Anti-gun people say they don’t like them because they are made to kill people. But they’re missing the point. They are made to kill bad people. Of course, everyone has a different definition of that. But ask yourself this question, if a gunman was coming at you down a hall, would you rather have a gun or not? If your car broke down in a scary neighborhood, would you rather have a gun or not?
Clayton Cramer makes several great points, I like this one:
A reminder: if someone commits mass murder with a weapon other than a gun, the national news media usually ignore it. For example, Hector Escudero started a fire at a casino in Puerto Rico in December 1987 as part of labor union activism, and killed 96 people. Julio Gonzalez threw $1 worth of gasoline into an illegal night club in New York City in April 1990 to get back at his girlfriend, and killed 87 people. These stories received almost no national news coverage at the time--while mass murders that were substantially smaller received vastly more coverage. Why? Gonzalez and Escudero's crimes didn't advance the cause of gun control.
He also reports the shooter was a legal resident and therefore was able to legally own a gun. Pish! Another, from the same blog post:
At Pearl High School, in Mississippi, the assistant principal brought an end to Luke Woodham's murders by retrieving a pistol from his vehicle[link]. Similarly, a student at Appalachian Law School stopped another mass murder by retrieving a gun from his car[link].
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have been at the Appalachian Law School than at VT yesterday.
Over at PowerLine, I read that 75-year-old Professor Liviu Lebrescu, a holocaust survivor, sacrificed his life for his students. He was shot while blocking the door to his classroom, while students jumped out of the window and the question, where do we find such men? is rightly asked.
Dr. John Lott wrote a piece on April 9 that seems prescient now, I quote:
With such rampant failures in the system, there is one piece of advice that could have saved Rebecca’s life: self-defense, get a gun.
Indeed, the University of Washington goes in the opposite direction and tries to protect people by declaring the campus a “gun free zone,” with the school’s code of conduct banning the “possession or use of firearms . . . except for authorized university purposes.”
Gun free zones may be well intentioned, but good intentions that is not enough. It is an understandable desire to ban guns. After all, if you ban guns from an area, people can’t get shot, right? But time after time when these public shootings occur, they disproportionately take place in gun free zones.
It is the law-abiding good citizens who would only use a gun for protection who obey these bans. Violating a gun free zone at a place such as a public university may mean expulsion or firing and arrest, real penalties for law-abiding citizens. But for someone intent on killing others, adding on these penalties for violating a gun free zone means little to someone who, if still alive, faces life in prison.
Unfortunately, instead of gun free zones ensuring safety for victims, ensuring that the victims are unarmed only makes things safer for attackers.
One of us conducted research [link] with Bill Landes at the University of Chicago that examined all the multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999. We found that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.
To the extent that attacks still occurred, they overwhelmingly happened in the special places within right-to-carry states where concealed handguns were banned. The University of Washington is a good example of this.
People remember, the very worst case of mass murder on US soil occurred when 19 men armed with box cutters hijacked aircraft. Another asshole drove a truck with fertilizer into a building and killed many people. Another drove a car into a group of students.
Statistics
Lies, damned lies and statistics goes the old saw. There's a reason for that old saw. People are quickly trotting out the old, tired numbers about the numbers of people killed in "gun crime" per year. Some say 31,000. Fine, but no one breaks down those numbers: how many were self-defense cases in which a woman, for example, shot and killed her attacking husband or boyfriend? Or how many were gang members shooting each other in some insane, inane battle over "turf"?
If that's not enough, what about comparisons that put this statistic in perspective? How many people die in road accidents per year? How many die each year from migraine-related strokes? How many die from drug overdose? Or from "knife crime" or lawnmowers, or some other cause? Any idea how many of those occur and aren't deemed news worthy? Just because it's not reported doesn't mean it doesn't happen but GUNS, oh yes, that always gets reported hence the role it plays is vastly overstated; a persistent, clever repeating of a lie will never be the truth.
But what do I know? I'm no gun statistician, but this guy is.
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