Tag Archives: Gun-Free Zones

News

Obama-supporter Aaron Alexis opens fire in Navy Yard gun-free zone

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I want to make a few points about this latest multiple-victim public shooting, and I’ll do it with several links.

My friend Conway posted this article from National Review showing that multiple-victim public shootings are common in gun-free zones.

Excerpt:

Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,” Jim Kouri, the public-information officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me earlier this year at the time of the Aurora, Colo., Batman-movie shooting. Indeed, there have been many instances — from the high-school shooting by Luke Woodham in Mississippi, to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo. — where a killer has been stopped after someone got a gun from a parked car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.

Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.

I spoke with Lott after the Newtown shooting, and he confirmed that nothing has changed to alter his findings. He noted that the Aurora shooter, who killed twelve people earlier this year, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a 20-minute drive of his home. The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals. All of the other theaters allowed the approximately 4 percent of Colorado adults who have a concealed-handgun permit to enter with their weapons.

“Disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks,” Lott told me. “A couple hundred people were in the Cinemark Theater when the killer arrived. There is an extremely high probability that one or more of them would have had a legal concealed handgun with him if they had not been banned.”

Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

There is no evidence that private holders of concealed-carry permits (which are either easy to obtain or not even required in more than 40 states) are any more irresponsible with firearms than the police. According to a 2005 to 2007 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Bowling Green State University, police nationwide were convicted of firearms violations at least at a 0.002 percent annual rate. That’s about the same rate as holders of carry permits in the states with “shall issue” laws.

And another point to make is that the shooter was a liberal Democrat who opposed George W. Bush and supported Barack Obama.

Shooter was a pro-Obama, anti-Bush leftist

Here’s the news clip from CNN:

And the story from center-right Breitbart News about the clip:

Tuesday, on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” Michael Ritrovato spoke at length about his friend, suspected Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis. After expressing his condolences to the victims and their families, Ritrovato then expressed his shock over the actions of a man he described as being “like a brother to me” and a “good-natured guy.”

Ritrovato went on to explain that two of them had a close relationship based in part on their differences, specifically race and politics. Alexis was black, Ritrovato is white. Ritrovato described himself as conservative and Alexis is “more of a liberal type” who supported Barack Obama:

I would say things like, ‘You know, you are my brother from another mother.’ And he would say things like, ‘You’re my Italian mafia guy from New York.’ So we had things we joked about: Aaron wasn’t conservative like I am. He was more of a liberal type; he wasn’t happy with the former [Bush] administration. He was more happy with this [the Obama] administration — as far as presidential administrations.

So he is a leftist just like the Fort Hood shooter was a leftist. Just like Tsarnaev was a leftist. Just like the FRC shooter Corkins was a leftist. Just like the Gabby Giffords shooter was a leftist. Just like Jared Loughner was a leftist. These people are all Democrats. (See below for links). If gun control is for anyone, it should be for leftists. They are the crazy ones who prefer violence to debate. They aren’t used to debate, because they aren’t used to hearing other points of view.

The non-existent AR-15

Finally, the radically leftist Washington Post reports that the mainstream media invented an imaginary AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in their biased coverage, in a blatantly partisan attempt to push for more gun control.

Excerpt:

CNN correspondent Pamela Brown just reported on air that Aaron Alexis, the deceased suspect in the Navy Yard shootings, entered the facility yesterday armed with a shotgun. Citing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as well as law enforcement sources, Brown reported that the gunman had tried to purchase an AR-15 at a gun shop in Northern Virginia but was turned down. Two pistols were also recovered.

He had a shotgun and two handguns – no AR-15, because he was turned down for an AR-15.

But radically leftist CNN reported that he had an AR-15:

This morning, CNN’s John Berman said on the network’s program “Early Start”: “Alexis is the only gunman now, officials say. Yesterday, there was word that there was maybe a second, a third possible person involved in the attack. That is no longer the case. Officials say that Aaron Alexis was a lone gunman. This is what we know about him this morning. We know that he had an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle. He also had a different rifle and a glock, that is a handgun with him. It’s believed that the AR-15 was the main murder weapon used from the atrium above. That is also the weapon you’ll remember used by Adam Lanza in the Newtown massacre and James Holmes in Aurora. That’s the Colorado movie theater massacre.”

Other leftist “news” sources kept the lie going:

[…]The Associated Press:

Alexis carried three weapons: an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun that he took from a police officer at the scene, according to two federal law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation. The AR-15 is the same type of rifle used in last year’s mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school that killed 20 students and six women. The weapon was also used in the shooting at a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 and wounded 70.

The Washington Post notes that about a half-dozen leftist news sources reported on the fictitious AR-15, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

You would think these left-wing media people would learn from previous retractions not to let their left-wing politics determine the narrative, but they don’t. It’s the same thing every day, over and over. This is what happens, though, when newsrooms are packed full of radical leftists. There is no diversity of opinion, no debate, no critical thinking. It’s an echo chamber.

Related posts

Commentary

Editorials by Stephen Baskerville, John Lott, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams

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I thought I would throw out a variety of recent editorials from some of my favorite economists and public policy experts. Economist Robert P. Murphy isn’t featured today, because I wrote an entire post about his excellent article on energy policy recently.

Does the government discourage marriage and family?

Patrick Henry College economist Stephen Baskerville wrote an article about the government’s role decline of marriage and the family.

He writes:

…80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

…Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

If these statements surprise you, I recommend you read the whole article to find out how this is done. You will never see anything like this reported in the mainstream media. They have an agenda that forbids telling the truth about this issue.

Do gun-free zones discourage multiple victim public shootings?

University of Maryland economist John R. Lott writes about gun-free zones and their effect on MVPS incidents in this Fox News article.

He writes:

Time after time multiple- victim public shootings occur in “gun free zones” — public places where citizens are not legally able to carry guns. The horrible attack today in Binghamton, New York is no different. Every multiple-victim public shooting that I have studied, where more than three people have been killed, has taken place where guns are banned.

You would think that it would be an important part of the news stories for a simple reason: Gun-free zones are a magnet for these attacks. Extensive discussions of these attacks can be found here and here. We want to keep people safe, but the problem is that it is the law-abiding good citizens, not the criminals, who obey these laws. We end up disarming the potential victims and not the criminals. Rather than making places safe for victims, we unintentionally make them safe for the criminal.

Lott is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime”, a study, published by University of Chicago Press, that shows how concealed-carry laws drastically reduce crime in every state in which these laws were enacted. Surprising? Take a second look.

Is moral equivalence good foreign policy?

Hoover Institute (Stanford University) economist Thomas Sowell writes about the danger of electing a president with no executive experience at any level. Especially one who believes, as Evan Sayet says, that evil is good, and good is evil.

Sowell writes about Obama’s affection for Iran and Russia:

What did his televised overture to the Iranians accomplish, except to reassure them that he was not going to do a damn thing to stop them from getting a nuclear bomb? It is a mistake that can go ringing down the corridors of history.

…This year, President Obama’s attempt to make a backdoor deal with the Russians, behind the backs of the NATO countries, was not only rejected but made public by the Russians– a sign of contempt and a warning to our allies not to put too much trust in the United States.

And his hostility for Israel and Britain:

However much Barack Obama has proclaimed his support for Israel, his first phone call as President of the United States was to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to whom he has given hundreds of millions of dollars, which can buy a lot of rockets to fire into Israel.

Our oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, has been downgraded by President Obama’s visibly less impressive reception of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, compared to the way that previous Presidents over the past two generations have received British Prime Ministers.

You can find a lot more about the kind of foreign policy threats we face at The Western Experience. The world is not a safe place, Bush just made it look that way by keeping our enemies in check, in exactly the way Obama won’t.

Is wealth redistribution morally justified?

Finally, let’s see what George Mason University economist Walter Williams has to say about the morality of wealth redistribution.

Excerpt:

The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral. People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They’ll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes. As it stands now, close to 50 percent of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient.

I recommend clicking on whichever of these stories strikes you as the most wrong or unfamiliar, and see if reading the whole thing changes your mind at all. I think it’s a fun experience to become more aware and tolerant of different views by learning about them. You can still disagree, but you’ll have more understanding.