The pretend gun-free zone
Here’s an interesting article about how it might have been a good thing had the attendees at the Bible study meeting in Charleston been armed. That’s not just a fanciful thought; mass murders, even mass murders at churches, have been thwarted before by a good guy wielding a gun and stopping the bad guy (and here I use the word “guy” in the completely non-PC sense that includes “woman”):
Murray had already shot and killed two people in the parking lot when he burst into the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Before he could pull the trigger again, however, the 24-year-old shooter was gunned down by Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard with a concealed-carry permit.
That was eight years ago, but even though Ms. Assam was credited for saving as many as 100 lives that day, a dozen states continue to restrict the carrying of concealed firearms in churches ”” including South Carolina.
There have been quite a few similar cases of a law-abiding citizen with a gun (often an ex- or off-duty police officer, but not always) stopping or even preventing a mass shooting. A list of similar incidents can be found here. That there are not even more is probably due to the fact that mass shootings are actually quite rare to begin with—despite our perceptions that they are common, and despite the fact that even a single one is too many—and so it is not surprising that there are not so very many cases where a witness pulled a gun and even tried to stop such a shooting. Another reason is likely to be that mass murderers understand that they will be more likely to achieve their goals if they attack people in a gun-free zone, and so many attacks occur in such places.
But the shoot-em-up fantasy of someone like MSNBC’s Bob Shrum appears to lack any real-world precedent:
“Now I cannot imagine the horror that could have occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started, and you have a full-scale gunfight,” said Democratic advisor Bob Shrum on Friday’s episode of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.”
“You might not even have three survivors,” said Mr. Shrum, a top campaign aide to now-Secretary of State John Kerry during his failed 2004 presidential bid.
So, a bunch of unarmed people who are sitting ducks, completely at the mercy of an armed predator bent on mass murder, would be better off that way than to take their chances having an armed defender? What’s the better percentage deal, do you think?
I actually haven’t been able to find a single instance (although I suppose they may exist) where anything resembling Shrum’s vision has actually occurred—where an armed citizen trying to stop a mass murder already in progress escalated the situation. Even an article appearing in the leftist Mother Jones could do no better than to discover two situations in which the would-be defender was also shot.
The entire idea of a gun-free zone is an odd one. After all, who is going to abide by the law? The only people it disarms are the law-abiding, who were not likely to suddenly slip into mass murderer mode. And the actual mass murderer could not care less about the rule, and what’s more he will gravitate to such venues for his massacre because he knows that’s where he’s likely to encounter the least resistance.
So most so-called gun-free zones are actually what Dave Kopel calls pretend gun-free zones, meaning that the only people without weapons there are likely to be those who wouldn’t think of using them to murder in the first place.
The only true gun-free zone would be one with highly effective metal detectors at the entrance, and even then, unless the entrance is protected by several armed guards (not just one), a determined shooter can just shoot his way past a guard before going through the detector, especially with the element of surprise. Since most venues cannot afford (or do not want) such a complex and expensive arrangement, that leaves us with pretend gun-free zones versus areas in which concealed carry is allowed.
Which would you choose, if you were a gunman bent on doing harm? The pretend gun-free zones, of course, which makes them (paradoxically) the most dangerous environment of all.
The Left wants you to die and suffer, including any families you bring. They want it very bad. And they will do anything, including disarmament procedures and importing in Syrian AQ to the US, to get the job done.
The Left isn’t anti gun. That’s a slight mis analysis of the Left. After all, the Left was fine doing Ruby Ridge, Syria arms sell out, California arms exports via Democrats, WACO 1, WACO 2, Elian Gonzalez “we’re from the government, do what we tell you to do or else”. They are lying about being anti gun. They like the power of the gun. They use the power of the gun.
I’m pretty sure that no one in the midst of such a mass shooting ever thinks “I’m glad no one else has a gun”.
What the people thinks matters about as much to the leadership as what an ant thinks matters to Hussein when Hussein’s golf ball lands on their mound.
1993
The Saint James Church massacre was a massacre perpetrated on St James Church in Kenilworth, Cape Town on 25 July 1993 by four cadres of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA). 11 members of the congregation were killed and 58 wounded. …
The attack occurred during the Sunday evening service. Sichumiso Nonxuba, Bassie Mkhumbuzi, Gcinikhaya Makoma and Tobela Mlambisa approached the church in a vehicle stolen by Mlambisa and Makoma beforehand. Nonxuba, who commanded the unit, and Makoma entered the church armed with M26 hand grenades and R4 assault rifles. They threw the grenades and then opened fire on the congregation, killing 11 and wounding 58. One member of the congregation, Charl van Wyk, who wrote a book about the event (Shooting Back), returned fire with a .38 special revolver, wounding one of the attackers. At this point they fled the church. Mkhumbuzi had been ordered to throw four petrol bombs into the church following the shooting, but abandoned this intention as all four fled in the vehicle.
It is a peculiar thought indeed that somehow a mass murder could be escalated. Into what? Genocide?
in case you havent noticed.
made up fantasy facts and fear trump experience, examples, history and everything else, just like in most discussions here and elsewhere…
that neo points out that the fear of a gun fight making it WORSE than an unempeded gunman bent on exterminating everyone…
of course they forget or dont care, or cant think, that if there IS a gun fight… people tend to be able to leave while the gunman is focused on the other gun… ie. they stop shooting people and start shooting protectors.
but note… academic fantasy is the rule… they are so smart raised in a box with little real world experience, that we take them as experts in everything and anything… same is true of fame as russel found out in the UK as to what happens to revolutionaries when their own goes fickle.
these are very fraid fraidy cats pretending to be otherwise by fale erudition. and that is always based on leftist fantasy facts.
but thats the larger point i have been making for years… no one has the nicety enough to not piss in the well of others minds if they dont know the answer… they just give opinion as facts.
so people who dont own guns, who dont fire guns, who never been shot at (i have severl times), who havent been in fights (except when the bully took their lunch money, and who insanely belive a green light a white stripe or some law in the books that criminals never read is going to stop things.
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“He pulled out his gun and started pointing it at people,” Thacker said.
Cowan trained a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol at Riden’s face, said Sullivan County Sheriff Wayne Anderson. Carolyn Gudger, the school resource officer, drew her gun, then shielded the principal’s body with her own.
Thacker remembers Cowan shouting something — possibly including the words “10 years” — but she isn’t sure. She turned and ran out the set of public doors to the mulch pile in the front of the school, and hid behind bushes.
“He might shoot someone,” Thacker remembered thinking. “I just wanted to get out of there.”
Riden fled and Gudger inched back into the school, leading Cowan through the scattered pastel chairs in the empty cafeteria. It was a tactical move, meant to lure the gunman into a more contained place, Anderson said.
Ymarsakar Says: The Left wants you to die and suffer, including any families you bring. They want it very bad. And they will do anything, including disarmament procedures and importing in Syrian AQ to the US, to get the job done.
i think you have the focus wrong… what they want is to have their idea of how the world works be vindicated by their own telling of it to work… but it doesnt… so there isnt much to do about it other than to make sure that what you believe cant be tested and then bias against any information that would negate or weaken that belief while at the same time, show confirmation bias of the infinite kind.
they dont want you to die, but they are unwilling to accept reality, and if you die because of that, its not their fault, as reality should be what they think it should be (and nevermind that the person next to them has a different group of things about life saying how it should be)
they are the jokers who didnt learn, they are the acadmics whose knowlege is so narrow, that outside their realm they are quite useless, dysfunctional, and wouldnt survive a day or two without society propping them up.
so in a way, their assertions and others joining them in the idiocy, is their way of being validated when reality wont validate their parking tickets.
mao did not set out to murder millions
mao set out to force a change and then ignored their dying to insure that his idea would be tried.
hitler did not set out to murder millions, he set out to make sociailsm work, and so, followed the recipe that required removal of the bad less than humans to save the humans
its on and on that way…
their goal is not to kill
but their ideas kill and they wont accept principaled arguments as to why not as they cant understand principals… they dont get it… they dont get that one can work them out, so they would rather claim the person cheated and not that they were better at understanding functional principals an applying ideas to them…
ego meets incompetence that ego cant accept
so, ego ignores incompetence claiming compensatory level of overcompetence even in things they know nothing about, and use other idiots that side with them as vindication as they know that a million people cant be wrong (Which requires ignoring examples of when masses of people were wrong, like tulip mania, bull and bust markets, blood letting, nazi germany, etc)
this is what makes them so dangerous
they are akin to the zealot blood letter who will murder all his patients but never stop the practice they believe in… which is also why they have to paranoiically invent moriorties to their holmes like abilities, always blaming some secret cadre that has the power to stop them and negate them, but never the power to be seen.
If you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you have the law on your side, argue the law. If you have neither, attack the witness.
“’Now I cannot imagine the horror that could have occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started, and you have a full-scale gunfight,’ said Democratic advisor Bob Shrum on Friday’s episode of MSNBC’s ‘The Ed Show.’
‘You might not even have three survivors,’ said Mr. Shrum, a top campaign aide to now-Secretary of State John Kerry during his failed 2004 presidential bid.”
Bob Shrum is an idiot/loyal party hack. We don’t need to imagine what would have happened.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/6-shot-at-new-life-church-gunman-2-churchgoers-dead
“Two church members were shot to death and three others were injured after a gunman opened fire outside the New Life Church in Colorado Springs as Sunday services were wrapping up.
The gunman was shot by a church female security officer and was found dead when police arrived at the scene, said Colorado Springs Police Chief Richard Myers.
Police did not release the name of the security guard but said she ‘probably saved many lives today.’
‘It’s a tragedy that could have been much worse than it was,’ the police chief admitted.”
The 2nd Amendment gives us the right to carry a weapon. It was enacted in response a lesson learned in our war for independence. One of the triggering events of that war was when British soldiers entered the homes of Bostonians and took away their firearms. Note particularly that these were British citizens being dis-armed by their own soldiers. Only tyrannical governments disarm their citizens. Today, most who carry do so for personal protection, whether they fear their fellow citizens . . . or their government.
When the owner of a building declares that no one is allowed to enter with a gun, the owner is denying the guest of his right to defend himself. The owner thus takes upon himself the duty to insure the safety of those who enter.
I am waiting for some clever lawyer to make the case that the owner of a “gun free” zone is liable in damages for the death of anyone who is shot on his premises.
I suppose the owner could require those who enter to sign a release.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sydney-siege-gunman-man-haron-5759722
The self righteous Australians like to lecture Americans about adopting Australian laws, since Australians supposedly don’t have mass shootings. And if they do have mass murder sprees, at “least” they’ll just be stabbings and rapes.
Enjoy the livestock farm, subjects of Australia. Soon they won’t have any need of you once they import in enough Islamos.
Every single one of those Aussie freaks should have realized that America’s Iraq war was killing terrorists. Because if we don’t kill the terrorists, guess what. You guys will have to deal with it, at your home. Enjoy dealing with that. Believing in the Leftist propaganda about US wars and foreign policies, doesn’t make you safe. It just makes you entitled to a freedom you never earned.
Ymarsakar:
Speaking of Aussies…
There is no uniform way to predict a mental break that will lead someone to commit murder. Recognition of this truth and acknowledging that self-defense is a human right, should inform our discussion of tools and means to mitigate risk and preserve life.
Also, the first responders are rarely an authorized security force (e.g. police), but rather the intended victims and innocent bystanders. In the course of securing human rights, or perhaps environmental stability, we should avoid general characterizations that unfairly and illogically trap a class of people, which in the case of gun control is the law-abiding population.
but… but, but we can’t have self-defence meatheads around can we?
At all cost we must behave in a sentimental way
In a lot of cases, like Sandy Hook, Clackamas, and Westroads Mall, the “good guys with guns” didn’t even have to hit the “bad guy” to end their threat. Cowards are only comfortable killing people who can’t fight back effectively, and being confronted with anyone at all shooting back at them tends to break them out of their power trip, making them panic and end their shooting spree early by killing themselves.
What’s a self defense meat head? Is that what the new upper middle class are calling hillbillies and veterans?
I got this from http://scstatehouse.gov/code/t23c031.php
and for a reference
Churches are not true gun free zones. The restriction on bringing a concealed gun in a church is very similar to the restriction on bringing a gun into somebody’s residence; that is you have to ask for permission first.
KRB
I went to the Slate link which led me to an interesting Mother Jones link. I love the way they manipulate statistics to support their argument. One of the stats they came up with was that the shootings where someone armed stopped* the rampage was statistically irrelevant because it only represented 1.6%. Of what? I wondered. Well, the best i can figure, they came up with 1.6 because X people died on the shootings they tallied, and Y people died in the shootings that were stopped* and Y is 1.6% of X. (I’m reading this on my phone so I’m only doing math in my head.) Anyhow, that if just silly. How can you base your conclusion on that sort of “math”?
* They, Mother Jones that is, argue that the shootings aren’t really stopped by someone armed; the shooter was pretty well done shooting at that point for most of them. Oy.
If Bob Shrum were trapped in a room with an armed spree killer, I am quite sure he would be thinking, “I am glad I am not armed, I might kill someone if I were.”
Ymarsakar Says:
June 22nd, 2015 at 6:12 pm
What’s a self defense meat head? Is that what the new upper middle class are calling hillbillies and veterans?
I suppose. The ultimate sheeple term of disdain for Sheep dogs or Tommy …
Found it at this Neo thread.
GRA Says:
June 19th, 2015 at 8:30 pm
…Not only are you a self-defense meathead, but you’re a disrespectful human being. Right next to Mr. Roof.
Tommy
A goodly number of my friends are Mormon. When I found out their church strictly forbade firearms, I will not visit their churches or large events. Same with any church. I will not be party to anything like that. No church, no business, no state. I even avoid, where possible, doing business with companies based in states who have attacked the 2nd amendment… more than has already been done.
I wish some of them well, but will not be a party to anyone or anything that sets people up. Besides, I ask, what is a man if you remove his ability to self-defense? He is no longer a man, he is a peasant.
Well, it’s apparently been determined that the Confederate flag was responsible for the shootings, so I guess we won’t be hearing any more about gun control.
RickL – spot on!
The news media is wising up to the fact that gun rights advocates are winning the debate based on facts – so, time to change the topic/cause to something else. Look! There’s that racist flag!
Oh, and we know the gunman was truly crazy because according to a couple of news reports he, gasp! gave money to Republican candidates. or is that because he gave money to Republicans THEY are evil?! I couldn’t quite figure out which.
“basically the only way to guarantee that we will dramatically reduce acts of violence involving guns is to basically remove guns from society” Karl Rove
“The 2nd Amendment gives us the right to carry a weapon.” Cap’n Rusty
Not so. The 2nd Amendment recognizes our unalienable right to bear arms. The assertion that our right to bear arms is ‘unalienable’ extends from the premise (asserted by the founders to be a self-evident truth) that the universe’s creator has endowed each individual with rights that supersede a personal opinion or even a majority of people’s opinion.
Without that premise, our ‘rights’ are entirely subject to the current whim of the mob, otherwise known as the amendment process. And if you doubt that assertion, I would remind you of our experiment in prohibition.
There you go, Neo, being logical again.
The rants from many of my leftwing nutjob friends on Facebook have been positively unhinged this week: this terrible event has uncapped a deep well of hatred in them and it’s all spewing out. They hate Southerners and gun owners, and this Roof guy is the personification of their hatred.
Ugly, disturbing stuff. I’ve “un-followed” four friends because I can’t stomach it. One I posted an angry word on a post she put up that slandered all Southerners in a really vicious way. Then sent her a direct message that it really gets me angry that the same crowd that are slandering all of us for the deeds of one evil man are the Same people who LEAP to defend the Muslims from being blamed for the nearly endless parade of jihadi atrocities.
Useless, I know. Man, I have to move back down south. I don’t know how much more I can take of this.
The recent hit film “Kingsman” had EXACTLY this scenario as part of its plot… a shoot out in a Baptist church in the American South.
Somehow the mad perp missed the fact that the film perp was established as being certifiably mad, ravingly insane.
Someone should remind Karl Rove of that.
It seems Jeanne Assam has led a troubled life since the shooting. http://www.5280.com/magazine/2012/12/jeanne-assam-still-waiting
Rove can’t even dramatically reduce dead Democrat votes in the system. Who is he to tell us how to reduce violence in the US?
Geoffrey Britain, Ymarsakar:
Rove didn’t mean he was advocating repeal of the Second Amendment. He did phrase it very poorly, though, and his statement left him open to the idea that he was advocating the banning of guns.
See this.
I saw his statement, which can be misconstrued. But it is quite clear that his declaration about how to reduce violence dramatically was his own thought.
Which is wrong and what I targeted.
The point is, even if the 2nd Amendment is gone, would Rove be right about violence being dramatically reduced?
No, cause he’s an idiot and incompetent on this subject to begin with, hence my line above.