Tag Archives: Safety

News

Concealed carry permitholder stops stabbing rampage in Utah

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Here’s a story from KSL TV, in Utah. (H/T All American Blogger)

Excerpt:

A man stabbed two people at the Smith’s Marketplace grocery store in downtown Salt Lake City before being subdued by a bystander.

The attack took place around 5:30 p.m. in the parking lot of the store at 455 South and 500 East. According to a witness, it appears one man was stabbed in the side of the head and another was stabbed in the stomach. The exact condition of the victims is unknown, but police believe the injuries are very serious and possibly critical.

Police say a bystander with a concealed carry permit witnessed the attack and stepped in to keep it from escalating.

“(The bystander) was suspicious of what might be going on, and when he saw the stabbing, he just drew his pistol and challenged the individual,” which caused the alleged attacker to lie down on the ground, Brian Purvis with the Salt Lake City Police Department said. By the time police officers arrived on the scene, the man was subdued and is now in custody.

The attacker apparently bought the knife inside the store.

Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens can be used to save lives.

Commentary

Do gun registries solve crimes? Learning from the Canadian experience

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John Lott explains in the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

The D.C. Council will soon vote on a new law that would eliminate several obstacles for gun buyers — a five-hour training course, ballistics testing, a vision test, and a ban on certain types of ammunition. But they will leave unchanged the registration requirement for gun owners. D.C. could learn a lot from Canada’s decision to finally rescind its gun registry in February.

Beginning in 1998, Canadians spent a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a registry for long guns — in the U.S., the same amount per gun owner would come to $67 billion. For all that money, the registry was never credited with solving a single murder. Instead, it became an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from traditional policing activities.

Gun control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue. Their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun is left at a crime scene, and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link it back to the criminal.

Unfortunately, it rarely works out this way. Criminals are seldom stupid enough to leave behind crime guns that are registered to themselves.

From 2003 to 2009, there were 4,257 homicides in Canada, 1,314 of which were committed with firearms. Data provided last fall by the Library of Parliament reveal that murder weapons were recovered in fewer than one-third of the homicides with firearms. About three-quarters of the identified weapons were unregistered. Of the weapons that were registered, about half were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide.

In only 62 cases — that is, nine per year, or about 1 percent of all homicides in Canada — was the gun registered to the accused. Even in these, the registry does not appear to have played an important role in finding the killer. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case.

Note that the data provided above cover all guns, including handguns. It isn’t just the long-gun registry — there is also no evidence that Canada’s handgun registry, started in 1934, has ever been important in solving a single homicide.

In parts of the United States where registration is required, the results have been no different. Neither Hawaii, D.C., nor Chicago can point to any crimes that have been solved using registration records.

Nor is there any evidence that registration has reduced homicides. Research published last year by McMaster University professor Caillin Langmann in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence confirmed what other academic studies have found: “This study failed to demonstrate a beneficial association between legislation and firearm homicide rates between 1974 and 2008.” There is not a single refereed academic study by criminologists or economists that has found a significant benefit. A recent Angus Reid poll indicates that Canadians understand this, with only 13 percent believing that the registry has been successful.

The problem isn’t just that the $2.7 billion spent on registration over 17 years hasn’t solved any crimes. It is that the money could have been used to put more police on the street or pay for more health care or cut taxes.

We have been trying all kinds of things since Obama was elected that were already tried in other countries. Green energy, stimulus spending, green jobs programs, socialized medicine, printing money to pay off record deficits, and so on. We need to start learning from the experiences of other countries. If something hasn’t worked in another country, then we shouldn’t be trying it here. We should do what has been known to work. Gun registries don’t solve crimes.

News

Wisconsin Republican introduces bill to protect children of single mothers

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From Yahoo Parenting.

Excerpt: (links removed)

In Wisconsin, a state senator has introduced a bill aimed at penalizing single mothers by calling their unmarried status a contributing factor inchild abuse and neglect.

Senate Bill 507, introduced by Republican Senator Glenn Grothman, moves to amend existing state law by “requiring the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.”

The bill would require educational and public awareness campaigns held by the board to emphasize that not being married is abusive and neglectful of children, and to underscore “the role of fathers in the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect.”

Saying that people “make fun of old-fashioned families,” Grothman — who has never been married and has no children — criticized social workers for not agreeing that children should only be raised by two married biological parents, and told a state Senate committee that he hopes the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention board, of which he’s a member, could “publicize something that’s politically incorrect but has to be said in our society.”

“Whether that leads to more people paying attention and having children after they’re married or whether that leads to some others making a choice for adoptions,” he said.

Is he right about his assertion? Let’s see what the research says.

Excerpt:

The institution that most strongly protects mothers and children from domestic abuse and violent crime is marriage. Analysis of ten years worth of findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has conducted since 1973, demonstrates that mothers who are or ever have been married are far less likely to suffer from violent crime than are mothers who never marry.

Specifically, data from the NCVS survey show that:

  • Married women with children suffer far less abuse than single mothers. In fact, the rate of spousal, boyfriend, or domestic partner abuse is twice as high among mothers who have never been married as it is among mothers who have ever married (including those separated or divorced).
  • Married women with children are far less likely to suffer from violent crime in general or at the hands of intimate acquaintances or strangers. Mothers who have never married–including those who are single and living either alone or with a boyfriend and those who are cohabiting with their child’s father–are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than are mothers who have ever married.

Other social science surveys demonstrate that marriage is the safest place for children as well. For example:

  • Children of divorced or never-married mothers are six to 30 times more likely to suffer from serious child abuse than are children raised by both biological parents in marriage.2

Without question, marriage is the safest place for a mother and her children to live, both at home and in the larger community. Nevertheless, current government policy is either indifferent to or actively hostile to the institution of marriage. The welfare system, for example, can penalize low-income parents who decide to marry. Such hostility toward marriage is poor public policy; government instead should foster healthy and enduring marriages, which would have many benefits for mothers and children, including reducing domestic violence.

That’s just a summary, click the link for the all the data. Christians should care about the safety of children – and that means telling men and women the truth about the consequences of their choices. It’s nice to see one legislator standing up for the safety of children. Grown-ups can’t just do whatever they want in order to try to make themselves happy. We have to care what the consequences of our choices will be for the little ones – born and unborn.