SDC
Member
This was printed in this morning's Calgary Sun, out of Alberta:
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnis...02252-sun.html
"Anti-firearms nuts dead wrong
Sheeplike behaviour won't make us any safer when gunman arrives
By IAN ROBINSON, CALGARY SUN
The geek with the gun is back, this time at Virginia Tech, and the death toll of 32 innocents brings the anti-firearms nuts out of the woodwork, elbowing one another out of the way in their haste to be first to climb to the top of the pile of corpses to trumpet their message.
Even in Canada, where restrictions on owning long guns are beyond reasonable and getting a handgun ridiculously so -- unless you're a gangbanger who refuses to obey the law -- there are people who believe if they can limit certain freedoms just a little bit more, we'll all be safe within the comforting embrace of the Mommy State.
Jack Layton and Stephane Dion and Sheila Copps all dusted off their tired, old morally and intellectually bankrupt acts and took them on the road again.
They are the Neville Chamberlains of the modern age.
If only we're made more defenceless, more sheeplike, somehow only then will we be safe.
The U.S. Department of Justice found the risk of serious injury for unarmed women who were victims of crime was 250% higher than those who -- Eek! Eek! -- had a gun.
In a study of all public, mass-murder incidents in the U.S. between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott Jr. of Yale's law school and William M. Landes of the University of Chicago's law school (not exactly wild-eyed radicals on this issue like ... well ... me) wrote:
"The most comprehensive empirical study of concealed handgun laws finds that they reduce murder rates by about 1.5% for each additional year a law has been in effect, with similar declines in other violent crimes. And contrary to a popular misconception, permit holders are virtually never involved in the commission of crime, let alone murder."
These fellows found states in which law-abiding citizens can get a concealed weapons permit, the incidence of mass-murder shootings like the one at Virginia Tech were reduced 60%, and when they did occur, the deaths and injuries from such attacks were reduced nearly 80%.
In other words, self-defence works.
It's annoying to live in a culture in which we have to hire smart people to point out what ought to be self-evident.
Lott and Landes also wrote: "One puzzle is why the media rarely reports the role of guns in ending attacks."
A shooting spree at a Mississippi high school in 1997 left two students dead. An assistant principal got his handgun from his car and stopped the attack by immobilizing the shooter until police arrived.
Of 687 news articles about the attack, only 10 mentioned the vice-principal's gun. That's like reporting on the Second World War and forgetting to mention the A-bomb.
A CBS News story noted the educator "eventually subdued the young gunman." No mention of how he did it.
Lott and Landes cite other examples. (The paper is available on the web, just Google the authors' names. For a sane Canadian perspective on gun control, and the number of times Canadians use firearms to save their own lives, Google Gary Mauser, a prof at Simon Fraser University.)
But merely putting forth the notion of resistance to killers is now politically incorrect. A Fort Worth school district recently hired a security outfit called Response Options.
It was founded by retired SWAT cops appalled by the Columbine massacre. They decided to do something about it and came up with a program that taught teachers and children, if someone with a gun came into their classroom, to throw everything at him that came to hand, and swarm him to bring him down.
The rationale is the school shooter is beyond reason.
He is there simply to kill.
There is no reasoning with such animals. And by attacking, there is a better chance of survival for the largest number of potential victims.
As trainer Robert Browne of Response Options told the press at the time: "Getting under the desk and doing what the gunman tells you ... that's not a recipe for success."
But when news got out, the school district backed off from the program.
One wonders what might have been for the victims at Virginia Tech had anyone in the building been armed or if, at least been trained in defence against such monsters the way they were trained in fire drills as children.
There are now 40 U.S. states with "right-to-carry" laws. Not a single one has rescinded the law once it passed."
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnis...02252-sun.html
"Anti-firearms nuts dead wrong
Sheeplike behaviour won't make us any safer when gunman arrives
By IAN ROBINSON, CALGARY SUN
The geek with the gun is back, this time at Virginia Tech, and the death toll of 32 innocents brings the anti-firearms nuts out of the woodwork, elbowing one another out of the way in their haste to be first to climb to the top of the pile of corpses to trumpet their message.
Even in Canada, where restrictions on owning long guns are beyond reasonable and getting a handgun ridiculously so -- unless you're a gangbanger who refuses to obey the law -- there are people who believe if they can limit certain freedoms just a little bit more, we'll all be safe within the comforting embrace of the Mommy State.
Jack Layton and Stephane Dion and Sheila Copps all dusted off their tired, old morally and intellectually bankrupt acts and took them on the road again.
They are the Neville Chamberlains of the modern age.
If only we're made more defenceless, more sheeplike, somehow only then will we be safe.
The U.S. Department of Justice found the risk of serious injury for unarmed women who were victims of crime was 250% higher than those who -- Eek! Eek! -- had a gun.
In a study of all public, mass-murder incidents in the U.S. between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott Jr. of Yale's law school and William M. Landes of the University of Chicago's law school (not exactly wild-eyed radicals on this issue like ... well ... me) wrote:
"The most comprehensive empirical study of concealed handgun laws finds that they reduce murder rates by about 1.5% for each additional year a law has been in effect, with similar declines in other violent crimes. And contrary to a popular misconception, permit holders are virtually never involved in the commission of crime, let alone murder."
These fellows found states in which law-abiding citizens can get a concealed weapons permit, the incidence of mass-murder shootings like the one at Virginia Tech were reduced 60%, and when they did occur, the deaths and injuries from such attacks were reduced nearly 80%.
In other words, self-defence works.
It's annoying to live in a culture in which we have to hire smart people to point out what ought to be self-evident.
Lott and Landes also wrote: "One puzzle is why the media rarely reports the role of guns in ending attacks."
A shooting spree at a Mississippi high school in 1997 left two students dead. An assistant principal got his handgun from his car and stopped the attack by immobilizing the shooter until police arrived.
Of 687 news articles about the attack, only 10 mentioned the vice-principal's gun. That's like reporting on the Second World War and forgetting to mention the A-bomb.
A CBS News story noted the educator "eventually subdued the young gunman." No mention of how he did it.
Lott and Landes cite other examples. (The paper is available on the web, just Google the authors' names. For a sane Canadian perspective on gun control, and the number of times Canadians use firearms to save their own lives, Google Gary Mauser, a prof at Simon Fraser University.)
But merely putting forth the notion of resistance to killers is now politically incorrect. A Fort Worth school district recently hired a security outfit called Response Options.
It was founded by retired SWAT cops appalled by the Columbine massacre. They decided to do something about it and came up with a program that taught teachers and children, if someone with a gun came into their classroom, to throw everything at him that came to hand, and swarm him to bring him down.
The rationale is the school shooter is beyond reason.
He is there simply to kill.
There is no reasoning with such animals. And by attacking, there is a better chance of survival for the largest number of potential victims.
As trainer Robert Browne of Response Options told the press at the time: "Getting under the desk and doing what the gunman tells you ... that's not a recipe for success."
But when news got out, the school district backed off from the program.
One wonders what might have been for the victims at Virginia Tech had anyone in the building been armed or if, at least been trained in defence against such monsters the way they were trained in fire drills as children.
There are now 40 U.S. states with "right-to-carry" laws. Not a single one has rescinded the law once it passed."
