{"id":734,"date":"2007-04-19T04:34:41","date_gmt":"2007-04-19T10:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/04\/19\/building-the-safer-criminal\/"},"modified":"2008-02-14T17:53:34","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T22:53:34","slug":"building-the-safer-criminal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=734","title":{"rendered":"Building The Safer Criminal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Identify the quote:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Was it Charleton Heston, Ted Nugent, or Me?<\/p>\n

Trick question, naturally. It was Thomas Jefferson. And he was as right 200 years ago as he is today.<\/p>\n

The Second Amendment movement has made massive <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

David Kopel writes today in the Wall Street Journal<\/a> about the (lack of) value in these niggling controls:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It might have been worse. But Utah has a shall-issue law (hence the sign):<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The value of the armed citizen in self-defense is shown daily<\/a> (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).<\/p>\n

\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And yet, over and over again, Americans show they know better:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As a commenter noted, best to let numbers rather than anecdotes drive policy.<\/p>\n

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

Where’s the argument?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gun-free-zones","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}