’s home in New Jersey to South Carolina when he stopped at Walter Reed Army Hospital in DC for an appointment. Bad move!

After getting lost and pulled over by police, he was arrested, thrown in jail, and had over $10,000 in guns seized by the District. Despite the fact that he had no evil intent, Lt. Kim didn’t get a pass … but I bet Gregory will.

Or how about the case of Army Specialist Adam Meckler? Meckler, who had recently ended his active duty tour, was dropping off records at the VFW in DC when they discovered a few rounds of ammunition in his bag left over from recreational shooting. Let me repeat that … a few rounds of ammo … not a gun … not a knife … not an RPG … a few rounds of 9mm ammo.

For that ‘crime’ Specialist Meckler was handcuffed, treated like a terrorist, arrested, and forced to accept a plea deal that will mark the honored veteran for the rest of his life. But will the same happen to Gregory? I don’t think so.

So let’s recap. Two soldiers, absent any evil intent, violate the strict letter of DC’s draconian gun control laws and end up getting no leniency from a justice system that serves anything but true justice.

Apparently, to regular plebeians, the letter of DC’s stupid law isn’t a “waste of time”.

Just move him out of his secured apartment building and make him live in a regular working-class house in Newark or Detroit or Chicago for a while.

Ditto David Gregory.

The other day, I was talking with Sheila Rae Thorvaldssen, a woman from Dilworth Minnesota who writes the liberal-leaning blog Oh Noes, Wingnutz Are Blooming Like Loosestrife On My Lawn.  It is one of the leading blogs, left or right, from outstate Minnesota.

The conversation went something like this:

THORVALDSSEN:  Har har, Merg!  You gunny wingnuts have been pwn3ed again!  Tony Cornish said stuff that wasn’t true!

ME: Yeah, that’s the problem with being a pro-Second Amendment activist.  If you’re a gun controller, all you have to do is keep repeating the same lines over and over again.  On our side, you have to keep up with current events.  Israel “toughened” up their gun laws in the last decade or so!

THORVALDSSEN:  It must be awkward to realize you were wrong on all the facts!

ME: Well, it sucks bobbling facts, and we all try not to.  But here’s the rub;  you’ve heard that old saying, “the British lose all the battles but win the wars?”

THORVALDSSEN:  No.  Did Conan O’Brien say it?

ME: Nope.  Anyway – it’s a little like that when you’re a 2nd Amendment activist.  Every once in a while you may bobble a fact, or factoid, that’s part of the larger discussion – but we’re still right on the actual conclusions.

THORVALDSSEN:  Oh, riiiiiight.

ME: Well, wrapped around that factoid about the Israelis “toughening” their gun laws are two facts that everyone, like you, that jumps up and down about Rep. Cornish – and me! – bobbling the fact is the inconvenient truth that that factoid reinforces two conclusions that we’ve always made.

THORVALDSSEN:  That’s just crazy talk.

ME: Well, yeah, but not in the way you think.  For starters, the “tightening” of gun laws – on the law-abiding – in Israel cut the number of legal firearms in half – but more than doubled the number of illegal ones, and reinforced the black market.  Which is exactly what happens whenever gun control is tried, whether in Tel Aviv or Chicago.

THORVALDSSEN:  Hah hah!  You said there were two conclusions, but you only gave one!  You are a liar!

ME: Well, the other one is this;  whatever happened in Israel in the past decade or so, and whatever they do now, it is a historical fact that in the seventies, there were several attacks on Israeli schools and school children –  the 1970 Avivim Massacre which killed 12 kids, the Kiryat Shmona massacre (which began as an attempt to kill the children at a kibbutz school and evolved from there, ending in 18 dead, eight of them children), and the Ma’alot Massacre (terrorists killed 22 children and five adults).  That’s 42 dead children among three incidents, in a population about the size of Minnesota’s.  Can you imagine almost five Red Lake massacres in four years, the affect that’d have here?  Anyway – at the time, one of Israel’s responses – one of many – was to allow teachers in high risk areas along the borders to carry legally-permitted guns.

THORVALDSSEN:  So?

ME: So the attacks on children stopped.  They found softer targets – actually, they largely switched to bombs and rockets.

THORVALDSSEN:  But Cornish got current Israeli law wrong.  So your entire point is invalid!  Hah!  Bow down before my superior reasoning, bitchez!

ME:  Not if your point is “there are some ideas out there to stop school violence”.  The point being, once schools became harder targets – in this case, harder because teachers in vulnerable areas were armed – school shooting stopped.

People like Cornish – and me, by the way – say that that just might be a better than the “gun-free school zones” that we’ve been trying for the past 25 years or so.

THORVALDSSEN:  But you forgot the ultimate argument against arming teachers.

ME: What’s that.

THORVALDSSEN: It won’t work.  Period.

ME: What makes that the ultimate argument?

THORVALDSSEN:  I said “Period” at the end.

ME: Hm.

THORVALDSSEN:  That means you’ve been pwn3d.

ME: Huh.

THORVALDSSEN:  Do you feel awkward yet?

ME: Sure, why not?

And SCENE.

Larry Correia has written the best single synopsis of gun myths and misunderstandings, and the actual opposing facts, that I have ever seen.  Anywhere.

It covers the whole waterfront of lefty strawmen about guns – “why do you need an assault rifle?”, “why you need at 30 round magazine?”, the whole works.

But since so many in the Twin Cities media and alt-leftysphere have been tittering about Rep. Cornish’s proposal to allow teachers (who are over 21 and have qualified for Minnesota carry permits to carry guns, this seemed to be the most important passage in the piece:

You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!

No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.

(Brief tangent:  when I wrote about that exact same thing happening, two weeks ago in the Portland Oregon shooting, lefties said “aww, he shot himself! You can’t credit that to the gun owner!”.  Yes, you can.  In fact, you have to.  Without the armed citizen and the resistance, the death toll would have risen).

Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter …The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.

However, cops can’t be everywhere…Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back

The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.

It’s a long read – 10,000 words – and the best single digest of actual fact vs. BS that I’ve read in one place anywhere on fact vs. liberal fiction on this issue.

The next time some Harvard-addled chanting-point-bot wants to declaim about the need for a “conversation about guns” – which, as we all know, means “a monologue about guns, with we 2nd Amendment types shutting up and speaking when spoken to” – I’m tempted to take the “conversation” more in this sort of direction.

“Here’s why I own guns:  because people like this were disarmed:

Stores burning after UK riots. Hey, at least the store owners couldn’t defend themselves!

“These people – well, former people – too:”

Mass graves in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Goodness knows how bad it’d have been if the hundreds of victims had been able to defend themselves, rather than rely on the Dutch “Peace-Keepers” who ran like scared bunnies.

Or here:

Mass grave in Chicago. No, it’s Cambodia. You’ve seen one “gun free zone” full of disarmed civilians, you’ve seen ’em all. The Cambodians, like the black children of Chicago, had the bad luck not to be white, suburban, and big Democrat contributors.

Or here:

It’s Darfur. Remember them?

How about here?:

Hey, Amitai Etzioni!  It’s a gun-free home!

Or these people:

Victims of the Chinese government at Tienanmen Square. Hey, in a couple of years, we won’t be able to insult our Chicom overlords anymore! Thanks, President Obama!

More people without guns:

Russian Gulag inmates. Men, women, children. Dead! Stalin – darling of the New York Times? Now he knew how not to waste a crisis!

“I could go on, but you get the idea.”

“That’s why I own guns.  I don’t give a rat’s ass about hunting. ”

“So if your idea is to disarm me, the law-abiding citizen, because of the misdeeds of someone I’d have happily shot with one or another legally-permitted firearm, here’s the “conversation about guns” we’re going to have…”

“YOU:  “Shut up and let’s “converse” about the need to disarm you, Mr. Berg”

“ME:  Go f**k yourself”

“YOU:  “With what appendage, sir?”

“How are you liking the “conversation” so far?”

No, I’m not going to do it.  But I thought I’d share it, just between us.  It’s fun to think about.

For us Second Amendment activists, especially those of us who’ve been at it for a while,  there’ve been a few constants.

One of them:  the rank hypocrisy of the leadership of the gun control movement; then, now, and always.

For almost two decades, exhibit #1 has been Diane Feinstein, who has made gun control a creepy fetish for over two decades now.

And yet…:

Opponents of the Assault Weapons Ban point to Feinstein’s hypocrisy on the issue, as the Senator herself said she obtained a concealed carry permit in California when she felt her life was threatened.

You find this, over and over, with gun control leaders; you, the hoi-polloi, should be content to call the cops; as elites, they’re different; their lives are worth defending.

In 1995, Feinstein described this experience:

“Less than 20 years ago, I was the target of a terrorist group. It was the New World Liberation Front. They blew up power stations and put a bomb at my home when my husband was dying of cancer and the bomb was set to detonate around 2 ‘o clock in the morning, but it was a construction explosive that doesn’t detonate when it drops below freezing. It doesn’t usually freeze in San Francisco, but on this night it dropped below freezing and the bomb didn’t detonate.
“I was very lucky, but I thought of what might have happened. Later the same group shot out all the windows of my home and I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself, because that’s what I did. I was trained in firearms. When I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick, I carried a concealed weapon. I made the determination that if somebody was going to try to take me out I was going to take them with me. Now having said all of that, that was period of time ago and I’ve watched through these 20 years as terrorism has increased both on the far extremist left and the far extremist right in this country.”.

And throughout that time, her line has been the same:  her life is vital and worth protecting; yours is mundane and can wait your turn.   When she was mayor of Sant Francisco, she revoked all civilian carry permits – but got her converted to a “police” permit.

Her “training” was no more involved that what all of us carry permit holders get.

You find this level of hypocrisy throughout the gun control movement; the lists of prominent gun-grabbers who’ve gotten themselves carry permits, or wangled permits for their bodyguards, or who’ve been busted with illegal guns, is legendary among 2nd Amendment Rights activists…

…and unknown among anyone that depends on the media – frequently among the biggest hypocrites – for news on the subject.

Joe Doakes from Como Park has a question that’s occurred to me as well:

I don’t have time today to look this up, maybe some of your readers do?

I’m getting the feeling the media is under-reporting a crucial element in the shooting stories: what stopped the killer?

Is it correct the most recent school shooter stopped killing when he was confronted by a cop with a gun? The cop didn’t shoot him, the kid killed himself, but the cop with the gun was the motivator? You ran the story about the CCW guy in the shopping mall – same result.

Mother Jones magazine claims armed citizens only stopped mass murders 1.6% of the time. Slate Magazine on-line points out some of that is how you count it (it’s not a “mass murder” until there are already four dead) other studies disagree.

Here’s the question: regardless of WHO was holding the gun that stopped the killing, is it correct that the killing continued until SOMEONE with a gun confronted the killer?

The NRA’s Armed Citizen column is devoted to proving from real-life experience that the mere presence of a gun in the hands of a good citizen can prevent crime, without a shot being fired. Are they right?

If so, wouldn’t more good guys holding guns be better?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

That one occurred to me when discussing the Portland shooting on December 11.  As we reported earlier this week, a man with a rifle started shooting at the Clackamas Mall in Portland.  He fired over sixty shots, and miraculously killed “only” two people.  At some point, his AR15 jammed – reports vary, and it may or may not have been well before the time he was confronted by an armed citizen with a carry permit and a handgun.  He apparently fled, and shortly thereafter shot himself.

But notwithstanding the fact that he fired sixty shots, and could have fired a lot more, just watch; it won’t be called a “mass shooting”, because “only” two died.

Because he was deterred by a citizen with a gun.  That the left will studiously avoid calling a hero for ending a mass shooting because it won’t be shown as a mass shooting in the stats.  Because the citizen prompted it to end before it became a mass shooting.

It’s a Catch 22, although in this case, it beats the alternative.

At any rate, there’s a list of mass shootings, and would-be mass shootings, that’ve been stopped by citizens – not police – with guns:

• The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting, where a teacher grabbed a gun and stopped the two shooters.
• The Appalachian Law School shooting, where a would-be mass-murderer was stopped by a couple of armed students.
• A robbery that was devolving into a mass-shooting in Virginia was stopped by a CCW permittee.
• This interesting incident in Texas recently
• An episode in Richmond, VA in the nineties where a shooter who intended to copycat the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre (in Killeen, TX) was stopped after killing one person, by another citizen with a legal handgun.
• Allen Crumb, who helped in the counterattack on Charles Whitman, the U of Texas Clock Tower shooter, was an armed civilian with a borrowed rifle who’d been deputized on the fly.  Some would say  “Crumb was a veteran”.  He was a veteran of the Air Force.  Go ahead, veterans, especially all you USAF people; tell us how much Close Quarters Battle training the Flyboys get. About the same as any civilian.
• The New Life Church shooting spree in Colorado Springs in 2007, ended by Jeanne Assam.
• This episode in Texas, where an armed man killed a mass shooter (and died, himself); it’s generally aggreed he saved several lives in the process.
• And, as mentioned above, the Clackamas Mall shooting, which was stopped by a man with a legal permitted firearm.

Eugene Volokh also has a list with a few more as well as a few repeats from my list.

Now, if you look at most of these incidents, most of them aren’t “mass shootings”  – because most of them were stopped before they topped that magic “four dead” threshold.

Which is what we want.  Right?

I used to play in a band with a guy, a keyboard player.  He was a bit of a prodigy; he’d been sent off from North Dakota to the Berklee College of Music in Boston; he was one of the most amazing keyboard players you’ve ever seen.

Of course, like a lot of prodigious talents, he had some issues.  He was bipolar.  The illness left him unable to function at Berklee, so it was back to North Dakota.  Psychiatrists put him on lithium – which enabled him to function.  To thrive, really – when he was on his meds and everything was well-tempered, he would practice, perform, put on recitals that’d stun the locals, play in bands, hold a job, function in society.

Then he’d feel he could function without the meds. He’d go off ’em…

…and, inside of a few weeks, wind up in the papers for having driven to Fargo and remodeled the inside of a Catholic church with a sledgehammer.  Followed by another bout of treatment, and then another course of lithium.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

He functioned about 95% of the time.  About 5%, he was incapacitated.  Was he a success story, or a failure?

———-

Psychotropic medication has been a boon to many people.  They’ve helped pull back the gray fog on the lives of millions who suffer from depression.  They allow many with serious mental illnesses to function, and often thrive.

But as my keyboard-playing friend showed, there’s a downside; when the medication doesn’t work, or when the doses get changed, or abruptly stopped?  Bad things can happen.

As at least one Catholic church in Fargo discovered back in the early eighties.

And sometimes, much, much worse.

The site “SSRI Stories” – it stands for “Seratonin-Specific Re-Uptake Inhibitor”, a class of anti-depressants that includes Zoloft, Paxil and Wellbutrin among many others – catalogs crimes and other violent and bizarre incidents that have some link to psychotropic meds.   The stories on the site are open to some discussion – and there is discussion – and correlation doesn’t equal causation.  But the site chronicles a hell of a lot of correlation.

The list of school shootings alone is below the jump.  The incident at the Red Lake Reservation school seven years ago is on the list.  There’s much, much more there.

Speaking of correlations that don’t necessarily equal causation – is it any wonder the Psychiatric community is so hell-bent on calling gun crime a “public health issue?”  It’d sure be more convenient than addressing their own stake in violent crime, especially spree shootings, wouldn’t it?

(more…)

Patrician Brit attacks American gun owners.

In related news, Nazis condemned George Patton, Al Capone ridiculed Elliot Ness, the Chinese Communists rattled off a list of charges against the Tienanmen Square demonstrators, and the Ku Klux Klan presented an alternative view of Martin Luther King.

The nation wracks itself in grief – justifably – over the deaths of 20-odd children in Connecticut.  I’d shudder to meet the monsters that don’t recoil in horror and outrage.

I’m  struck, though, by the lack of outrage over the carnage in President Obama’s home town, the town run by the machine that put him in office, the city run by his former Chief of Staff.

In Chicago, since 2008, 622 children have been murdered.  That’s almost thirty Sandy Hook classrooms full of kids.  They didn’t have the “luck” to look, largely, just like the children of our nation’s “elite”, our media, business and wonk classes – white, exurban, upper-middle-class.  The died in ones and twos, not in a bloody pile that became a media feeding frenzy.  They weren’t killed by children of privilege, shot by weapons that the dominant political class was trying to turn into a boogeyman and political wedge; they were mostly murdered by their neighborhoods’ own criminal underclass, carrying mundane, mostly-stolen pistols and illegally-modified shotguns, almost none of them by any “assault weapon” anyone would recognize.

No – they’re mostly black and latino.  They’re mostly from poor families, students at Chicago’s wretched public schools.  And they live – lived – in a city that has been the American left’s social laboratory for the better part of a century.  And they died in a city that is a fully-owned subsidiary of the American left, and a key part of its national power base, and a place that has made it harder for the law-abiding citizen to buy guns than to buy crack, heroin or a hooker. A city that trumpets the ambitions – and exhibits the failures – of everything American “progressivism” stands for.

They’re minority, they’re poor, they’re rhetorical guinea pigs in America’s biggest leftist lab.

And they’re dying at the rate of seven or eight classrooms-full a year – not on one horrible bloody Friday, but every year, for years past and for years to come.

And outside their communities, their families, their neighborhood’s churches?  They die anonymously.

And there is the American left’s concern for “the children”.

So let’s do make sure that’s part of the “Conversation about Guns”, shall we?

“Why do you need teh gun?” – Because it’s the duty of every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with firearms.

“You’re joking, right?” – Oh, sort of.

“You know what I think?  I think gun owners are compensating for something?” – Oh, haha.  Never heard that one before.  Honest.

But no, you’re right.  We’re compensating for the fact that our society is full of the depraved, the amoral and those that think their ends justify their means.

“Owning a gun is about teh fear!” – The same way buying insurance is about “fear” of fire or accidents, or the same way packing blankets and candles in your car is about “fear” of icy roads and blowing snow.  In other words, baloney.  It’s about responding prudently and reasonably to things about which one might be legitimately afraid.

“Aren’t gun owners just a bunch of teh flaby bald white guys?” – Sure, in the same sense that gay marriage proponents are a bunch of mincing, flouncing, buttless-chaps-wearing effeminate show-tune-singing poofters.

“Hey, that’s nothing but teh derogatory stereotype, designed to try to negate your opponents arguments by dehumanizing them without ever engaging any of teh facts!” – Bingo.  The difference is, I don’t believe the thing about gay marriage proponents.

“But teh conservative GOP Senator with teh “A” rating from teh NRA said big clips are useless for hunting!”  – Then that “conservative Senator” should get docked a few points.  The 2nd Amendment doesn’t protect hunting!

“OK, smart guy, why does a citizen need a gun with teh big clip for?” – For starters, it’s only a “clip” if it “clips” the bullets together.  Like this:

If it’s a metal box, like on an AK47 or an AR15 or a Glock, it’s called a “Magazine”.

Remember that and you’ll sound marginally less ignorant.

OK, now to answer your question – and I say this without acknowledging if I do or do not own one or more weapons with high-capacity magazines; if I do have them, I need them because the threat, out there – robbers, burglars, gang-bangers of all stripes – have them.  Indeed, gun and magazine prohibitions make them more likely to have them.

Now, I don’t hunt, and I never likely will.  But I am a self-defense shooter, and anti-gunner wives’ tales to the contrary, there have been cases when armed intruders and home invaders, whether high or highly motivated or both, have opted not to turn tail and run when the home/business owner fired six, seven, eight or ten shots.  It’s happening often enough that most cops have not only traded in their six-shot revolvers for semi-auto handguns with 15-18 rounds, but retired their good ol’ shotguns for AR15s and M4s – fully-automatic assault rifles, not merely ugly “assault weapons” – in the trunk (leaving lots of surplus Remington 870 Express 12 gauges going for really nice prices at area gun shops!)

“So you think your life is as valuable as a cop’s?” – Yep.

“But robbereys like that hardly ever happin!” – Either do car crashes.  But you wear your seatbelt, don’t you?”

“No!  That’s what teh Police are for”  – OK, then.

“But conservative Republican Joe Scarborough, who says he’s a member of  teh NRA, says there’s no need for guns that can fire 30 shots in teh second!” – Joe Scarborough was a conservative in 1994.  He makes vaguely Republican noises these days, on some issues.  But it’s with this remark he not only shows why he can’t get a show on a real network, but that he must be one of those rare NRA members that knows nothing about firearms.  Guns that “fire 30 shots a second”, fully-automatic firearms like machine guns, submachine guns and real honest-to-pete military Assault Rifles, have been illegal for most citizens since 1934.

“But killings with assault weapons are out of control!” – As usual, no.  Murder in general dropped 14% in the past four years, and the drop among firearms deaths led all others.  And out of 10,000 or so firearms homicides in, say 2007, 358 involved rifles, which is down sharply since the mid-20002, and about a quarter of the 1,704 knife murders, not to mention much much lower than the 540 involving blunt objects, or the 745 people killed with fists and hands. And I’m going to bet that the vast majority of those were not legally purchased, by the way.

“Well, you are kidding yourself!  No citizen has ever stopped teh mass murdor!” – Sure they have.  I listed the ones I could find here.  And those were just the cases where the authorities said in as many words “there was a mass shooting incident underway”, which they usually won’t if it stops before anyone’s hurt.  Check it out.

“Well, you are teh coward.  A real man doesn’t need teh gun and I’m proud of it!” – Well, that’s your choice.  Go for it.  In fact, take that feeling to the next level.  Put one of these in your front window.

No, seriously – your masters have decreed it, so you have no choice.  Put your ass, and your family’s safety, where your precious little mouth is.  Deal?

Get right on that!

“Well, it’s time to have a conversation about guns” – We’ve been having one for almost forty years.  And the gun-grabber side lost.  And they’ll lose this time too, because outside the self-referential, self-adoring, rhetorically-onanistic lefty cluster-cuddle between the media, the alt-media, academia and the lefty wonk class, most of America has been convinced that you’re wrong.

Which doesn’t mean people like me – law-abiding citizens who believe in and practice the Second Amendment – are going to stop working to keep the battle won.

Because we’re always “having a conversation about guns”.  It’s just that you want the other side, my side, to shut up and let you do all the talking.

And as much as you’d like that, I for one decline.  Thanks.

Sean Higgins at the WashEx finds yet another case of a major-media “fact-checker” burying inconvenient facts to slander gun owners.

Washington Post Fact Check columnist Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, “three pinocchios” for claiming, as he did yesterday on Fox News Sunday, that so-called right-to-carry laws reduce crime. So, that’s settled then? There’s no evidence that the laws do that? Err, no … as Kessler’s own column indicates.

“When right-to-carry laws had a surge in popularity in the 1990s, a common liberal argument against them was that this would lead to an increase in gun violence. Stands to reason, right? More guns means more gun crime.”

“Except it didn’t happen. Gun violence overall has declined, horrible incidents like Friday’s notwithstanding. Economist John Lott has argued in his book, More Guns, Less Crime (written with David Mustard) that the concealed carry laws actually reduce crime. It was his work that Gohmert was presumably referencing.”

Well, among others.

Read the whole thing.  Sean Higgins at the WashEx shows where the WaPo left the whole “fact” thing behind.  It seems they find facts that conflict with a tidy narrative to be just too confusing.

Y’know, as the mainstream media slowly dies off, you’d think one of them might figure out that a feature that checks the facts of the MSM’s legions of biased, narrative-driven “fact-checkers” would be good business.

Unless the media, like the Democrats they support, are banking their entire future on the “low-information consumer”.

…as Dennis Prager said.

But Amitai Etzioni, writing in the Huffpo, truly truly is that stupid.

To: Dick’s Sporting Goods
From: Mitch Berg, Law-Abiding Gun Owner, Occasional Customer
Re:  Your Cowardice

Dear Dicks,

I’d be lying if I said I shopped at your chain much, even for firearms and ammo.  Your prices are adequate (Frontiersman in Saint Louis Park is much better, Fleet Farm and Joe’s clobber you on ammo prices, and even Gander Mountain is better than you are on sale prices), but I’ll stop by and grab the odd purchase once in a while.  Indeed, a trip to the neighborhood Dick’s for some camping gear was on my noontime agenda today.

But no more.

Crises come and go. And while the Democrats vow not to waste them, they do pass.  The vast majority of the American people – Real Americans, not the “elite” media, who are nothing but Frenchmen in Lexuses – aren’t fooled.

I’m done with you.  And I urge all Real Americans to follow suit.

That is all.

UPDATE:  You too, Cheaper Than Dirt.

In the wake of the shootings in Connecticut last week, some – myself included – said it might be time to look at the response the Israelis took to repeated terrorist attacks on schools in the seventies; allowing teachers to carry their own, legally-obtained weapons in school.

Lefties, armed with a small sheaf of convenient Google results and an Ezra Klein column that was, er, riddled with errors, responded “But no!  Gun laws in Israel are teh tight!  You are wrong!”

The answer?  Somewhere in between and, as usual, a little to my side of the divide (and, as always, “distrust but verify Ezra Klein”), according to this piece in “The Table” from Liel Leibowitz.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Problem: people who are mentally ill and dangerous commit crimes with firearms.

Potential Solution 1: remove firearms from society. Objections: Unconstitutional under Second Amendment, difficult to implement door-to-door and as impossible to enforce as prohibition of alcohol, drugs and illegal aliens.

Potential Solution 2: remove people who are mentally ill and dangerous from society. Objections: Difficult under 1970’s Supreme Court equal protection rulings and current Minnesota law because the legal standard of proof is so high.

Recommendation: try the easier one first. Convince the Supreme Court to change the law back to the earlier standard, making it easier to remove people who are mentally ill and dangerous from society leaving the rest of us free to use firearms responsibly.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I think Obama is going to use the classic totalitarian means of splitting the difference; calling dissenters “insane” and locking them all up.

Both problems solves – if you hate freedom.

Mayor Bloomberg of New York took time off from his busy schedule of banning Big Gulps and not restoring power to the Rockaways to give us an object lesson in what gun control is and how it works.

1) Start with an illogical premise:

With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it’s still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their A,B,Cs are safe.

What is the “it” that’s “come to that?”  Some mammoth conspiracy to kill children that started with senior high kids in Columbine and has been working its way down, neglected by society?

No.  “It” – the fact that our most vulnerable are, well, our most vulnerable – has always been the case.  It’s why society – the decent among us, anyway – endeavor to protect them.

We’ll come back to that.

2) A self-righteous demand for “action”…

For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds…Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before.

And of those 34 people murdered (and you want to check his numbers) how many were killed by people with no legal right to own a gun – by criminals, parolees for violent crimes, and the insane?  How many victims were in places like Chicago and Washington DC, where the law-abiding citizens already needs authorization from the Supreme Court to own a firearm?  How many were kiled as a direct or indirect result of the War on Drugs, which has killed more people than Vietnam and Korea and which the Obama Administration is going to carry on in spite of the wishes of several states’ electorates?

I’ll wait on that answer – no doubt in vain.

3) …that has already failed miserably. 

What we have not seen is leadership – not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever.

Mayor Bloomberg?  Plutocrat d*psh*t?  Your response to a tragedy in another state is to demand “leadership” in putting sanctions against the law-abiding citizens who didn’t and  will never kill anyone?

Steve Timmer – hey, when did he get an actual name? – writing at MNBlue MNProgressive MN MNLib whatever he rechristened Cucking Stool, exhumes an anti-Second-Amendment argument that isn’t the oldest one, but is certainly the least compelling and convincing; “if you think an “assault weapon” is OK, why not a nuclear weapon?”

No, my synopsis is actually better than Timmer’s piece, but since good form demands it, I’ll give you a quote or two:

 Scalia believes the test is your right to own a weapon depends on your ability to carry it — to “bear” it, in other words. There’s no room here for consideration of a weapon’s lethality, dangerousness, or complexity.

(Except for all of those “prudent restrictions” that Scalia himself talked about in in the Heller decision.  But don’t stop him.  He’s on a roll)

One can imagine signs in gun shops: If you can carry it out the front door, you can own it!

In the shops are rocket-propelled grenades, bazookas, hand gernades, the aforesaid MANPADS [shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles], 50 caliber machine guns, fully-automatic rifles, etc. *

And what if Timmer’s fantasy came true?

Let’s just say that a law-abiding citizen, one who’s never stolen so much as a candy bar in his life, walks into a store that, per Timmer’s fantasy, has one of just about everything  from the international arms market that doesn’t require wheels or tracks to move?

Let’s hypothetically say that that law-abiding citizen…:

• …has in his possession a document indicating that several levels of government have put on the ol’ rhetorical rubber gloves and poked and prodded his criminal background, and found that he had no crime record?  No record of dangerous mental illness?  That the cops and sheriff hadn’t had to pull him out of a succession of brawls, and that he didn’t have a record of picking pointless fights?  And that…
• …as a result of having that documented clean history, he had the legal right to carry a concealed handgun, and had done so for, say, seven years?  And that…
• …over those seven years the only time that gun had come out of his pocket for cleaning, overnight storage and practice?   That in fact that citizen, who had never stolen so much as a candy bar, had not been inveigled to, say, kill someone, notwithstanding the fact that they had a gun in their pocket?  That in fact, in seven years, not a single person had guessed that the citizen had a gun in his pocket, because there was no reason to guess it?    This is rare thing – there are only 110,000 of them in Minnesota, after all.
• The citizen walks into the shop and does some shopping?

The citizen is a history buff who minored in German, so he buys an MG42 machine gun (think the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan) (Image NSFW, if you work around liberals).  Or perhaps to commemorate a Marine ancestor he grabs an M2-2 flamethrower?

Or perhaps in a Slavophile moment he grabs an SA7 Grail man-portable anti-aircraft missile launcher – think “bazooka with a heat-seeking rocket”?

Or perhaps he has a wicked sense of irony, and decides to blow the lid off of every lefty strawman (but only figuratively, ghuk ghuk), and buys the fabled “Davy Crockett“, a (very technically) man-portable “spigot launcher” that fired a small nuclear charge, with a lethal radius of about 500 feet, to a range of about a mile and half.

Or heck, he has a Groupon deal, so he gets all four!

Question:  As our citizen – who, remember, has never committed a non-traffic crime in his life, has never picked a fight, has never given society the faintest reason to doubt his stability, and has proven it by carrying a legal, permitted, loaded handgun for years and years without even a whiff of an incident – walks away carrying the four weapons he just bought and, what the heck, an M-2 .50 caliber machine gun to boot (he wants a workout), what happens?

Your choices are as follows:

1. Our citizen, who has never committed a violent act in his life, is overcome by a psychic force emanating from the weapons he owns.  Our hypothetical placid schlemiel, who has carried a 9mm semiautomatic boogeyman handgun for most of a decade without incident, is suddenly overcome by voices telling him to mow down commuters with the machine guns!  To cut loose with the flamethrower at the mall!  To plink at passing aircraft with the SA7!  To lob nukes at the Metrodome just to watch the light show?  Or…
2. Nothing.  Same as before.

Of course, all the weapons above are illegal, and nothing the SCOTUS, or Scalia himself, has said or done, officially or not, has changed the “prudent restriction” we put on these sorts of things.

If only the SCOTUS would put “prudent restrictions” on red herring arguments.

Question to Steve Timmer:  if I put one of the “MANPADS” (man-portable anti-aircraft missiles) you wrote about in your hands, showed you how to use it (if I knew) and told you to hang onto it for an hour, do you think you could restrain yourself from shooting down an airliner?

Yes?  OK – why?

Because MANPADS, machine guns, flamethrowers and nuclear spigot bombs don’t actually kill people.  There is nothing about them that overpowers a person and makes them need to kill.

Jed Babbin gets the basic facts right…:

Politicians and media are preoccupied with the idea that gun control is the only answer to these murders and that nothing else is worth discussion. But the inconvenient facts include that the Oregon mall shooter used a stolen weapon. Adam Lanza, the Newtown murderer, used weapons stolen from his mother who had them legally and registered them under Connecticut law. He reportedly shot his way into a locked school. The time and political energy that’s being wasted on gun control could be put to better use. That’s our job, so let’s get to it.

He posts some proposals for making schools more secure.  He opposes arming teachers – and I can see many reasons for that, and we’ll come back to them.

One – getting more realistic about the extremely mentally ill, who make up all of our crop of school shooters – makes obvious sense.

The other – improving school security, without turning them, as Babbin says, “into armed camps” – is a little dodgier.

Babbin quotes a friend, a former SEAL who works as a security consultant, who advocates putting ballistic doors and mag locks on classrooms, issuing “ballistic blankets” (think “flak blankets”) and drilling the kids on their use, and teaching the staff to “buy time” for the police to arrive.  Which makes sense, from a purely security perspective; make the target harder.

The consultant advises against arming teachers: “It would probably cause more problems than keeping them unarmed.”   Maybe, maybe not – people in law enforcement and the military tend to think the rest of society are mindless sheeple, but I can see the argument.  There are problems.

Which brings us not only to the beef I have with Babbin’s thesis – which is a perfectly valid one – but what I think the real problem is.

Look at the issues facing school security:

• Schools are big, fat, juicy unarmed targets full of helpless victims.  Never more so than now; as school districts centralize more and more kids to “cut costs”, schools get bigger and bigger. You don’t need to be a terrorist or a nutcase to know that; how many times has Hollywood turned to the “evildoer at a school” plot?  Everyone knows; if you want to screw with a society where it really hurts, screw with the kids.
• As schools get bigger and bigger, the kids at the margin – the kids with emotional, behavioral and mental health issues – get pushed further and further to the fringe.  The emotionally-disturbed kids get more alienated; the mentally-ill kids get more siloed.  Teachers and administrators get more involved in the endless process of running a huge, institutional, “factory” school, and less in what’s ticking with each individual kid.
• Some of the kids on the fringes will act out on their adolescent hormonal aggression, and on the criminal behavior they currently pattern themselves after in our society, and commit stupid crimes of opportunity.  Which, if we did happen to arm teachers, would likely involve students jumping teachers and stealing guns.  It’s a fair point – in a school where students can form an in-school criminal underclass.
• Other kids on the fringe – after years of bullying in a huge, soulless school that already resembles a prison – will, like Columbine’s murderers or the kid at Cold Springs/Rokori, get their revenge in the way that seems most satisfying to their troubled minds; killing their schoolmates and destroy the thing that, in their warped little adolescent minds, left them so alienated.  Others, like the shooter at the Red Lake school or at Dunblane, Scotland, will hear voices telling them to find a school and start shooting.  Or, like Lanza, react to God only knows what – but through whatever motivation, find the biggest, fattest, least-defended target they can; a mall, a movie theater, or in too many cases, a school.

What do these all have in common?

The big, soulless, impersonal megaschool.  They’re everywhere; big cities are cramming thousands of kids into huge “campus” schools, like Columbine, where the staff can barely keep up with the paperwork, much less the states of mind of their individual kids.   Rural America is consolidating its schools into ever-bigger buildings, to save money (or, really, redirect more of it to administrative overburden).

There’ve been examinations of the psychological effects of cramming children into huge schools.  They’ve been shunted into the circular file by an education establishment that created the status quo.

But you didn’t see these kinds of shootings when schools were in the neighborhood, when staff knew their kids, and could tell when something needed attention.

Along with looking at what makes American schools so insecure, maybe it’s time to look at what makes so many people what to destroy them.

It’s hard to believe that this particular angle on this story – about the shooting at the mall near Portland, Oregon, which happened a few days before the New Town, Connecticut shooting – didn’t get national coverage:

PORTLAND — Nick Meli is emotionally drained. The 22-year-old was at Clackamas Town Center with a friend and her baby when a masked man opened fire.
“I heard three shots and turned and looked at Casey and said, ‘are you serious?,'” he said.
The friend and baby hit the floor. Meli, who has a concealed carry permit, positioned himself behind a pillar.
“He was working on his rifle,” said Meli. “He kept pulling the charging handle and hitting the side.”

[Aside to shooters; poor gun maintenance actually saved lives.  Who knew?]

The break in gunfire allowed Meli to pull out his own gun, but he never took his eyes off the shooter.
“As I was going down to pull, I saw someone in the back of the Charlotte move, and I knew if I fired and missed, I could hit them,” he said.
Meli took cover inside a nearby store. He never pulled the trigger. He stands by that decision.
“I’m not beating myself up cause I didn’t shoot him,” said Meli. “I know after he saw me, I think the last shot he fired was the one he used on himself.”
The gunman was dead, but not before taking two innocent lives with him and taking the innocence of everyone else.
“I don’t ever want to see anyone that way ever,” said Meli. “It just bothers me.”

As it should anyone with a human soul.

But as the media celebrates the teachers in New Town as heroes for dying to try to protect their students – as it should – it’s high time we took a moment to praise our live heroes; the ones that choke back their fear and respond to unexpected trauma…

…and because they had the tools they needed to confront the trauma,  a deranged killer, at closer to even odds, were able to be live heroes.

Greetings, City Pages Readers.  If you’ve been reading what certain gutless Tweeps have been writing – nope.  I don’t advocate arming elementary school kids.

I do point out – correctly – that Israel has been arming teachers for decades, to prevent, as it happens, mass school shootings.  And it’s worked.

This is, of course, a mindless, senseless tragedy, the kind of thing that makes you re-examine your faith in your fellow human, if you have any.  I urge everyone to send your thoughts, prayers or whatever you believe in, as well as a buck or two to whatever relief effort springs up when the time comes, to the families and community.

But let’s be honest, if we can, for a moment; look at just about every mass shooting in the past twenty years.  Schools, universities, malls, the Aurora theater, post offices, the entire City of Chicago.  What do they have in common?  They’re gun free zones, by federal, state or local law.

More below.

———-

Another deranged gunman has cut loose in another building full of people forbidden from being able to defend themselves and the children in their “care” by federal law.

Initial reports indicate the gunman – who was killed, somehow – was the father of one of the students.

How many more children need to die before we realize “gun free zones” don’t work?

UPDATE:  Count up the number of school shootings we’ve seen in the past decade and a half, including two in Minnesota (with 11 dead) – all in “gun free zones”.  What was that “definition of insanity” again?

In Israel, in the seventies, there were a number of attacks by terrorist gunmen on Israeli schools and school buses.  The Israelis responded…how?  By banning guns in schools, just to keep the law-abiding terrorists in line?

No. They allowed (and on field trips, required) teachers to be armed.  And it worked.  And it’s still working.

In 1987, Florida became the eighth state, and the first large state, to adopt a “shall issue” law requiring the state to issue carry permits to applicants with clean criminal records, no record of drug abuse or alcohol problems and no known record of violent mental illness.

Next week, the state of 19 million people will cross the threshold to a million active permits:

Applications for the permits in the state of 19.1 million people have doubled since 2007. Only 0.3 percent of the more than 2 million total permits issued since 1987 have been revoked, said Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.

“Floridians who are obtaining these licenses are obtaining them for the right reason and are using them in an appropriate way,” Putnam said.

Florida’s adoption of concealed carry in 1987 was the Battle of Gettysburg in the war over the Second Amendment.  For the previous twenty years, gun control had gone from “nutty racist fringe” to “dominant racist ideology”; a majority of Americans, the stats said, supported banning handguns; guns in the hands of the law-abiding were banned not only in authoritarian cesspools like Chicago and DC, but in placid burbs like Morton Grove, Illinois.

Bur since Florida flipped the orcs the finger, the tide has turned…

…everywhere but in the mainstream media.  Reuters – who wrote this story – notes…:

Florida has been a bastion for gun owners, with some of the most expansive laws on the books regarding who can carry weapons and when they can be used.

OK, we’ll call that a flub by someone who doesn’t know the issue (or gets their information from the media):  the United States has the expansive law, the Second Amendment, that says we all have the right, granted by God or whatever creator you believe in, to keep and bear arms.  States may place prudent restrictions on that right.  Florida merely has among the most enlightened set of restrictions.

But this…:

A state law that can make it difficult to prosecute shooters who claim self-defense has come under scrutiny following the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in February.

…is proof that we’ve got a ways to go.

“Stand your Ground” laws don’t “make it difficult to prosecute”; they shield the law-abiding, legitimate self-defense shooter from spurious, agenda-driven legal harassment. And in the vast majority of cases that don’t get politicized by a president during an election year, they work well.

Anyway – congrats, Florida!

The US 7th Circuit has struck down Illinois’ civilian firearms carry ban:

The state of Illinois would have to allow ordinary citizens to carry weapons under a federal appeals court ruling issued today, but the judges also gave lawmakers 180 days to put their own version of the law in place.

In a 2-1 decision that is a major victory for the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said the state’s ban on carrying a weapon in public is unconstitutional.

“We are disinclined to engage in another round of historical analysis to determine whether eighteenth-century America understood the Second Amendment to include a right to bear guns outside the home. The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside,” the judges ruled.

And there’s your importance of Heller and McDonald, right there.

“The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense. Illinois had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden.

Boy, has it ever.

David Sigale, an attorney who represented the Second Amendment Foundation in the lawsuit, called the decision by the appeals court in Chicago “historic.”

“What we are most pleased about is how the court has recognized that the Second Amendment is just as, if not at times more, important in public as it is in the home,” he said. “The right of self-defense doesn’t end at your front door.”

I loved the little bit of closet fascism buried in this next graf (emphasis added):

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel said through a spokesman that he was “disappointed with the court’s decision.” The city is reviewing the opinion and will work with others “to best protect the residents of Chicago and still meet constitutional restrictions,” Bill McCaffrey added.

Comandante “Mayor” Emanuel:  your city is a war zone.  The best thing you can do to “protect the residents” is require each of them to become proficient at firearms.

(more…)