In his USA Today column yesterday, dear Instapundit’s response to the massacre of 20 children and six women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was headlined, “Gun-free zones provide false sense of security.”
Actually, gun-free zones provide an absolute sense of security for would-be mass murderers. That’s what turns them into kill zones. That’s why gun-free zones are magnets for massacres.
Fortunately, framing the problem this way provides the solution:
- Don’t ban guns, ban gun-free zones. For starters, Congress should repeal the federal Gun-Free Zones Act of 1990.
- Conservatives should be active at the state level to repeal “may issue” concealed carry permit laws and pass “must issue” or “unrestricted” laws in their place. Wikipedia has a convenient chart of the types of concealed carry laws each state has.
- People who work or congregate in places historically targeted by mass murderers should be encouraged to obtain pistols, firearms training and concealed carry permits.
- The ban on members of our military services being allowed to carry their sidearms on base should be repealed. The Fort Hood mass murder would have had far fewer victims if our military bases, of all places, had not been turned into gun-free zones.
- Women frequently are targets of mass murderers, so women’s advocacy groups should get busy promoting self-defense courses with firearms training and lobbying for “must issue” or “unrestricted” concealed carry permits if they live in more restrictive states.
Most mass murderers include suicide in their attack plan. This fact is extremely useful in preventing mass murders and reducing the death toll of those that occur. Why? Because we need to accelerate the killer’s scenario for the circumstances in which he has planned to kill himself. Isn’t that always when the armed responders have arrived and he’s cornered? That’s why we need plenty of civilians in schools, universities, churches, theaters and shopping malls who have concealed carry permits, weapons and the skill to use them. The sooner there’s return fire, the sooner the suicide is triggered and the killing stops. In addition, I predict that there will be a tipping point when there are enough people with guns and concealed carry permits that would-be mass murderers won’t like their odds and will give up on their plans.
P.S.
Dear Stacy McCain and Ace want to crack down on the mentally ill. I agree that it should be easier to force people who are a danger to themselves or others into care, including psych holds. But their proposals to further humiliate and enrage men whose mental illness and inadequacies may drive them to kill are disastrous. This will only push more men to kill as a means to make the world feel the hurt and impotence that overwhelm them. The carrot makes more sense than the stick: we need to find out if there’s anything we can do to give loners and nutjobs something useful to do even if it winds up being a form of semi-incarceration doing community service.
Please donate if you like this post — I need some 12-gauge shotgun shells:
Cynthia, I disagree with both Stacy and Ace on this, for one simple reason: One of the first tools totalitarian governments reach for is psychiatry to label opponents as crazy. With Obamacare, that prospect is enhanced. We’ve already seen so-called “scientific studies” that attempt to tie conservative views to mental illness.