I’d love to be at the federal building in Chicago right now.

I wonder how many potential handgun owners are bum-rushing the court administrators right now, filing suits against Chicago’s gun ban (even more draconian than the DC ban which Heller euthanized this morning)?

From Page 57 of Scalia’s opinion:

It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon. There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; It cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upperbody strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.

Even more?  Michelle Malkin notes:

And it’s not just that self-defense is a subsidiary right to the common defense, it’s (page 26) “the central component of the right itself.”

And not just self-defense in the sense of immediate threat to life: it’s for the defense of life, family, and property (p.54):

The prohibition extends, moreover, to the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. 

In other words, Chicago – to paraphrase old friend and frequent commenter Angryclown – your gun ban ain’t worth dicta.

UPDATE:  Well, that didn’t take long! 

Yaaay, NRA! 

I’m going to do a rare bit of mid-day writing to point to this bit here, which – presuming it’s accurate, and the author Tom Goldstein takes pains to temper our enthusiasm – could be excellent news for Real Americans (emphasis added):

It does look exceptionally likely that Justice Scalia is writing the principal opinion for the Court in Heller – the D.C. guns case. That is the only opinion remaining from the sitting and he is the only member of the Court not to have written a majority opinion from the sitting. There is no indication that he lost a majority from March. His only dissent from the sitting is for two Justices in Indiana v. Edwards. So, that’s a good sign for advocates of a strong individual rights conception of the Second Amendment and a bad sign for D.C.

There are signs the Supreme Court is going to release its ruling Wednesday.

Allahpundit notes:

What’s strange is that, per O’Shea, there’s likely to be a majority on the threshold question but then all kinds of splits within the court on the subsidiary questions — and Scalia, being more of an absolutist on this issue, is unlikely to represent the majority on all or most of those subsidiary questions. Roberts himself, or Kennedy, would seem to be a better bet. Is that a hint that maybe the Court’s not going to reach those subsidiary questions at all, and will content itself with a simple ruling on the individual rights issue?

I’m loathe to indulge in exuberance of any sort, hence won’t speculate “perhaps the absolutists will win on all the subsidiary questions”. It’s never that easy.

Mike O’Shea has another fascinating possibility:

If D.C.’s handgun ban is held unconstitutional in Heller (as it should be), the city of Chicago’s essentially identical ban on handguns will offer a prime target for a test case designed to present the issue of Second Amendment incorporation. A lower court that considers the issue in light of the Supreme Court’s post-1960 “selective incorporation” precedents will have a very difficult time avoiding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, at least in some form, against state and local governments. The only way lower courts might be able to avoid that conclusion is by cleaving to nineteenth century Supreme Court opinions like Presser v. Illinois and U.S. v. Cruikshank that declined to incorporate the Second Amendment, just as the Court at that time declined to incorporate the other provisions of the Bill of Rights. The Court repeatedly rejected this approach during the twentieth century.

I’ll be watching the SCOTUS wire bright and early tomorrow.

UPDATE:  Apparently Allahpundit had the wrong date for the next session in his copy; change to fit reality.

Plenty of bloggers fisked the bejeebers out of Nick Coleman’s column from a week ago Sunday (April 13); KAR lit it up pretty well, among several others.

But it’s still sitting out there, taunting me. And so while I’ve been trying to hand off the Nick-fisking duties to the crop of newer bloggers, and have been gratified to see many new Minnesota blogs standing on that wall guarding the Second Amendment, there are some siren calls that can’t be resisted.

Because the fact is that for all of Coleman’s agenda-flogging, he actually makes a few brief nods to something related to fairness.

I went to a die-in at the State Capitol on Wednesday, marking the anniversary of last year’s slaughter at Virginia Tech, where a deranged kid killed 32.I brought my Glock.I didn’t really. It would have been weird and crazy to take a gun to an event marking a massacre, especially the very kind of gun used in the massacre.

Actually, it’s…well, I won’t say “weird and crazy”, but it’s a little odd to lead off with a joke about it.

But then again, this country is weird and crazy about guns.

I went to a local gun store Wednesday (I have a permit) and found I could get a nifty Glock 19 — the 9-millimeter semiautomatic model that Cho Seung-Hui used on April 16, 2007 [not to mention an awful lot of policemen and, let it be noted, tens of thousands of honest citizens – Ed.] — for less than what Cho spent.

He bought his Glock for $571 at a Roanoke, Va., gun store. I could have purchased one Wednesday for $550.

It was on sale! Who says Americans don’t celebrate history?

“So what?” is the first thing to jump to mind. The ebbs and flows of the handgun market have what to do with the story? What’s the connection?

“More expensive handguns equal mass murder?”

The die-in (it was called a lie-in, actually) [then why change the name for your column? – Ed.] was organized by Protect Minnesota, an umbrella group representing five gun-control organizations pushing for tighter rules on sales and universal background checks on buyers. Thirty-two people wore black T-shirts that said, “Minnesotans Against Being Shot” as well as ribbons of maroon and orange (Virginia Tech’s colors) made by families of the victims. One by one, to the solemn beat of a drum, they went down on the Capitol steps and remained motionless, as if asleep.

It was like the state Senate, but without the pompous speeches.

Or the Strib newsroom

OK, it was one of those media events that is easy to mock and, indeed, it was mocked by a few underemployed members of the gun-rights lobby who couldn’t resist the temptation to spoil a somber moment by holding up frat boy signs to the effect that a teacher or student packing heat could have stopped the carnage, which is the kind of thing I wonder about when a cop gets shot.

Leaving aside Coleman’s failed attempt at clairvoyance (he asked the pro-liberty guys what they did for a living?) or the ad-hominem attack (frat boy signs?), or the complete illogic of comparing the “teacher or student packing heat” with a cop, who is paid (inadequately) to go where danger is…

…well, if you leave all of that aside, there’s nothing left to talk about.

Never mind.

Next, Coleman skirts perilously close to fairness…

Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people. And sometimes people with guns kill other people with guns.

…without quite getting there:

It’s as complicated as our feelings, and nobody’s come up with a convincing response to slaughters such as Virginia Tech, especially proposals to let college kids carry guns on campus. Rep. Tony Cornish, a Republican from Good Thunder, introduced one such obscenely timed proposal Wednesday.

Neither Nick Coleman nor I can define obscenity. But like most people, I know it when I see it.

Do you wonder how many guns were sold in the week after Virginia Tech, or Columbine, or Red Lake (hint: plenty). Do you wonder how many people started carrying, with or without a permit, after massacres like those? (Lots). How many NRA memberships are applied for after events like this? (A big surge, usually).

It’s from people who know the real obscenity; that while there is no guarantee that an armed student or teacher could have ended Cho Seung-Hui’s killing spree, having a gun increases your odds of walking away when the next Cho – or mugger, or abusive ex-spouse, or rapist or thug in the street – commits his or her next obscene act.

Still, Coleman does note both sides of one key fact:

The Virginia Tech killer shouldn’t have gotten a gun, because he should have been in a psychiatric ward. Virginia closed that loophole two weeks after the 32 died.

All the more reason, of course, not to assume government will take care of you.

But there remain many loopholes to shut, including in Minnesota, where some unlicensed sellers can still sell guns to unknown buyers without background checks. To tighten those laws is not anti-gun. It is pro-safety.

“It’s harder to transfer title to my fishing boat than a gun,” said St. Paul City Council Member Lee Helgen…

Then perhaps Minnesota’s boat control laws are almost as dumb as our gun control laws?

…who was displaying a gun shot map showing that the area north of the Capitol was well-sprayed with gunfire last month.

I’m confused: Does Mr. Helgen – member of Dave “No puking Republicans!” Thune’s ultraliberal “Gang of Five” bloc on the Saint Paulitburo City Council – think that the “Well-sprayed” North End is being shot up by college professors and 21-or-older students with carry permits?

“I don’t know why everybody has to shoot somebody every time there’s a misunderstanding,” said 70-year-old bus driver Barb Sjerven, who was drawn to the steps by all the commotion while waiting for her Osakis, Minn., sixth-graders to finish touring the Capitol. “I mean, it’s OK to have guns,” Sjerven said. “But it seems like everybody has guns. So I can’t blame [the die-in people] for being concerned. There’s way too much shooting going on. And there’s something wrong with us. There really is.”

You don’t have to be on the side of anything more than common sense to agree with Barb Sjerven from Osakis.

There’s too much shooting.

And none of it is coming from people who give a rat’s ass about gun transfer laws, Lee Helgen’s map, or the “die-in’s” objectives.

It’s coming from criminals; the people who don’t care what the law is; the people who are too addled, impaired or defective to care about laws, morality, symbolic protests or Lee Helgen’s little maps. The people that are drawn to our city by the policies of people like Lee Helgen!

It’s not coming from college students, professors, office workers, bricklayers, bus drivers or even Metro columnists who are over 21, have clean criminal records, training, and the motivation to avoid being the next statistic for someone to mourn on the Capitol steps, under the watchful eye of a media who has the story about the significance of their death already written.

Glocks are on sale all month.

Keep ’em. I hate the trigger pull.

Wait – is that “obscene?”

Good thing Chicago bans gun ownership by law-abiding civilians!
Otherwise, goodness knows how bad this weekend of gang violence might have been!

A violent and deadly weekend continues in Chicago. At least 12 people have been shot, two of them killed, since Saturday morning. This comes after at least 20 people were shot, four of them killed, from Friday night through early Saturday.

A 28-year-old man was shot and killed at an auto body repair shop on the Southwest Side Saturday morning. Raul Lemus was shot in the stomach at 2520 W. 59th St. at about 11:20 a.m.

Lemus, of 4630 S. Talman Av., died several hours later at Stroger Hospital, making him the sixth person killed in Chicago since Friday night. Police said the shooting appeared to be gang related.

Also Saturday morning, Michael Giles, 26, was shot and killed inside his home at 336 N. Avers Av. Harrison Area detectives are investigating.

Because, as everyone knows, if you keep “assault rifles” out of the hands of the law-abiding citizen, gang-bangers will be disarmed.

Really!

In another case, a suspect toting an AK-47 has been charged with murder and three counts of attempted murder after allegedly killing a man and shooting at police. Bennie Teague of 6200 S. Sacramento Av. is due in bond court Sunday afternoon.

It’s amazing no one was hurt during the shootout between police and Teague, who was firing an assault rifle.

(…other than the guy he’s already murdered from among the pack of defenseless sheeple that he could have killed before the police arrived, naturally).

Police say the gunman opened fire on them Friday night at 110th and South Union. They tracked him down after he allegedly shot and killed 34-year-old Marcus Hendricks inside a plumbing business a few blocks away.

Y’know, it’ll only be a few more decades of complete disarmament before the people of Chicago will be rendered safe from this kind of thing!

This week is the planned protest by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus against the laws that require most American college and university campuses to be gun-free zones disarmed victim zones.  These zones – where the law-abiding citizen, whether student or staffer, is enjoined from carrying a legally-permitted firearm that they have a permit to carry for self-defense.

These laws have contributed to the deaths of dozens of American high school and college students in the past twenty years.

During the week of April 21-25, 2008, thousands of college students throughout the United States, organized under the banner of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC), will attend classes wearing empty holsters, in protest of state laws and school policies that stack the odds in favor of dangerous criminals and armed killers by disarming law abiding citizens licensed to carry concealed handguns virtually everywhere else.

SCCC hosted its first national collegiate Empty Holster Protest during the week of October 22-26, 2007, on the campuses of approximately 125 U.S. colleges and universities. This second Empty Holster Protest will expand upon the concept of the first protest by placing greater emphasis on educating the uninformed. Protesters will focus on sharing the facts of “concealed carry” with students and faculty who may not be aware that concealed carry laws exist or that those laws differ on college campuses from most other locations.

I’m aware that an SCCC protest is being planned at Saint Cloud State.  I’d welcome comments from participants from SCSU, or any other campuses.  I expect campus administrations to attempt to “manage” these protests – and naturally will welcome word of any administration actions.

Palestinian gunman kills eight Jewish seminary students:

Witnesses said the gunman went into the library at the Mercaz Harav seminary in the city’s Kiryat Moshe quarter and opened fire.

Here’s the interesting part:  the shooting was stopped…wait for it…wait for it…

…by an armed student:

One of the students, Yitzhak Dadon, reportedly shot the gunman twice before he was finally killed by an off-duty Israeli army officer, who had gone to the school after hearing gunfire.

“I shot him twice in the head,” he told the Reuters news agency.

“He started to sway and then someone else with a rifle fired at him, and he died.”

I have a strong hunch he wasn’t going to be doing any more shooting after that.

Israel has had a policy of allowing lawful concealed carry in schools of all types since an earlier rash of terrorist school shootings.  The rate of school shootings in Israel is vanishingly low.
Why does the American left hate students?

Another multiple victim shooting at an American post-secondary school. This time, possibly zero dead; some reports say the shooter killed himself:

Several people have been shot on the Northern Illinois University campus. The suspect reportedly killed himself and officials say the danger has passed.

Officials confirmed that several people were shot at Cole Hall, a large lecture hall on campus, shortly after 3 p.m. and the campus was immediately placed on lockdown. Kishwaukee Hospital reported that up to 15 people were being brought to the hospital.

While I can’t find a specific policy on the NIU website yet, Illinois has among the “toughest” gun laws in the country (where “onerous to the law-abiding” = “tough”).

Looks like they’ve done yet another fine job.

UPDATE: I had a bad feeling it couldn’t last. Four dead, plus the shooter.

Good thing Illinois is the most anti-gun state in the Union; goodness knows what would have happened.

Doug Tice – who’s taken and run with “The Big Question” after Eric Black’s departure – noted something from Saturday’s NARN broadcast:

Yesterday, on one of the Saturday afternoon “Northern Alliance Radio Network” talk shows on AM 1280 The Patriot, I heard two of the the allies — I believe, Mitch Berg (from shotinthedark.info) and Captain Ed (from captainsquartersblog.com) — discussing last week’s awful Nebraska mall shooting. Their take on it was intriguing.

Doug noted that, first, I…

…insisted that nearly all mass shootings in recent years have occured in “gun-free” zones.

Not surprisingly, evidence for these assertions has been compiled and disseminated by scholar John Lott, the famed advocate of the “more guns-less crime” theory.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist – or an economist – to note that the vast preponderance of spree killings – certainly all of the ones the media brings up – take place in “gun free zones”, in academic sources like Lott, as well as, er less-academic ones:

Schools. College campuses. Government buildings. The list goes on, and on, and on. And if there are exceptions to the rule, they are often as not found in “gun-free” states.

We can certainly argue the premise. The numbers are on my side, but there is most certainly an argument to be had.

But Tice goes on to the more interesting question:

But anyhow, the allies didn’t stop there. Apparently following the lead of Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, they argued that victims or victims’ families in this situation may have grounds for a lawsuit against the mall based on the gun ban.

No doubt there will, as usual, be lawsuits, alleging various reasons for holding the mall liable for the tragedy. But the new theory (new to me, anyhow) is this: By deliberately banning otherwise permitted guns from their property, the mall managers exposed their customers to greater danger from criminal violence, since the ban ensured that no one would have the means to return fire.

Not “legally”, anyway. Fact is, if Nebraska’s law is anything like Minnesota’s, then carrying illegally in the store would have been a legal infraction, punishable by a fairly trivial fine. I’m not sure if there’d be any additional penalty to a carry permit holder actually using a permitted gun in a posted space in legal self-defense, or if a jury would ever convict them of it if they had done so. I don’t know that there’s ever been a case on the subject.

But I digress. The fact remains that the Westroads Mall had declared itself a no-gun zone – for those who follow the niceties of the law, anyway. And I, like most carry-permit holders, would have honored that request – by keeping my gun, out of there. Also myself; I don’t go where I’m not wanted, as a rule, and I don’t spend my money there, either.

Tice cuts to the, er, Big Question:

Interesting, but also puzzling.

Granting, for the sake of argument, the Lottian view that gun-free status makes a place of business more dangerous for its patrons, this lawsuit theory seems a surprising position for conservatives to take, since they presumably are defenders of private property rights.

True. (And to be perfectly accurate, I’m not entirely sure Ed shares my views on this issue; guns are pretty much my turf, among the NARN crew).

Doesn’t a property owner have a right to ban guns from his property, even if it is unwise to do so? And aren’t those who believe such a ban puts them at risk free not to enter his property?

Yes, and yes. It’s a freedom I generally exercise, too. As noted above, I rarely if ever patronize posted businesses, if there is a reasonable alternative.

Aren’t customers assuming any risk, and waiving any right to recompense, when they knowingly and voluntarily enter a gun-free zone?

I’m not aware that there is any law or precedent about this. Has there ever been a case with a:

1. legal activity, whose practicioners are…
2. …permitted by the state to carry out the activity with…
3. …an object that is legal – a firearm – for the express purpose of…
4. …defending themselves and bystanders from…
5. …an illegal activity that also happens to be a lethal threat?

…being enjoined for matters of a shopkeeper’s pure personal preference (as opposed to an empirical hazard – which, let us not forget, doesn’t exist with concealed carry permit holders)?

I’m trying to think of any situation that’d be even analogous. Barring defibrilators from your store (they can be misused!)? Banning asthma inhalers (they can be abused)?

Here’s the, er, Big Counterquestion: Does your property right trump my right to self-preservation?

The situation seems roughly comparable to the debate over bar and restaurant smoking bans. Conservatives as a rule argue that smoking bans are improper because a property owner should be able to decide whether to allow smoking or not. People who fear secondhand smoke need not work there or take their leisure there — or so the conservative line usually goes.

By and large conservatives can be expected to respond with disdain to the idea of lawsuits based on harm from voluntary exposure to secondhand smoke.

True. But the two ideas aren’t really similar. If I’m in a bar, smell smoke, and decide I don’t like it, I (and my friends and family) can make an orderly exit with a reasonable chance of getting out alive.

If I’m in that same bar, and a spree killer stands in the doorway and starts blazing away, the decision loop is a lot tighter; neither I nor the bar owner can be reasonably assumed to have chosen this activity; it’s being inflicted on all of us against our will. The threat to my life, liberty and happiness isn’t at some hypothetical intersection of property rights and science. It is in the hands of a madman with a gun. A madman that the store owner has forbidden me to defend myself against, without (obviously, and indeed impossibly) safeguarding me and mine from him.
He’s put my right to live snugly behind his property rights.  Just as the owners of the Westroads Mall did.

And let’s not forget that while the science of secondhand smoke is very much up in the air, the science of hot lead is not.

Here are three questions — assuming, for this purpose, that both secondhand smoke and gun bans are hazardous to people voluntarily exposed to them.

Question 1: Is it possible, coherantly, to believe secondhand smoke lawsuits are ridiculous but gun-ban lawsuits make sense?

Question 2: Is coherance possible the other way around — secondhand smoke lawsuits are sensible but not gun-ban lawsuits?

Going to a bar and smoking are both voluntary activities. One may leave a bar and find a smoke-free place at ones’ leisure. One may not leave this life, metaphysics aside, to go to a different one if someone gives you secondhand lead. Being enjoined by a property owner from taking legal steps with a legal gun that one is legally permitted to carry to safeguard the life that you and yours have is a whole different level of importance.

And when you’re talking about government offices and public buildings, I think it’s even more clear-cut. The right to protect ones’ life, and ones family’s lives, exists on at least as high a moral plane as private property (and at least a plane higher than smoking).

Question 3: Again assuming the Lottian view correct, are gun bans by private businesses a market failure caused, as market failures often are, by inadequate information — in this case people’s failure to understand what really makes them unsafe? Is the mall owner’s self interest in attracting shoppers better served by what Lottians would consider the illusory safety of the advertised gun ban than by the actual safety of allowing guns?

When statistically tiny numbers of Americans were poisoned by tampered Tylenol, or sickened by tainted spinach, sales of both dropped through the floor, creating marketing nightmares for both industries.

Against that – in just two incidents in “gun-free zones” in the past year, over forty people have died. In Minnesota, ten people have died in two school shooting incidents in the past few years – all of them on “gun-free” property. I’m not sure where that places the relative odds of dying of tainted beef to being shot by a madman at a posted business or federally “gun-free” school, but I’m guessing it’s pretty daunting.

I think the market has at least partially answered Doug’s question; the vast majority of the stores that “posted” themselves in the wake of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act have quietly dropped the signs in recent years; perhaps some were swayed by the protests of people like me, who made our displeasure at the unwarranted bigotry known. The vast majority, I suspect, simply realized that the law-abiding gun owner was less a threat than the average customer, and that Wes Skoglund was a lying moron.

If it takes a lawsuit to convince the rest that my right to protect my life is on a par with their property right – or at least that trying to trump my right to survive with their property rights is an act with consequences – I think I’m willing to go with that.

Am I missing something?

UPDATE:  Of course I’m missing something!  Or at least in Minnesota, according to the panoply of lawyers in the comment section below. 

So the legal route is, at least under Minnesota law, a non-starter (I don’t know about Nebraska law), and as commenter Jay Reding points out, the market does seem to be taking care of things in Minnesota. 

And commenter JoelR notes that, since carrying ones’ legally-permitted handgun in a posted store is an infraction that might be punishable by a $25 fine in Minnesota, it’s pretty much worth committing “civil disobedience” anyway, as long as one acts legally (to say nothing of tactfully and respectfully – keeping the gun carefully concealed and not making an ass of oneself.  Which is always a good idea).

But let me emphasize; while the law would seem to hold that the stores are legally blameless for anyone getting murdered because nobody can legally carry a firearm to defend themselves, it still doesn’t make it right.  Hence, I’ll continue to avoid posted stores; less out of fear of mass-murder than out of protest against bigotry against the demonstrably law-abiding.

Like me.

The Westroads Mall in Omaha – site of Wednesday’s horrible spree-shooting – is a “gun free” zone:

Turns out that the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, where Robert Hawkins killed 8 with an SKS medium-powered rifle is, guess what, a Gun Free Zone.

For an overview of all the media discussing this fact, see GunPundit, Murdoc’s fledgling gun-oriented site.

From FoxNews:

But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.

Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?

Show me a spree-killing, and as a rule I’ll show you a “gun free zone”.  The exceptions largely prove the rule, in fact.

The usual suspects are lining up to claim the usual BS (via Say Uncle), or in the case of this ignorant Australian knuckle-dragger, commit libel:

NEBRASKA, the farming state with the highest per capita gun ownership in the US, began the year with LB-454, a new state law allowing people 21 years and over to carry a concealed handgun pretty much wherever they go.

Applicants must pass a routine police check, complete a basic handgun training course (most are run by ex-cops) and pay $US100 ($115) for a five-year permit. It’s as simple as that.

Simpler still – the shooter used a rifle.  Not a concealed handgun. 

It is, in fact, as simple as that.

There might be some meaning to this tragic waste of life if all over the Cornhusk state [ ? ? ?- Ed] – the only US jurisdiction that still executes prisoners by frying them in the electric chair – the gun-culture penny was to finally drop.

Sadly, that is unlikely to be the case. Out in the American Midwest tragedies such as Westroads and the Virginia Tech massacre in April, when 32 people were killed [ Virginia’s in the Midwest?  Who knew? – Ed.], often serve to reinforce the convictions of gun nuts who believe that being armed is not just a constitutional right but goddamn common sense, too.

I’m sure a few people at “gun-free” Westroads Mall thought it might have made sense yesterday.

Take Chuck Zellers, a resident of the state capital, Lincoln, who wrote to his local newspaper, the Lincoln Journal Star, after the Virginia Tech slaughter to complain about an article in an Australian publication that had argued for stricter US gun control.

“Google Australian gun laws,” Mr Zellers urged his readers. “You will see several entries that, upon reading, dispel the notion that such stricter laws have reduced crime in that country. In fact, crime has risen in Australia since passing stricter laws.

As a Lincoln resident, Mr Zellers no doubt feels his freedoms have been violated by a local ordinance that denies convicted stalkers or anyone named in a protection order over the previous 10 years the right to a concealed weapon.

Is the columnist calilng Mr. Zellars a convicted stalker? 

Seems a bit…yellow?

After all, just down the road in Omaha no such restrictions exist.

And it is about as relevant as Mr. Nelson’s preeningly, gratingly ignorant column.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings – which could possibly have been thwarted had VT not been a gun-free zone – people and institutions around the country responded.

In the case of my neighbor, Hamline University in Saint Paul, the response involved punishing students that spoke out for concealed carry reform on the “gun-free” campus:

In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”

Ironically, Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota – the group that drove the Concealed Carry reform issue for a decade in Minnesota (not, as the media would have you believe, the NRA) – had most of its meetings at the Hamline University law school auditorium. 

But after the Virginia Tech massacre, school administrators across the country were ramping up security. Flip to any cable news channel and you’d hear experts talking about warning signs that had been missed. Cho had a history of threatening behavior and stalking. And a psychological evaluation had deemed him a threat to himself.

So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he’d been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he’d have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.

The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn’t allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he’s reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.

“‘Oh, he’s the crazy guy that they called the cops on.’ How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?” Scheffler asks.

For exercising his right to speak freely, he’s branded as a nutcase by the school’s administration.

Sort of like the Soviets used to do.  

While Hamline doesn’t have the rep for relentless PC noodling of, say, Macalester or St. Thomas, it gives both a run for the title.

He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn’t go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. “He had a gun and everything,” Bucholz says…Now Scheffler is looking to hire a lawyer of his own. Even if Hamline lifts the suspension, he doubts he’ll return to campus, he says. “If they’re going to treat me that way before, how will they treat me after?”

Dunno, but I hope his suit draws blood. 

Note to any Hamline administration reading this space; your worthless frat trash’s “puke on Mitch’s property” privileges are permanently revoked. 

Identify the quote:

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

Was it Charleton Heston, Ted Nugent, or Me?

Trick question, naturally. It was Thomas Jefferson. And he was as right 200 years ago as he is today.

The Second Amendment movement has made massive strides in the 25 years I’ve been involved; in 1983, eight states had shall-issue laws; today it’s 40 (and Vermont and Alaska require no permit at all to carry a concealed firearm). Gun control has become a third rail for Democrats; even they fear the NRA, with good (and justifiable) reason.

Of course, the controllers have gotten their due in states where they are still powerful, including Minnesota. Even in states with good, solid Shall Issue laws, they’ve managed to get “wins” like “gun-free school zones” and those dumb signs that you see (less and less frequently) around Minnesota barring guns from stores.

David Kopel writes today in the Wall Street Journal about the (lack of) value in these niggling controls:

In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him from carrying a gun on the premises [in Salt Lake City] and began shooting people who moments earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.

It might have been worse. But Utah has a shall-issue law (hence the sign):

Fortunately, someone else — off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth Hammond — also did not comply with the mall’s rules. After hearing “popping” sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire on the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other innocent bystanders from getting hurt. He bought time for the local police to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.

The value of the armed citizen in self-defense is shown daily (everywhere but the mainstream media, naturally), in incidents big (the Salt Lake City incident, the Pearl Mississippi and Appalachian College of Law shootings and many others) and small (estimates of firearms self-defense incidents ranging from the CDC’s half million a year up to Gary Kleck’s estimate of up to two million annual uses, most of which involve no shots being fired).

But let’s take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that would have ended the “gun-free zones” in Virginia’s public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the General Assembly’s action “because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” In an August 2006 editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: “Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.”

Actually, Virginia Tech’s policy only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns. Virginia Tech’s policy bans all guns on campus (except for police and the university’s own security guards); even faculty members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.

Virginia Tech thus went out of its way to prevent what happened at a Pearl, Miss., high school in 1997, where assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a handgun from his car and apprehended a school shooter. Or what happened at Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, when a mass murder was stopped by two students with law-enforcement experience, one of whom retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. Or in Edinboro, Pa., a few days after the Pearl event, when a school attack ended after a nearby merchant used a shotgun to force the attacker to desist. Law-abiding citizens routinely defend themselves with firearms.

In most of America – blue and red – the average schmuck in the street sees a gun as a tool with a specialized purpose; defending oneself (from criminals, deer and geese).

Gun control in America, for the past forty years, has been based on the elitist notion that a law-abiding common citizen somehow turns into blood-lusting cartoon the moment he gets a gun in his/her hands; it’s instructive to notice how many of those gun-ban-supporting elites, like Pinch Sulzberger and Diane Feinstein, consider themselves above that standard.

And yet, over and over again, Americans show they know better:

In Utah, there is no “gun-free schools” exception to the licensed carry law. In K-12 schools and in universities, teachers and other adults can and do legally carry concealed guns. In Utah, there has never been a Columbine-style attack on a school. Nor has there been any of the incidents predicted by self-defense opponents — such as a teacher drawing a gun on a disrespectful student, or a student stealing a teacher’s gun.

Israel uses armed teachers as part of a successful program to deter terrorist attacks on schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are following the Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism…In many states, “gun-free schools” legislation was enacted hastily in the late 1980s or early 1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime. Aimed at juvenile gangsters, the poorly written and overbroad statutes had the disastrous consequence of rendering teachers unable to protect their students.

Reasonable advocates of gun control can still press for a wide variety of items on their agenda, while helping to reform the “gun-free zones” that have become attractive havens for mass killers. If legislators or administrators want to require extensive additional training for armed faculty and other adults, that’s fine. Better that some victims be armed than none at all.

As a commenter noted, best to let numbers rather than anecdotes drive policy.

Very well; the numbers all show that armed, law-abiding citizens do at least no harm, and at best help prevent tragedies like Tuesday’s carnage.

Where’s the argument?

My NARN colleague Captain Ed has had his usual excellent commentary in re the Virginia Tech shooting yesterday.

But in his piece on the shootings this morning, he betrays a key misunderstanding (too much hobnobbing with Bill Buckley, perhaps?) of one of the issues:

However, concealed=carry permits would not necessarily have prevented this, either. As my cousin Mike pointed out in the comments yesterday, such permits require the holder to be 21 years of age or older. That would have disqualified at least three-quarters of the students on campus. It would have only taken one or two to confront the shooter in this case, and at Appalachian Law (also in Virginia), armed students successfully ended a rampage.

Well, Ed is right – all it would have taken was one.

Or none.

The key reason to have “shall-issue” laws in place is not just to kill criminals; it is to deter violent crime. 

And where have the highest-profile mass-shootings taken place?  Schools – which, by federal law, are “gun-free”.  Colleges, which have the option to follow the same route.  The New York subway, where Colin Ferguson murdered five people, knowing he’d have no resistance without a cop present (getting a carry permit in New York City is mainly a function of political connections).  Luby’s Cafeteria, in Lubbock Texas, long before Texas adopted a “shall issue” law (and where, famously, one woman watched her mother die of a gunshot wound, regretting having left her own gun in the car), an incident which helped lead Texas to adopt “Shall Issue”.  The McDonalds in San Ysidro, California, where 21 died; it’s as difficult for a civilian to get a permit in California as it was in 1981.

You don’t see many mass-murders at NRA conventions or NASCAR races. 

The possibility that a would-be killer might face armed civilians doesn’t guarantee safety, of course – but the legal guarantee that a would-be killer will not face such a threat (as was the case at Virginia Tech, Columbine, Red Lake, Cold Spring-Rokori, Pearl Mississippi and dozens of smaller shootings) certainly doesn’t make anyone safer.  A hard target is always safer than a soft target.

Back to Ed:

However, that student was a former law-enforcement officer who retrieved his service pistol from his car, not just a student with a carry permit.

True, and irrelevant.  Virginia had a “shall-issue” law in 2002; while former cops are more likely to have guns than the general public (thankfully, in that case), it wouldn’t have mattered if it were an ex-cop or “just” a student, a staffer or a passerby who shot or deterred the killer.  Statistically, armed citizens are every bit as effective as law-enforcment when it comes to face-to-face cases of self-defense.

The story is so old it hardly bears re-telling – but several decades ago, Israeli schools and their children were among Palestinian terrorists’ favorite targets.  Israel started allowing teachers to carry pistols – requiring it, in some instances. 

What do they know that we don’t?

My prayers go out to everyone involved in the massacre at Virginia Tech. 

Politics have no place in this horrific tragedy and ghastly crime  (As a personal aside; the shooter is reportedly dead.  I sincerely hope it was a cop that fired that last fatal bullet. I’m sick of these mass-murdering animals destroying dozens of lives and then checking out on their own).

But amid the shock, horror and (soon) grief, it’s worth noting that, according to the school’s policies and procedures guide, Virginia Tech is a safe zone for mass murderers “gun-free” school (emphasis added):

 2.2 Prohibition of Weapons

The university’s employees, students, and volunteers, or any visitor or other third party attending a sporting, entertainment, or educational event, or visiting an academic or administrative office building or residence hall, are further prohibited from carrying, maintaining, or storing a firearm or weapon on any university facility, even if the owner has a valid permit, when it is not required by the individual’s job, or in accordance with the relevant University Student Life Policies.  

 Any such individual who is reported or discovered to possess a firearm or weapon on university property will ked to remove it immediately.  Failure to comply may result in a student judicial referral and/or arrest, or an employee disciplinary action and/or arrest.

As Joel Rosenberg notes, a bill to allow law abiding permit-holders to carry guns on Virginia university campuses died in committee.

It’d be the depth of tastelessness to try to capitalize on this horror for political gain.  But when the shock wears off, it might be worth noting that disarming the law abiding doesn’t protect anyone.

One professor with a gun in his desk, one girl with a .38 in her purse, one student with a legal, permitted handgun, and this tragedy could have turned out very different.  Goodness knows obeying the University’s rules didn’t do anyone a damn bit of good.