Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: bedens67 on April 16, 2007, 11:36:28 AM
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I don't know where this should be filed on this board, but it certainly covers the whole range of emotions... My thoughts are with those involved... :cry:
- Bert in Springdale, Arkansas
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My thoughts and prayers with the victims. I do believe this is evidence of why we must be prepared at all times.
Here is something that is of some relevance
Gun Bill Gets Shot Down (http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/wb/xp-50658)
Up to date info and commentary at Michelle Malkin (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007319.htm)
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My thoughts and prayers with the victims. I do believe this is evidence of why we must be prepared at all times.
Here is something that is of some relevance
Gun Bill Gets Shot Down (http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/wb/xp-50658)
Up to date info and commentary at Michelle Malkin (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007319.htm)
Yes, definitely need to be prepared at all times... Something to think about, and certainly a reminder to kick up the training a notch or four...
I think this is why I decided to put this in the politics forum... I've already seen message boards packed full of Pro/Anti-NRA messages... This is certainly a hot topic for all...
In the meantime, I'm going to take time to think of the victims and their immediate families... Politics can come later...
- Bert
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/04/16/at-least-22-dead-28-wounded-in-shooting-at-virginia-tech/
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Absolutely terrible.
There's going to be a lot of wild and contradictory rumors being bandied about as facts-- and powerful biases within the MSM against guns as they so often do may look to install falsehoods as facts in the public mind.
Keep your eyes open and hold on to all relevant info before the "inconvenient" parts get sent down the Orwellian memory hole.
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Here's Stratfor from a few minutes ago:
U.S.: A Well-Planned Shooting Spree
Summary
At least 32 people were killed April 16 when an individual or individuals went on a shooting spree at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University campus in Blacksburg, Va. This was obviously an attack for which the killer prepared, and the high killed-to-wounded ratio suggests the killer was skilled and thorough.
Analysis
At least 32 people were killed April 16 when an individual or individuals went on a shooting spree at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University campus in Blacksburg, Va. The shooter reportedly used two 9 mm semiautomatic pistols to kill his victims, many of whom were lined up and shot.
The first shooting occurred around 7:15 a.m. local time on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory, where one victim was killed. The second shooting occurred approximately two hours later in Norris Hall, an engineering building. The gunman reportedly entered the building, chained the doors shut behind him and moved from classroom to classroom executing students.
This was obviously an attack for which the killer prepared. The high killed-to-wounded ratio suggests the killer was skilled and thorough. Police were still investigating the first shooting at the dorm when the other shootings occurred. It is possible the killing in the dormitory was meant as a diversion to occupy police while the gunman moved on to his primary target, Norris Hall.
Within the last two weeks, there were two separate bomb threats against engineering department buildings at the university. These could have been a form of preoperational surveillance to gauge the response times and procedures of university police.
Unconfirmed reports coming from Blacksburg have identified the suspect as an Asian individual in his mid-20s. In all probability, the delay in identifying the culprit or culprits is because the intelligence community is running foreign and criminal intelligence traces on the suspect(s). Police believe the shooting spree might have been the result of an off-campus incident. They are not certain whether the suspect was a student, nor have they ruled out the possibility that he had accomplices. Arrests reportedly were made this morning.
The largest killing spree on a U.S. campus until this incident was in 1966, when Charles Whitman killed 15 people in the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1999, two high school students in Columbine, Colo., killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.
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Virginia quashed bill allowing handguns on campuses
Tech spokesman celebrated 2006 defeat because it would help make campus safe
Posted: April 16, 2007
3:15 p.m. Eastern
By Art Moore
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
More than one year before today's unprecedented shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, the state's General Assembly quashed a bill that would have given qualified college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus.
At the time, Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said he was happy to hear of the bill's defeat, according to the Roanoke Times.
"I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus," the Virginia Tech spokesman said.
At least 32 people were killed today at Virginia Tech in the worst campus shooting in U.S. history.
The proposal, House Bill 1572, was initiated by Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, on behalf of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
But the bill didn't pass its first stage, the House Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety.
Most universities in Virginia require students and employees, other than police, to check their guns with police or campus security upon entering campus.
Backers of the bill wanted to prohibit public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun."
The bill's sponsor, Gilbert, told WND that with today's tragedy still unfolding, he is uncomfortable commenting and cannot assert the university's policy in any way contributed to the shooting. But he said, nevertheless, it's clear it couldn't have stopped the attack.
"The one thing that this tragic event does illustrate is that there is not a single gun law, rule or regulation that will stop someone with this kind of evil intent from going about their business and taking life at will, if they are committed to doing that," Gilbert said.
While advocates of gun control often believe they are improving safety, they are depriving law-abiding citizens from defending themselves in dangerous situations, he contended.
"Had I been on campus today, and otherwise been entitled to carry firearms for protection and been deprived of that, I don't think words can describe how I would have felt, knowing I could have stopped something like this," Gilbert said.
People who are willing to jump through all the legal hoops necessary to get a weapons permit usually are not people society needs to worry about, he argued.
The suspect in today's shootings might have been a legal weapons holder, Gilbert said, but the law didn't prevent him from doing what he did.
In the spring of 2005, a Virginia Tech student who had a concealed handgun permit was disciplined for bringing a handgun to class, the Roanoke paper reported.
Second Amendment groups questioned the university's authority, but the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police argued against guns on campus.
In June 2006, Virginia Tech's governing board approved a violence prevention policy that reaffirmed the school's ban.
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Ayoob article on Whitman shooting and civilian participation. When Texas was what you expected of Texas. Link
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m..._72293265/pg_2
The AYOOB FILES
Case One was the infamous Texas Tower incident of August 1, 1966, in which Charles Whitman shot 45 people, 14 of them fatally. He had earlier stabbed both his wife and mother to death. His weaponry included a sawed-off J.C. Higgins semiautomatic 12 ga. shotgun with which he killed and wounded multiple victims inside the tower, a .30 M-1 carbine with which he shot several people, and the weapon with which he wrought most of his havoc- a bolt-action Remington in 6mm Rem. mounting a 4x scope.
The Austin newspapers reported that "dozens" of armed citizens returned fire on Whitman along with police, primarily using rifles. Most were "deer rifles," many of them accurate, scoped bolt-actions as precise as the killer's weapon. A military reservist deployed an M-14 .308 semi-automatic, believed to be match grade. While the shots came close enough to greatly reduce the death toll, once return fire started after the initial 20 minutes or so, Whitman kept shooting for more than an hour and a half.
Private citizen Allen Crum, armed with a rifle given him by a policeman, led Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy up through the tower to the killer's perch on the roof. They approached the sniper's lair from opposite sides. Crum fired the first shot, which did not strike the killer but did startle and disorient him. Martinez then emptied his service revolver at Whitman, and McCoy fired twice with his Winchester 1200 pump. Whitman fell, dropping his .30 carbine.
Martinez dropped his empty sixgun, grabbed McCoy's Winchester, charged the downed Whitman and shot him once more at close range, arm-into-chest. Researcher Gary M. Lavergne interprets the autopsy of the murderer to say that the fatal shot was McCoy's first shotgun blast from 50 feet away, which caught Whitman in the eyes and forehead and pierced his brain.
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Also, I would suggest that anyone who has not yet done so go to our front page, click on "Flight 93 Memorial" and read the article that pops up there.
TAC,
CD
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From Bush's comments at the convocation last night:
Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they’re gone—and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.
Coming from a president who thinks pre-emptive wars, assassinations, secret imprisonment, and torture are all a-OK, his presence at the service was fairly inappropriate. If he didn't enjoy effective immunity from the consequences of his policies, it might occur to him that the above could just as easily be said about the masses of dead Iraqis.
There's also this line. Again, fairly predictable:
It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering
Really? Or could it be that why stuff like this is happening with increasing frequency in the US is a question that Bush and his speechwriters would prefer not to examine too closely? What have we as a society done since Columbine to make such incidents any less likely to occur?
This thread (to this forum's credit) started out with expressions of shock and sympathy for the victims, but now it's all but devolved into a discussion about fears that incidents like this will increase the appeal of gun control laws. IMO, that says quite a bit.
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If he didn't enjoy effective immunity from the consequences of his policies, it might occur to him that the above could just as easily be said about the masses of dead Iraqis.
The same could be said about just about every politician in Washington, past present and future, on both sides of the aisle. I should also add he isn't using this event as a campaign speech like others are.
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"What have we as a society done since Columbine to make such incidents any less likely to occur? This thread (to this forum's credit) started out with expressions of shock and sympathy for the victims, but now it's all but devolved into a discussion about fears that incidents like this will increase the appeal of gun control laws. IMO, that says quite a bit."
Not sure I follow here. You ask what we have done as a society to lessen the chances of such incidents, yet we are not to discuss allowing the population to defend itself vs. disarming the population? :roll:
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If he didn't enjoy effective immunity from the consequences of his policies, it might occur to him that the above could just as easily be said about the masses of dead Iraqis.
The same could be said about just about every politician in Washington, past present and future, on both sides of the aisle.
Totally agree that the use of violence to achieve foreign policy goals is pretty bi-partisan. Without over-simplifying the matter, I would argue that a policy of violence abroad is becoming increasingly difficult to separate from our domestic life.
I should also add he isn't using this event as a campaign speech like others are.
Sure, probably because he would prefer to sweep this under the rug ASAP. His sympathy with the pro-gun lobby is no secret, and it's hard to imagine any serious discussion of this incident not going down that road eventually.
I've seen much mention of the fact that the shooter was here on a student visa. Should immigrants (non-US citizens) be allowed to purchase guns here?
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From Bush's comments at the convocation last night:
Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they’re gone—and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.
Coming from a president who thinks pre-emptive wars, assassinations, secret imprisonment, and torture are all a-OK, his presence at the service was fairly inappropriate. If he didn't enjoy effective immunity from the consequences of his policies, it might occur to him that the above could just as easily be said about the masses of dead Iraqis.
There's also this line. Again, fairly predictable:
It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering
Really? Or could it be that why stuff like this is happening with increasing frequency in the US is a question that Bush and his speechwriters would prefer not to examine too closely? What have we as a society done since Columbine to make such incidents any less likely to occur?
This thread (to this forum's credit) started out with expressions of shock and sympathy for the victims, but now it's all but devolved into a discussion about fears that incidents like this will increase the appeal of gun control laws. IMO, that says quite a bit.
It seems that someone could post about burning their mouth on a hot slice of pizza and Rog could segue that into an anti-Bush diatribe. Just saying....
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OK here's an analysis that has nothing to do with guns-- a WSJ editorial from many years ago that was reprinted today. On a personal note I am left with a sense of wonderment that I should be posting it given who I thought I was in 1968. Life truly is an Adventure.
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No Guardrails
August 1968 and the death of self-restraint.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:00 a.m. EDT
(Editor's note: This editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1993.)
The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: "Just do it." Michael Frederick Griffin just did it.
An anti-abortion protester of intense emotions, he walked around behind the Pensacola Women's Medical Services Clinic and pumped three bullets into the back of Dr. Gunn. Emptied himself, Michael Griffin then waited for the police to take him away. A remark by his father-in-law caught our eye: "Now we've got to take care of two grandchildren."
As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn't seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, did so many become undone?
We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won't like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals--university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators--who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.
With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance--against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.
What in the past had been simply illegal became "civil disobedience." If you could claim, and it was never too hard to claim, that your group was engaged in an act of civil disobedience--taking over a building, preventing a government official from speaking, bursting onto the grounds of a nuclear cooling station, destroying animal research, desecrating Communion hosts--the shapers of opinion would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the "dissidents" (in the '60s and '70s) and "activists" (in the '80s and now).
Concurrently, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.
You can argue, as many did and still do, that all this was necessary because the established order wouldn't respond or change. But then you still need to account for the nation's simultaneous dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction. You need to account for what is happening to those people within U.S. society who seem least able to navigate the political and personal torrents that they become part of, like Michael Griffin. Those torrents began with the antiwar movement in the 1960s.
Those endless demonstrations, though, were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture--away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence. As to limits, you set your own.
The people who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift--the intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement--did very well, or at least survived. They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength. The fame and celebrity help, too.
But for a lot of other people it hasn't been such an easy life to sustain. Not exceedingly sophisticated, neither thinkers nor leaders, never interviewed for their views, they're held together by faith, friends, fun and, at the margins, by fanaticism. The big political crackups make the news--a Michael Griffin or the woman on trial in Connecticut for the attempted bombing of the CEO of a surgical-device company or the '70s radicals who accidentally blew themselves up in a New York brownstone. But the personal crackups just float like flotsam through the country's hospitals and streets. You can also see some of them on daytime TV, America's medical museum of personal autonomy.
It may be true that most of the people in Hollywood who did cocaine survived it, but many of the weaker members of the community hit the wall. And most of the teenage girls in the Midwest who learn about the nuances of sex from magazines published by thirtysomething women in New York will more or less survive, but some continue to end up as prostitutes on Eighth Avenue. Everyone today seems to know someone who couldn't handle the turns and went over the side of the mountain.
These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life's margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They're guardrails. It's also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country's institutions and its codes of personal behavior (abortion, for instance).
In a sense, it has been a remarkable political and social achievement for them. But let's get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, if we are going to march and fight and litigate over every conceivable grievance, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them.
Michael Griffin and Dr. David Gunn are merely two names on a long list of confrontations and personal catastrophe going back 25 years. That today is the status quo. The alternative is to start rethinking it.
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Sure, probably because he would prefer to sweep this under the rug ASAP. His sympathy with the pro-gun lobby is no secret, and it's hard to imagine any serious discussion of this incident not going down that road eventually.
I've seen much mention of the fact that the shooter was here on a student visa. Should immigrants (non-US citizens) be allowed to purchase guns here?
The truth is gun control does not work. Those who want guns, will attain them. How many guns recovered from violent crimes were actually being used by the person who bought and registered the gun legally. My guess is pretty low compared to the ones aquired illegally. 2nd amendment is there for a reason.
As far as non-citizens attaining weapons, I'm split on the subject. I know my inlaws (non-citizens) I would trust with my life with a gun, others not so much. What I believe for certain is that if someone on that campus had been armed besides the rentacops I doubt we would be discussing the 32 dead.
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Here's a wiff of what the killer was like:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0417071vtech1.html
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
Bath School disaster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bath School Disaster
Bath Consolidated School after bombing
Location Bath Township, Michigan, United States
Target(s) Bath Consolidated School
Date May 18, 1927
Attack type Shooting/explosives/fire/suicide bombing
Fatalities 45
Perpetrator(s) Andrew Kehoe
Motive Financial Hardship
The Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history. The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.
On the morning of May 18, Kehoe first killed his wife and then set his farm buildings on fire. As fire fighters arrived at the farm, an explosion devastated the north wing of the school building, killing many of the people inside. Kehoe used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months. As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle, killing himself and the school superintendent, and killing and injuring several others. During the rescue efforts, searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school's south wing.
I Blame BUSH!!!! :roll:
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Not sure I follow here. You ask what we have done as a society to lessen the chances of such incidents, yet we are not to discuss allowing the population to defend itself vs. disarming the population? :roll:
I'm not saying anybody is "not to discuss" anything, but that I see more concern for the possible threat to the Second Amendment as unlimited freedom to own/carry guns than doing anything to prevent these incidents from happening.
For the record, I am not against guns and I support our right to (some limited) gun ownership. I just don't buy this NRA fantasy of an armed-to-the-teeth (but educated and responsible) population somehow being the solution to all violent crime.
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It seems that someone could post about burning their mouth on a hot slice of pizza and Rog could segue that into an anti-Bush diatribe. Just saying....
Hey there sweetheart. We might be able to have an actual, reasonable discussion if you could leave out the personal jabs and name-calliing. just saying... :)
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Rog,
I'm glad to see i've endeared myself to you. I don't think pointing out your using the VT murders as a starting point for an attack on the president and his foreign policy counts as an ad hominem attack on your person. :wink:
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Deterring crime is the best solution. Concealed carry permits deter violent crimes more than handgun bans. Compare Washingto DC to say Austin Texas.
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The truth is gun control does not work. Those who want guns, will attain them.
I don't know about this. Isn't the US in the minority of industrialized nations when it comes to gun ownership rights? I agree that it's impossible to keep somebody from getting ahold of a gun if they really want one, but at same time I don't think this should be taken as a blanket invalidation of any attempt at gun control. I personally think anti-drug laws are stupid, but there's no denying that they result in less drug use.
As far as non-citizens attaining weapons, I'm split on the subject. I know my inlaws (non-citizens) I would trust with my life with a gun, others not so much. What I believe for certain is that if someone on that campus had been armed besides the rentacops I doubt we would be discussing the 32 dead.
It's hard to say. I ask about immigrant gun ownership because I remember then-AG John Ashcroft specifically stepping into block any investigation of gun purchases by immigrants in the aftermath of 9/11. Of all the immigrants' rights being put on the chopping block after 9/11, appeasing the pro-gun lobby was still considered important enough that the sanctity of their right to anonymously purchase guns was considered not to be f-d with.
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Rog:
Ummm, for the record actually he didn't call you a name. Also worth considering is that when you posted this
"Coming from a president who thinks pre-emptive wars, assassinations, secret imprisonment, and torture are all a-OK, his presence at the service was fairly inappropriate. If he didn't enjoy effective immunity from the consequences of his policies, it might occur to him that the above could just as easily be said about the masses of dead Iraqis. , , , could it be that why stuff like this is happening with increasing frequency in the US is a question that Bush and his speechwriters would prefer not to examine too closely?"
you open the door to his comment :-)
Returning to the subject at hand "For the record, I am not against guns and I support our right to (some limited) gun ownership. I just don't buy this NRA fantasy of an armed-to-the-teeth (but educated and responsible) population somehow being the solution to all violent crime."
I am delighted to see that you apparently recognize that there is a personal Consitutional right to regulated gun ownership. Have I understood you correctly on this?
I think you will find that most "pro-gun" people can be similarly described. The problem is that there is a very substantial movement in this country, found principally in the Democratic Party, MSM and academia that is passionately for the disarmament or virtual disarmament of the American people. These people interpret the Second Amerndment as a matter of the rights of the States to have a National Guard or something like that. These people simply seek to incrementally increase the burdens and irrationality of the various regulatory schemes of the Feds and the States to eventually destroy gun rights in America-- the very same path as was taken in England and Australia.
But for the disingenuous bad faith of these people pretending to be for reasonable regulation when they actually seek disarmament of the American people I think you would find that the NRA (of which I am a member) would be much more flexible.
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Deterring crime is the best solution. Concealed carry permits deter violent crimes more than handgun bans. Compare Washingto DC to say Austin Texas.
Again though, what's your explanation for why the many countries where citizens are not allowed to own guns aren't nation-sized versions of the crime-ridden neighborhood of "Death Wish 3"?
Keep in mind that an outright ban on all gun ownership is not what I'm after. I don't even necessarily claim that stricter gun control laws can and will prevent stuff like the VT massacre. I do strongly disagree though, that putting more guns in people's hands is the solution.
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In the nanny state of England, where guns are banned, they have seen an increase in recent years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2656875.stm
Though last year saw a drop in traditional robberies (banks and other big hits) using guns. Home invasions using guns rose there.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1999066,00.html
Even more info here
http://www.bloggernews.net/14139 (Pop-up warning)
Edit: commas are my friends...
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So Rog, what do you suggest? Today's Opinion Journal of the WSJ contains a reference to one practical approach.
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Virginia vs. Gun Crime
Much is being made of the fact that Virginia resident Cho Seung-Hui legally bought the guns he used in his killing spree. But there is gun control and gun control.
In fact, Virginia has been a pioneer in clamping down on gun related crimes and has seen gun violence drop dramatically as a result. In 1997, "Project Exile" was launched by a U.S. Attorney in Richmond to move many gun-related crimes to federal court, allowing prosecutors to expedite the cases, impose stiffer sentences and prevent bail being offered to criminals caught using firearms. The last point was especially important: A criminal apprehended with a gun would face instant jail with little chance of being let out before trial.
To make sure the news got around, Virginia set up a private foundation to pay for a public awareness campaign. Word didn't take long to spread. At the time, an aide to then-Gov. James Gilmore told us of one criminal nabbed trying to flush a pistol down a toilet while police were kicking in his door even as the suspect left a pile of drugs for the cops to confiscate. He was apparently more afraid of being caught with a gun than of being caught with drugs.
In similar fashion, Mayor Rudy Giuliani made aggressive use of New York's stop-and-frisk authority to target habitual criminals packing guns as they traveled around the five boroughs. New York City and the state of Virginia have very different gun control regimes, but their success in reducing gun violence came by focusing on criminals, not retailers and the general public. At first, Project Exile in Richmond was controversial, but it quickly proved to be a success -- cutting gun violence in the city by 40% -- and has been adopted across Virginia and copied by other states.
Such laws wouldn't solve the problem of mad shooters like Cho Seung-Hui, and gun-control advocates will undoubtedly continue to demand laws to prohibit all gun sales. Those more interested in results will settle for effective gun control that has proved politically viable -- i.e. aimed at controlling the behavior of the 1% who are criminals, not the 99% who aren't.
-- Brendan Miniter
A Tragedy Foretold
The Virginia Tech killings were foreshadowed last August when escaped jail inmate William Morva allegedly killed a hospital guard and a sheriff's deputy just off campus and then fled to the Blacksburg school. His trial for those murders and other charges is set for September. The tragedy generated warnings about the school's vulnerability to violence that were ignored.
Jonathan McGlumphy, a Virginia Tech graduate student, wrote an op-ed in the school newspaper Collegiate Times calling on the campus community to "accurately assess the actions of all parties [in the Morva case] to ascertain what could have been done better or worse." His list was topped by university officials whom he said wrongly allowed morning classes to take place -- an eerie parallel to Monday's murders in which two hours elapsed between the first killings and the bulk of the homicides.
But Mr. McGlumphy saved his real ire last August for the school's policy of prohibiting students, faculty and staff members with concealed handgun permits from carrying legal firearms on campus. He noted that the campus gun ban "is completely artificial, and relies on the honor system... It is impossible to truly prevent someone from bringing a firearm if they are so inclined."
Mr. McGlumphy noted that any permit holder has gone through both firearm training and an extensive background check to obtain that permit. In Virginia, any permit holder must be 21 years of age or older, which excludes most college students, and holders are statistically less likely to commit violent crime than the general population. Mr. McGlumphy bluntly asked in the wake of the Morva incident whether "all students, faculty and staff would have been safer if CHP holders were not banned from carrying their weapons on campus? "
As evidence, Mr. McGlumphy cited a 2002 incident at the Appalachian School of Law in nearby Grundy, Virginia. Gunman Peter Odighizuwa killed three people and was only stopped when two permit-holding students ran to their cars, got their weapons, and subdued him.
But when a bill was introduced in Virginia's legislature last year to allow permit holders to carry guns on college campuses, Virginia Tech officials helped make sure it died in committee. Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker boasted: "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."
To Mr. McGlumphy such an attitude merely created a campus-wide "Safe Zone" for criminals. "For the university to continue to enforce its no-gun policy is to continue to put students in greater danger from the Morvas of the world," he wrote in Virginia Tech's campus paper last August.
Mr. McGlumphy now sadly concludes that the killings of 32 students and faculty this past Monday may have resulted partly because student Cho Seung-Hui knew that a university lecture hall was one place in Virginia where he had nothing to fear from the law-abiding people he was stalking.
-- John Fund
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http://www.atf.treas.gov/firearms/faq/faq2.htm#r1
(R1) May nonimmigrant aliens legally in the United States purchase or possess firearms and ammunition while in the United States?
Nonimmigrant aliens generally are prohibited from possessing or receiving (purchasing) firearms and ammunition in the United States.
There are exceptions to this general prohibition. The exceptions are as follows:
nonimmigrant aliens who possess a valid (unexpired) hunting license or permit lawfully issued by a State in the United States;
nonimmigrant aliens entering the United States to participate in a competitive target shooting event or to display firearms at a sports or hunting trade show sponsored by a national, State, or local firearms trade organization devoted to the collection, competitive use or other sporting use of firearms;
certain diplomats, if the firearms are for official duties;
officials of foreign governments, if the firearms are for official duties, or distinguished foreign visitors so designated by the U.S. State Department;
foreign law enforcement officers of friendly foreign governments entering the United States on official law enforcement business; and
persons who have received a waiver from the prohibition from the U.S. Attorney General.
Significantly, even if a nonimmigrant alien falls within one of these exceptions, the nonimmigrant alien CANNOT purchase a firearm from a Federal firearms licensee (FFL) unless he or she (1) has an alien number or admission number from the Department of Homeland Security (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) AND (2) can provide the FFL with documentation showing that he or she has resided in a State within the United States for 90 consecutive days immediately prior to the firearms transaction.
[18 U.S.C. 922(g)(5)(b) and 922(y), 27 CFR 478.124, ATF Rul. 2004-1]
(R2) Typically, who are "nonimmigrant aliens?"
In large part, nonimmigrant aliens are persons traveling temporarily in the United States for business or pleasure, persons studying in the United States who maintain a foreign residence abroad, and certain foreign workers. Permanent resident aliens are NOT nonimmigrant aliens. Permanent resident aliens often are referred to as people with "green cards."
****It is my understanding that the VT shooter had Permanent resident status.****
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I'm guessing he most likely did since he has been here since the 90's.
He came to the United States from South Korea in 1992 with his parents when he was eight years old.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-04-18-voa22.cfm
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This from the editorial page of today's WSJ makes some comparative references to other countries:
'Gun-Free Zones'
By DAVID B. KOPEL
April 18, 2007; Page A17
The bucolic campus of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., would seem to have little in common with the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City. Yet both share an important characteristic, common to the site of almost every other notorious mass murder in recent years: They are "gun-free zones."
Forty American states now have "shall issue" or similar laws, by which officials issue a pistol carry permit upon request to any adult who passes a background check and (in most states) a safety class. Research by Carlisle Moody of the College of William and Mary, and others, suggests that these laws provide law-abiding citizens some protection against violent crime. But in many states there are certain places, especially schools, set aside as off-limits for guns. In Virginia, universities aren't "gun-free zones" by statute, but college officials are allowed to impose anti-gun rules. The result is that mass murderers know where they can commit their crimes.
Private property owners also have the right to prohibit lawful gun possession. And some shopping malls have adopted anti-gun rules. Trolley Square was one, as announced by an unequivocal sign, "No weapons allowed on Trolley Square property."
In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him from carrying a gun on the premises and began shooting people who moments earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.
Fortunately, someone else -- off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth Hammond -- also did not comply with the mall's rules. After hearing "popping" sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire on the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other innocent bystanders from getting hurt. He bought time for the local police to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.
At Virginia Tech's sprawling campus in southwestern Va., the local police arrived at the engineering building a few minutes after the start of the murder spree, and after a few critical minutes, broke through the doors that Cho Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From what we know now, Cho committed suicide when he realized he'd soon be confronted by the police. But by then, 30 people had been murdered.
But let's take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that would have ended the "gun-free zones" in Virginia's public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the General Assembly's action "because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." In an August 2006 editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: "Guns don't belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same."
Actually, Virginia Tech's policy only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns. Virginia Tech's policy bans all guns on campus (except for police and the university's own security guards); even faculty members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.
Virginia Tech thus went out of its way to prevent what happened at a Pearl, Miss., high school in 1997, where assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a handgun from his car and apprehended a school shooter. Or what happened at Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, when a mass murder was stopped by two students with law-enforcement experience, one of whom retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. Or in Edinboro, Pa., a few days after the Pearl event, when a school attack ended after a nearby merchant used a shotgun to force the attacker to desist. Law-abiding citizens routinely defend themselves with firearms. Annually, Americans drive-off home invaders a half-million times, according to a 1997 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Utah, there is no "gun-free schools" exception to the licensed carry law. In K-12 schools and in universities, teachers and other adults can and do legally carry concealed guns. In Utah, there has never been a Columbine-style attack on a school. Nor has there been any of the incidents predicted by self-defense opponents -- such as a teacher drawing a gun on a disrespectful student, or a student stealing a teacher's gun.
Israel uses armed teachers as part of a successful program to deter terrorist attacks on schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are following the Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., long-time gun control advocates, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), agreed that making airplane cockpits into "gun-free zones" had made airplanes much more dangerous for everyone except hijackers. Corrective legislation, supported by large bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, allowed pilots to carry firearms, while imposing rigorous gun-safety training on pilots who want to carry.
In many states, "gun-free schools" legislation was enacted hastily in the late 1980s or early 1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime. Aimed at juvenile gangsters, the poorly written and overbroad statutes had the disastrous consequence of rendering teachers unable to protect their students.
Reasonable advocates of gun control can still press for a wide variety of items on their agenda, while helping to reform the "gun-free zones" that have become attractive havens for mass killers. If legislators or administrators want to require extensive additional training for armed faculty and other adults, that's fine. Better that some victims be armed than none at all.
The founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood the harms resulting from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In his "Commonplace Book," Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare Beccaria, the founder of criminology, which was as true on Monday as it always has been:
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo., and co-author of the law school textbook, "Gun Control and Gun Rights" (NYU Press).
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Ummm, for the record actually he didn't call you a name. Also worth considering is that when you posted this
"Coming from a president who thinks pre-emptive wars, assassinations, secret imprisonment, and torture are all a-OK, his presence at the service was fairly inappropriate. If he didn't enjoy effective immunity from the consequences of his policies, it might occur to him that the above could just as easily be said about the masses of dead Iraqis. , , , could it be that why stuff like this is happening with increasing frequency in the US is a question that Bush and his speechwriters would prefer not to examine too closely?"
you open the door to his comment smiley
If GM (or anybody else) disagrees with what I posted then I'm happy to have that discussion, but his implication is that I was simply looking for an excuse to bash poor W, which is a non-response to what I consider a perfectly valid point.
I am delighted to see that you apparently recognize that there is a personal Consitutional right to regulated gun ownership. Have I understood you correctly on this?
Yes. I don't believe I've ever denied that this right exists or opposed it.
I think you will find that most "pro-gun" people can be similarly described. The problem is that there is a very substantial movement in this country, found principally in the Democratic Party, MSM and academia that is passionately for the disarmament or virtual disarmament of the American people. These people interpret the Second Amerndment as a matter of the rights of the States to have a National Guard or something like that. These people simply seek to incrementally increase the burdens and irrationality of the various regulatory schemes of the Feds and the States to eventually destroy gun rights in America-- the very same path as was taken in England and Australia.
Well, I can't speak for those people. As for the UK and Australia, if (I assume) they have less gun violence as a result of their bans and most of those people feel their country is a safer, better place to live as a result, then how is that a bad thing?
But for the disingenuous bad faith of these people pretending to be for reasonable regulation when they actually seek disarmament of the American people I think you would find that the NRA (of which I am a member) would be much more flexible.
Do you see the NRA as being in favor of reasonable regulation? IMO, they take a pretty fundamentalist view of the Second Amendment I'm not sure is realistic. I see them as being to the Second Amendment like AQ is to Islam.
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'Happyland' Arson
Eighty-seven people die in dance club fire
(CBS) The Bronx After working hard all week for modest wages, many Latino immigrants in the East Tremont section of The Bronx would forget their troubles on the crowded dance floor of the Happyland Social Club.
Happyland was located on two floors above a row of stores. It was a tight space with just a single staircase leading in and out. It also was an illegal establishment; ordered closed by the city for building and fire violations. Orders that were ignored by the club's operators.
After midnight on Sunday, March 25, 1990, Happyland was packed with young men and women, most of them new to the U.S. and still calling places like Honduras and Ecuador home.
Just before 3 a.m., according to some who later remembered, a man argued loudly with a woman who worked in the club. He said in Spanish: "I'll be back."
Less than an hour later, Happyland was an inferno. Eighty-seven people died that night, 61 men, 26 women, more than half of them under 25 years of age. Along the walls of the dancefloor, 68 bodies were piled, indicative of their desperate attempts to find a way out from the flames.
The dead were asphyxiated or burned to death within minutes.
Later on that Sunday, police arrested a man they said had set the blaze with gasoline after quarrelling with his girlfriend who worked as a ticket taker.
Julio Gonzalez, an immigrant from Cuba, left the club drunk and walked to a nearby gas station where he bought a gallon of gas. He returned to the club and splashed the staircase and lit the gas.
Investigators said Gonzalez wanted to kill his girlfriend in the fire. She was one of the few who survived.
The fire resulted in a crackdown by the city on the hundreds of illegal social clubs and dance halls believed to be located in all five boroughs.
Gonzalez went to trial later in 1990. After two days of deliberations, a jury found him guilty on all 174 counts - two counts for each victim -of murder. However, New York State law did not allow for a sentence greater than that for a single count of murder: 25 years to life.
****I blame the gas and matches lobby for these deaths, and President Bush, of course. When will this country impose reasonable restrictions on the sale and ownership of gasoline and matches?**** :-D
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Would someone help out Rog with some data on what has happened in the UK and Australia since they have virtually outlawed guns?
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http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/BritainToyGunsWSJE.html
Worried that even showing a starting pistol in a car ad might encourage gun crime in Britain, the British communications regulator has banned a Ford Motor Co. television spot because in it a woman is pictured holding such a "weapon." According to a report by Bloomberg News, the ad was said by regulators to "normalize" the use of guns and "must not be shown again."
What's next? Toy guns? Actually, the British government this year has been debating whether to ban toy guns. As a middle course, some unspecified number of imitation guns will be banned, and it will be illegal to take imitation guns into public places.
And in July a new debate erupted over whether those who own shotguns must now justify their continued ownership to the government before they will get a license.
The irony is that after gun laws are passed and crime rises, no one asks whether the original laws actually accomplished their purpose. Instead, it is automatically assumed that the only "problem" with past laws was they didn't go far enough. But now what is there left to do? Perhaps the country can follow Australia's recent lead and ban ceremonial swords.
Despite the attention that imitation weapons are getting, they account for a miniscule fraction of all violent crime (0.02%) and in recent years only about 6% of firearms offenses. But with crime so serious, Labor needs to be seen as doing something. The government recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998-99 to 2002-03.
Crime was not supposed to rise after handguns were banned in 1997. Yet, since 1996 the serious violent crime rate has soared by 69%: robbery is up by 45% and murders up by 54%. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50% from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels.
The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the last survey done, shows the violent-crime rate in England and Wales was twice the rate in the U.S. When the new survey for 2004 comes out, that gap will undoubtedly have widened even further as crimes reported to British police have since soared by 35%, while declining 6% in the U.S.
The high crime rates have so strained resources that 29% of the time in London it takes police longer than 12 minutes to arrive at the scene. No wonder police nearly always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has been committed.
As understandable as the desire to "do something" is, Britain seems to have already banned most weapons that can help commit a crime. Yet, it is hard to see how the latest proposals will accomplish anything.
• Banning guns that fire blanks and some imitation guns. Even if guns that fire blanks are converted to fire bullets, they would be lucky to fire one or two bullets and most likely pose more danger to the shooter than the victim. Rather than replace the barrel and the breach, it probably makes more sense to simply build a new gun.
• Making it very difficult to get a license for a shotgun and banning those under 18 from using shotguns also adds little. Ignoring the fact that shotguns make excellent self-defense weapons, they are so rarely used in crime, that the Home Office's report doesn't even provide a breakdown of crimes committed with shotguns.
Britain is not alone in its experience with banning guns. Australia has also seen its violent crime rates soar to rates similar to Britain's after its 1996 Port Arthur gun control measures. Violent crime rates averaged 32% higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did the year before the law in 1995. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 74%.
During the 1990s, just as Britain and Australia were more severely regulating guns, the U.S. was greatly liberalizing individuals' abilities to carry guns. Thirty-seven of the 50 states now have so-called right-to-carry laws that let law-abiding adults carry concealed handguns once they pass a criminal background check and pay a fee. Only half the states require some training, usually around three to five hours' worth. Yet crime has fallen even faster in these states than the national average. Overall, the states in the U.S. that have experienced the fastest growth rates in gun ownership during the 1990s have experienced the biggest drops in murder rates and other violent crimes.
Many things affect crime; the rise of drug-gang violence in Britain is an important part of the story, just as it has long been important in explaining the U.S.'s rates. Drug gangs also help explain one of the many reasons it is so difficult to stop the flow of guns into a country. Drug gangs can't simply call up the police when another gang encroaches on their turf, so they end up essentially setting up their own armies. And just as they can smuggle drugs into the country, they can smuggle in weapons to defend their turf.
Everyone wants to take guns away from criminals. The problem is that if the law-abiding citizens obey the law and the criminals don't, the rules create sitting ducks who cannot defend themselves. This is especially true for those who are physically weaker, women and the elderly.
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Rog makes the reasonable request that when we post an article that we include a brief statement of why we are doing so.
The following piece establishes VT in some sort of larger context of time and shows that guns are not the only technology i.e. suggesting that even if guns did not exist, something else would be used to effectuate evil.
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For the staticians among us:
April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, ERFURT, LITTLETON
A Chronicle of the Worst Rampages Ever
The names Erfurt, Littleton and Dunblane stand for some of the bloodiest school shootings ever perpetrated. Blacksburg will now likely join that list. SPIEGEL ONLINE documents some of the worst shooting rampages in history.
February 12, 2007 : Ten people were killed during two shootings on the same day, one in Salt Lake City, Utah and one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Salt Lake City, the gunman opened fire in a shopping mall, killing five before he was shot and killed by the police. In Philadelphia, three men were killed at a business meeting before the gunman ultimately killed himself.
Photo Gallery: The Worst Ever School Massacres
October 2, 2006 : In Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, 32-year-old truck driver Charles Carl Roberts IV barricaded himself in a one-room Amish school house before killing five schoolgirls execution-style before killing himself.
March 21, 2005 : At Red Lake Senior High School in Minnesota, 16-year-old student Jeff Weise opened fire, killing five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard. Prior to the rampage, he had shot his grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend. It later became apparent that Weise had visited neo-Nazi Web sites prior to the shooting.
April 26, 2002 : At Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhäuser killed 16 people and himself within just 10 minutes. Among the dead were 12 teachers, the school secretary, two students and a policeman. Steinhäuser had been expelled from the school one year prior to the attack.
March 27, 2002 : Thirty-three-year-old Richard Durn opened fire at a town hall in western Paris, calmly shooting at 40 people, killing eight of them. He committed suicide by jumping out of the fourth floor of police headquarters after he was captured.
September 26, 2001 : A 57-year-old attacker forced his way into the parliament of the Swiss canton Zug and opened fire. He killed 14 people before turning his gun on himself.
June 8, 2001 : Former janitor Mamoru Takuma rampaged through an elementary school in the Japanese city of Osaka. He stabbed eight children to death and wounded a number of others. He was sentenced to death and was hanged in September 2004.
April 20, 1999 : Two students stormed Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and murdered 12 other students aged 14 to 18 as well as a teacher. A further 24 people were injured before the attackers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed themselves.
March 24, 1998 : In Jonesboro, Arkansas, four students and a teacher were killed when two middle school boys aged 13 and 11 set off the fire alarm. The two then began shooting at the evacuated students from the woods nearby. A further nine students and a teacher were wounded in the hail of bullets.
May 22, 1997 : In north-eastern Brazil, a former soldier killed 17 people. First he murdered his wife and mother-in-law before leaving his home and firing randomly at people on the streets. The reason for his attack appears to have been rumors about his apparent homosexuality.
April 28, 1996 : Thirty-five people were killed and a further 37 wounded when 28-year-old Martin Bryant went on a rampage in the town of Port Arthur on the island of Tasmania in Australia. Bryant opened fire in a café with an automatic weapon before moving to the neighboring gift shop and then the parking lot outside. It took hours before the police were able to capture the killer.
March 13, 1996 : In the deadliest attack on children in United Kingdom history, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton opened fire in a school gymnasium, killing 16 five- and six-year-olds and one teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane. Hamilton then committed suicide.
September 23-24, 1995: In the French town of Toulon, a 16-year-old student killed his step-father, his half-brother and his mother on the evening of Sept. 23. The next morning, he continued his rampage, killing a further 10 victims.
October 16, 1991 : George Hennard drove his pickup into Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas and opened fire on the guests inside. He killed 23 people and wounded 20 before eventually killing himself.
December 6, 1989 : Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lepine killed 14 women and wounded a further 13 people at the École Polytechnique at the University of Montreal in the worst school massacre in Canada's history. He then took his own life. In a letter he left behind, he indicated a hate for feminists as a motive for the shooting.
July 18; 1984: James Oliver Huberty, a 41-year-old welder, walked into a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California and opened fire with a 9-mm Uzi semi-automatic and other weapons. He killed 21 people and wounded 19 before being gunned down by the police.
August 1, 1966 : At the University of Texas at Austin, a student ascended a tower at the university and opened fire on people below. In all he killed 15 people, including his wife and mother the night before. He was shot dead by the police.
June 11, 1964 : In Volkhoven near Cologne, Germany, an army veteran stormed a school, killing eight children and stabbing two teachers to death.
May 18, 1927 : In the deadliest mass school murder in United States history, former school board member Andrew Kehoe set off three bombs in Bath Township, Michigan killing 45 people and wounding 58. Kehoe killed himself and the superintendent by blowing up his own vehicle.
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What I believe for certain is that if someone on that campus had been armed besides the rentacops I doubt we would be discussing the 32 dead.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with this one.
This is one of the few instances in which I believe another armed individual (besides a uniformed LEO) would have been more of a hindrance than a help. While we await the full details of the police investigation, I think a few things need to be consider in regards to concealed carry and this incident:
1) Chaotic situation - Huge campus, unknown shooter, panicked faculty and students, massive police presence. Anyone walking around with a gun besides the LEOs would have not only put themselves at extreme risk (from both LEOs and bystanders), but would have had one hell of a time trying to "explain" that they were not the shooter and only trying to help out. The attention drawn to themselves would have had a detrimental effect on what was already a highly charged situation.
2) Probable lack of environmental training - There is often discussion in these forums of training for reality or under duress/stress. What are the chances that a non-LEO could have reacted accordingly without placing him/herself or others in more danger? The only person I want carrying a firearm in a stituation like this is someone who shoots on a regular basis, trains in and for situations like this, or has been in high stress situations which required them use firearms. Is the person with the firearm necessarily going to fit into these parameters?
The unfortunate reality is that the great majority of students/staff/faculty/civilians are not going to be prepared for these situations. A one hour seminar/orientation on what to do in case of an on-campus shooter is not nearly enough training.
3) Statistical reality - The chances of the armed civilian being in the right spot at the right time and able to get off the shot to take care of the perp are slim to none. While the idea of CCW is a valid one, the chaotic reality of the situation throws the odds in favor of the perp.
I work on a large University campus and there has been much discussion among faculty, staff, and students about this tragic shooting. The students who work for me are trained on how to react to a situation like this one, and we are fortunate enough to work in a building that is basically built like a bank vault. However, in as much as I respect them as adults and hard workers, this does not mean that they are necessarily mature enough or adult enough to handle a serious breach in security. And the thought of one of them carrying a firearm and trying to formulate a plan to take out an armed gunman is a definite stretch.
This was not a hold up at a bank or restaurant. This was chaos on a large scale with an unknown number of assailants. Just having another gun handy would not have been the fix.
Concealed carry permits deter violent crimes more than handgun bans.
This may be true, but I'm going to guess that this deterrent relates more to common criminals that gun wielding sociopaths. Anyone willing to go on a rampage like this is not stopping to think about the handgun under Prof. Johson's coat.
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The people that have concealed carry permits tend to be the more well trained individuals. I know here in Texas one must certify to get the permit, not just pay a fee.
Yes the guy is a sociapath, but even the suicide bombers in Israel have been detered by the fact that teachers are armed. And I can't think of anyone more out of their mind than a suicide bomber.
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****For those of you who don't know him, Massad Ayoob, the son of a Syrian immigrant is one of the top names in law enforcement/self defense firearms writing/training in the US. Reading his stuff as a teen inspired my career in law enforcement.****
Armed civilians can
help fight terrorism
By Massad Ayoob
This article was written before terrorists seized a school in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia, one of the small republics that make up the modern Russian Federation. The terrorists took more than 1200 hostages and, by the time the ensuing siege ended, at least 335 of them, mostly children, were dead. As Mr. Ayoob points out, terrorists care not a bit for the lives of innocents, including children. But he also points out, in this article, that one of the most effective counters to terrorism is when the innocents themselves are armed. — Editor
It will happen like this. The story, by the way, is true and has already happened.
“At 7:50 a.m., near the highway’s third traffic light and by a row of shops called the White House Plaza, the Toyota minivan was waiting for the light to change when a yellow-painted taxicab overtook the consulate car and stopped at a sharp angle in front of it. Two men, both carrying Chinese-made AK-47 7.62mm assault rifles, calmly emerged from the cab, raised their weapons, and unleashed a point-blank, furious fusillade at the minibus and its passengers. One of the gunmen fired into the front of the vehicle, peppering the windshield with nearly twenty 7.62mm holes. The second man, who eyewitnesses reported as bearing down on the sliding door of the minibus in text-book assault position, unleashed a banana-clip magazine’s worth of ammunition straight into the van, killing Mrs. Van Landingham and Mr. Durell.”
That incident did not happen in the United States. It took place in Karachi, Pakistan, on Wednesday, March 8, 1995. The account comes from Relentless Pursuit, the 2002 book about the hunt for Al-Qaeda terrorists written by Samuel M. Katz. Notes Katz, “It was the kind of operation the Mujahadeen had carried out so many times in Afghanistan, ambushing Soviet officers in Kabul.”
They don’t need airplanes to crash into skyscrapers. Many in the world intelligence community have been predicting that the next wave of Al-Qaeda attacks in the USA will take place on a much smaller scale, and in the heartland: the rural areas and small towns so cherished by the readers of Backwoods Home Magazine.
The next major terrorist target in the United States might be in “the heartland” instead of New York City.
Perhaps afflicted with the attention span of a fish, some pundits have implied that it’s paranoid to worry about further attacks. They say there is no evidence that terrorists are here.
The clueless should not talk about evidence. Mohammad Atta and the rest of the September 11, 2001 skyjacker team had long dwelt among us in this country as a sleeper cell. It was a carefully crafted operation of significant size. Believing that it cannot happen again is a manifestation of wishful thinking.
The fact is, there is strong reason to believe that it most certainly is going to happen again. The Israeli intelligence-gathering group DEBKA reported on May 26 of 2004: “Several sleeper cells are also known to have infiltrated the United States in ship’s containers in 2003 and early this year. Some of these containers were spotted at important US ports with signs of occupation by men with weapons and explosives who were never caught. They may have been decoys to distract attention from landings of large parties of armed terrorists on American shores, whom intelligence sources believed headed undetected for safe houses inland to await orders to strike.”
DEBKA noted in the same bulletin: “Our sources add that American and foreign counter-terror and intelligence agencies are also hunting for Midaat Mursi, known as Abu Khabab, prominent member of al Qaeda’s operational partner, the Egyptian Jihad Islami, who is considered the organization’s top expert on radiological bombs. Mursi heads a number of terrorist rings who may have been instructed to infiltrate the United States through Canada for a dirty bomb attack. They may have made the crossing already.”
As to the “dirty bomb” thing, the tidbit has been going around through the intelligence community for years now that Osama bin Laden is in possession of multiple “suitcase nukes” acquired through rogue elements of the former Soviet Union military. These would be more likely to be employed near large population centers.
The face of the enemy
We have seen the patterns of terrorist attack in other countries, with Israel being the paradigm. Suicide bombings, car bombings, and mass murder attempts in public places with firearms, such as the Karachi incident recounted at the beginning of this article.
The deaths of unarmed men, women, and children do not concern the perpetrators. Naive observers feel that this is not going to happen because their reading of the Moslem faith is that such killings are strictly forbidden. That is my understanding also. The problem is, we are not dealing with strict Moslems. We are dealing with fanatics and radicals whose faith has been cruelly misinterpreted by their leaders and twisted against them as well as against us.
Even the humble .22 can save the day if a shot is coolly placed in the right spot. This is the Smith & Wesson .22 Kit Gun, a favorite of backwoods people since before WWII.
In the wake of the brutal murder of American hostage Paul Johnson, Jr. in June of 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan was quoted by Beth Gardiner of Associated Press from an address he delivered over Jordan Radio. Said the king, “These evil acts are not only aimed against the United States and the West, but also against Islam and humanity.”
Researchers David Benjamin and Steven Simon were able to access the deposition of a captured member of Al-Qaeda. In the following passage, he talks about his training and what he was told by the spiritual leader who was in charge of his terrorist cell:
“He said that our time now is similar like in that time, and he say ibn al Tamiyeh, when a tartar come to Arabic war, Arabic countries that time, he say some Muslims, they help him. And he says ibn al Tamiyeh, he make a fatwah. He said anybody around the tartar, he buy something from them and he sell them something, you should kill him. And also, if when you attack the tartar, if anybody around them, anything, or he’s not military or that—if you kill him, you don’t have to worry about that. If he’s a good person, he go to paradise and if he’s a bad person, he go to hell.”
What this individual is expressing, literally, is an ethos of “kill them all and let God sort them out.”
There is, really, only one answer. The threat must be interdicted. The Israelis figured out long ago that there’s no point in taking at gunpoint a subject who considers himself to be on a “martyrdom operation,” as Osama bin Laden has called his trademark type of merciless attack against the helpless. When a criminal suspect is taken at gunpoint by a police officer, a security professional, or a law-abiding armed citizen, what is happening is essentially a kind of negotiation.
In negotiation, as we all know, a form of bargaining is taking place. We give something we can afford to give, to gain something that we genuinely need. At gunpoint, we are implicitly saying to the criminal, “If you cease what you are doing which endangers us, we will let you live.” We can afford to lodge him at society’s expense in a penitentiary (or, if we are not police, to let him escape) in return to his obedience to the command to cease hostility. On his side of the deal, he is allowed to live unharmed in return for ceasing his dangerous behavior, which forced us to point deadly weapons at him.
This particular negotiation breaks down, however, when what we offer in return for what we need is something the other party doesn’t particularly want. The fanatics of Al-Qaeda and their sympathizers have repeatedly said that where our culture loves life, theirs loves death. The volunteers call themselves martyrs, and expect to sit at the side of their god and be rewarded with a few dozen virgins in the afterlife as a result of their actions. Therefore, they do not fear death, and cannot be bargained with like a criminal who wants to live.
Only one type of “negotiation” is possible. If what we need is the safety of the innocent, and what the terrorists want is death, suddenly the trade seems feasible after all.
This is why the Israelis have learned to shoot first and discuss the matter later when the explosives or the guns come out in the hands of the other side. Not long ago, a woman in a market in Israel saw a man attempting to activate an explosive device strapped to his body. She drew a concealed pistol and shot him dead before he could trigger the suicide bomb, and in so doing she saved countless innocent people from being killed or mutilated. American newspapers referred to her as a “security” person, but the word I get is that she was simply an ordinary lady…with a gun, and the will to use it, and the foresight to have learned to use it properly and effectively.
Many years before, a clutch of terrorists opened fire in a public place in Israel. Guns bloomed everywhere from the concealing garments of honest Israeli citizens. In moments, the terrorists were on the ground bleeding from their gunshot wounds, all dead but one. The wounded survivor said indignantly afterward that no one had told them that their victims might be armed and capable of shooting back.
After the massacre at the Maalot school decades ago, the Israelis developed the policy of having plainclothes volunteer guards in the schools, armed with concealed handguns. They were not hired gun security specialists, but parents and grandparents who had signed up to help protect their children and those of the community. They were trained with their firearms by the civil guard. Since that time, there was no wholesale murder of children in an Israeli school. The one such incident happened on a field trip outside the country, where it would have been known to the murderers that the adult chaperones were not allowed to take the weapons they carried in Israel. Last year, a terrorist gunman opened fire in an Israeli school, and was cut down by civilian volunteer gunfire before he could accumulate a significant death toll.
A little “snub-nose .38” like this ended the depredations, and the life, of urban terrorist Twymon Myers. This one is the ubiquitous Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special, in production since 1950 and weighing some 19 ounces with five-shot capacity.
The June 2004 issue of the Gottlieb-Tartaro Report carried the following item under the headline Armed Israeli Citizens Help Curb Terrorists: “Israel’s police spokesman Gil Kleiman says that citizens who carry their own guns are helping to curb the damage terrorists can inflict by being able to stop a terrorist situation. ‘We’ve seen it time and time again,’ said Kleiman. ‘Armed civilians who are well trained can save people’s lives. If there isn’t a policeman, civilians can deal immediately with a terrorist.’” Emphasis is Gottlieb’s and Tartaro’s.
We need to remember, too, that all terrorism is not political. Two psychopathic teens inflicted a huge toll of death and tragedy at Columbine High School, acting out a sick agenda that was personal rather than political or religious. In Pearl, Mississippi, a young man in a similar state of mind murdered his mother with a knife to gain control of his estranged father’s deer rifle, which he then took to school. He shot several students, and was in the act of driving toward a nearby junior high school with the gun and a quantity of ammunition when he was interdicted at gunpoint by a courageous assistant principal who had retrieved a Colt .45 semiautomatic from his pickup truck in the parking lot.
NACOP, the National Association of Chiefs of Police, came up with some figures that are on point to this issue in their recent 16th Annual Survey of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, which was posted June 15, 2004. Jim Kouri, identified as Vice President and Public Affairs Specialist for NACOP, noted that the survey results differed from the public’s perception that most police executives in this country frown upon the idea of citizens fighting back. “When police chiefs and sheriffs are allowed to respond to poll questions anonymously, the politics may be removed from their answers,” Kouri explained.
Some extracts from the results of that survey:
“When asked if the United States would be attacked by terrorists within the next year, 88.2 percent said yes. Meanwhile 64 percent of police commanders said they received training and other resources from the federal government to combat terrorism, while only 42 percent said their departments participated in terrorism-response simulations.”
Also, “With regard to private citizens owning firearms for sport or self-defense, 94 percent of the respondents supported civilian gun-ownership rights. Ninety-six percent of the police chiefs and sheriffs believe criminals obtain firearms from illegal sources and 91 percent revealed they hadn’t arrested anyone for violation of the so-called ‘waiting period’ laws. When asked if they opposed citizens obtaining concealed-weapons permits, only 34 percent said yes.”
We’ve seen the future
We are a nation of hundreds of million of citizens, equipped with only a few hundred thousand police officers. Clearly, the cops can’t be everywhere at once.
Obviously, any citizen should report suspicious behavior. That’s not paranoia or fascism; under the circumstances, it’s just common sense.
No, citizens won’t spot a guy in a kafiyeh setting the timer on a small nuclear device. However, citizens do spot smaller things that can have a bearing. 9/11 suicide squad leader Mohammed Atta allegedly got into a road rage incident en route to the original airport from which he flew to Boston to transfer onto the fateful flight that terminated at the Twin Towers. If a cell phone call to police had summoned authorities in time, the course of history might have been changed.
The 1911 style .45 caliber semiautomatic is the classic American fighting pistol. This one is a Kimber CDP.
Now, if a man carrying a boxcutter and intending to slash throats, commit mass murder, and die himself that day should find himself embroiled in a shouting match with an angry motorist who appears about to call people who can “come and take him away,” he is not likely to just drive off. This is yet another reason for competent, responsible people to consider going armed.
More states than ever now authorize concealed carry of handguns. Vermont, the one state that has traditionally allowed that practice without any requirement for a permit or license, has recently been joined in that by an enlightened state of Alaska. More states than ever have reciprocity in this regard, that is, will accept concealed carry authorization issued by other states. Your best constantly-current source on the national concealed carry gun law situation is the web-site www.packing.org.
Choice of equipment
The citizens of Israel have proven that you don’t need exotic counter-terrorist equipment to deal with scumbags who open fire on the innocent. The typical gun used there successfully by armed citizens is the ordinary 9mm semiautomatic pistol, of any of several makes. The key thing is that it be reliable. Be sure to load it with jacketed hollow point ammunition. It is designed to open up inside an offender’s body and lodge there, instead of tearing out the other side and homing in on an unseen bystander located behind the attacker and out of the shooter’s line of sight. The hollow point is also a more decisive “manstopper.” In shooting after shooting in Israel, terrorists have had to be shot again and again and again before they ceased their hostile actions, because the typical full metal jacket ammunition used there just punches a narrow wound profile like an ice-pick and does not deliver as much energy to surrounding tissues as does the American style bullet with the hollow cavity.
.45 caliber is a traditional American choice, and it’s no trick to teach even a small person to use one effectively. This powerful round has a good reputation for one-shot stops on violent human aggressors. Again, hollow points should be the choice of ammunition. The .45 kicks harder than the 9mm and so, for some, will warrant more training and practice time to gain competency. The US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is partial to the .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol.
Frankly, the good old-fashioned six-shooter will probably do well enough. Back in the 1970s, a task force of NYPD detectives and Federal agents shot it out with one Twymon Myers, a domestic terrorist believed at the time to have been the last surviving member of the Black Liberation Army, whose signature attack was the ambush murder of uniformed police officers. Myers had wounded multiple lawmen in the firefight with his 14-shot Browning Hi-Power 9mm pistol, and was trying to get to heavier firepower in his attaché case, and a hail of gunfire from cops armed with everything from 9mm automatics to Magnum revolvers had failed to put him down. Police lore has it that, before Myers could dump his empty pistol and get into his case, a grizzled New York City detective leaned out from cover and carefully squeezed off a single shot from his 1950-style .38 Special revolver. The 158-grain non-hollow point bullet punched through Myers’ heart and dropped him like a rock. Inside the case the terrorist had with him were a Colt .357 Magnum revolver and a 9mm German Schmeisser submachine gun, both fully loaded.
Indeed, even a .22 is better than nothing at all. The .22 caliber Beretta pistol issued by Mossad has gotten many an Israeli intelligence agent out of dangerous circumstances.
Self-reliant people prepare for storms even if there haven’t been any for a while. There hasn’t been a real storm on these shores since 9/11 at this writing, but the storm warnings are clear and urgent.
The Federal government is preparing for the next wave of attacks. So is local law enforcement.
This means that the rest of America needs to prepare for it, too.
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GM -
Excellent post.
Kumaw -
Yes, most CC individuals are trained and knowledgeable in the use of their weapon. Unfortunately, this does not always equate to proficiency/ability to act under duress.
I think the article that GM's just posted article makes two points which we should be discussing as a society as a whole (and possibly under another forum heading):
1) Attitude - Most societies with a trained/enabled populace live under constant threat to life and limb. What we have here in the States is perceived threat. . We live in an open, relatively safe society so most people live with an "until it happens to me, I won't worry about it" mentality. Thus, the majority of the population, while believing that a terrorist threat is imminent, is unwilling to deal with that reality.
2) Preparation - Living under constant threat means that you prepare for worst case scenarios: Parents/grandparents/teachers learn to use weapons, fear or rejection of firearms is countered with education and training in firearms use, children are taught and trained to deal with "bad guys". As quoted in the article, "Armed civilians who are well trained can save people’s lives. If there isn’t a policeman, civilians can deal immediately with a terrorist.’”
So how do we, as a society prepare our populace to defend itself?
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Granted training does not always equal proficiency under stress, the belief by the "bad guy" that someone else has a gun is usually a very good deterent.
As far as how we go about preparing our society for such attack, I wish I knew. The magic word would be education, but there are far to many people that have the belief that we can all just put down our guns and hug and the world's problems will go away. I would love nothing more than for that tactic to work, but sadly it is not a reality now, nor has it ever been.
You are correct in that we live in a relatively safe country, while in the back of our minds we know an attack may be imminent we do not prepare because we say it cannot happen to us. We said that on September 10, 2001 and after a short period in which we were better prepared most have reverted back. Today we and many others discuss what we can do to prevent this from occuring again. Sadly though this too will pass and most will go back to worrying about what Paris Hilton is doing today rather than if their children are safe.
Politics are the name of the game, until it becomes financially and politically lucrative to be secure and prepared, chances are it won't happen.
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Politics are the name of the game, until it becomes financially and politically lucrative to be secure and prepared, chances are it won't happen.
So true...
You brought up the point that even crazy suicide bombers are deterred by the possibility of armed civilians. This is true, but as mentally ill as suicide bombers are, they are still thinking "rationally" in terms of completing a mission or a series of objectives and they have a religious motivation to complete the task at hand in the most attention getting way possible. Getting gunned down before completing this task is what might give them pause.
As more facts come out in the VT shooting, it is readily apparent that the shooter was waaaaaaaaaay beyond "rational" thought and acting on a purely psycopathic level. So the idea that there might be another shooter out there wouldn't even be a blip on his radar screen.
Don't get me wrong, I think that CC is a viable solution in many instances, but not this one.
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The thought of an armed citizen might not deter him, but an armed citizen shooting him until he no longer presents a threat would work.
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The thought of an armed citizen might not deter him, but an armed citizen shooting him until he no longer presents a threat would work.
I second that.
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Other viable options are an FMA practitioner leaping on him and stabbing him until the threat is ended, or a group of students rushing him and stomping him into jelly rather than being slaughtered like sheep.
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It is really sad all this happened. I wish it could have turned out differently.
Personally, I'm a little suprised this thing doesn't happen more often. There are a lot of hurt and crazy people out there.
In a country of 300+ million people, there is bound to be someone who as all the parts needed to make a killer. A lot of our states have higher populations than some European countries.
I think that the killings are a symptom of the freedom we all possess. You would have to limit it dramatically if you wanted to go out and lock down every loner with a bad additude... or give "the man" the power to decide if someone isn't on the right page and lock him away before he commits a crime.
For your own family and friends, you can give them tools, weapons, and knowledge so that they can try to protect themselves or see the danger signs and avoid these kinds of things.
I just don't see a reasonable solution for the whole of society when it comes to protecting everyone, all the time, from these types of people.
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April 18, 2007, 0:44 p.m.
A Culture of Passivity
"Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.
By Mark Steyn
I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”
Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.
Point two: The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:
Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn’t meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.
We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:
When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.
I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzEzYzQ0Y2MyZjNlNjY1ZTEzMTA0MGRmM2EyMTQ0NjY=
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Wanted: A culture of self-defense
By Michelle Malkin · April 18, 2007 11:24 AM
My column this week:
There's no polite way or time to say it: American college and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregrated dorms, politically correct academic departments, and designated "safe spaces" to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions—while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University's anti-Minuteman Project protesters).
Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.
And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.
As news was breaking about the carnage at Virginia Tech, a reader e-mailed me a news story from last January. State legislators in Virginia had attempted to pass a bill that would have eased handgun restrictions on college campuses. Opposed by outspoken, anti-gun activists and Virginia Tech administrators, that bill failed.
Is it too early to ask: "What if?" What if that bill had passed? What if just one student in one of those classrooms had been in lawful possession of a concealed weapon for the purpose of self-defense?
If it wasn't too early for Keystone Katie Couric to be jumping all over campus security yesterday for what they woulda/coulda/shoulda done in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and if it isn't too early for the New York Times editorial board to be publishing its knee-jerk call for more gun control, it darned well isn't too early for me to raise questions about how the unrepentant anti-gun lobbying of college officials may have put students at risk.
The back story: Virginia Tech had punished a student for bringing a handgun to class last spring—despite the fact that the student had a valid concealed handgun permit. The bill would have barred public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun." After the proposal died in subcommittee, the school's governing board reiterated its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus buildings.
Late last summer, a shooting near campus prompted students to clamor again for loosening campus rules against armed self-defense. Virginia Tech officials turned up their noses. In response to student Bradford Wiles's campus newspaper op-ed piece in support of concealed carry on campus, Virginia Tech associate vice president Larry Hincker scoffed:
"t is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles…The editors of this page must have printed this commentary if for no other reason than malicious compliance. Surely, they scratched their heads saying, 'I can't believe he really wants to say that.' Wiles tells us that he didn't feel safe with the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting him. He even implies that he needed his sidearm to protect himself."
The nerve!
Hincker continued: "The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We've seen that fear here, and we don't want to see it again…Guns don't belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same."
Who's scratching his head now, Mr. Hincker?
Some high-handed commentators insist it's premature or unseemly to examine the impact of school rules discouraging students from carrying arms on campus. Pundit Andrew Sullivan complained that it was "creepy" to highlight reader e-mails calling attention to the Virginia Tech's restrictions on student self-defense—even as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rushed to capitalize on the massacre to sign up new members and gather e-mail addresses for Million Mom March chapters. "We are outraged by the increase in gun violence in America, especially the recent shooting at Virginia Tech," reads the online petition. "Add your name to the growing list of people who are saying 'Enough Is Enough!'"
Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense—mind, spirit, and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.
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Over twenty five years ago I took a class in forensic psychiatry. We took a tour of St Elizabeth hospital for the crimnally insane.
I still remember many of the stories the psychiatrist told us. I also remember him distinctly saying that most of the patients *appeared* dangerous, but were not. Most of them, if released, would cause no harm. The problem was being able to predict or figure out which ones would go out and harm others. He said this was often impossible. Thus, many of the inmates/patients would spend their lives there - because the psychiatrists coud not predict the harmless from the dangerous. It is always easier in retrospect. In my experience in evaluating patients for mental hosptial commitment the psychiatrist simply interviews the patient to determine potential harm to him/herself and if they don't find clear evidence of delusions or hallucinations, and if the patient simply denies suicidal or homicidal intent then the patient is released.
Of course now we'll hear how the "system" failed, the college president should be fired, the teachers should have been more proactive, it's bush's fault, it's the NRA's fault, it is our decadant culture, and on and on and on for weeks or months, Time and Newsweek will come out with their version of the *real* truth behind the headlines, Geraldo, O'Reilly will have more to blab about ad nauseam on Fox, CNN will interview the Dems candidates side of the story giving them a platform describing how we need them to protect "our children" - all this and more - until we get new headlines.
Of course I can just turn off the news for a while or come here and chat and read up on other topics :-)
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Would someone help out Rog with some data on what has happened in the UK and Australia since they have virtually outlawed guns?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_the_UK
I don't want to post the whole page, so the following is my summary. This applies only to the UK.
First off, guns are not completely banned in the UK, but there is a certification process that would be considered draconian by US standards. The prospective gun owner must prove to the police that he has a "good reason" for owning one (legitimate sporting or work-related need) and that he can be trusted to operate it without causing any danger to the public. Self-defense has not been considered a legitimate reason since 1946. Before being issued a gun license, the person must give the police all serial numbers and other information on the specific gun(s) and must allow the police to inspect the person's gun storage arrangements. Handguns are pretty difficult to get a license for, while there's a slightly easier process for getting a shotgun license.
As for the effect of gun legistlation on crime in the UK, I will post from the Wikipedia word-for-word:
In 2005/06 there were 766 offences initially recorded as homicide by the police in England and Wales (including the 52 victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings),[15] a rate of 1.4 per 100,000 of population. Only 50 (6.6%) were committed with firearms, one being with an air weapon.[16] The homicide rate for London was 2.4 per 100,000 in the same year (1.7 when excluding the 7 July bombings).[17]
By comparison, 5.5 murders per 100,000 of population were reported by police in the United States in 2000, of which 70% involved the use of firearms (75% of which were illegally obtained).[18] New York City, with a population size similar to London and similar firearms laws with almost all firearms prohibited to normal citizens (over 7 million residents), reported 6.9 murders per 100,000 people in 2004.[19]
Based on the above, I would argue that a country's gun crime rate doesn't have as much to do with it's gun control laws as with it's culture around guns. We have few restrictions on gun ownership compared to other industrialized countries, but we also have a gun-glorifying culture I suspect you don't see much outside of the US. Mind you I'm not arguing for censorship of guns from our TV, movies, video games, etc. but that they may have something to do with why our rates of crazy suicide-shootings are off the spectrum compared to other countries.
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The mass killers are the abberant and thus media intensive form of killer in the US. The subculture of gangsterism in urban minority centers fuels most of our violent crime statistics. When it is safer for a young black male to be in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan than a civilian in Washington D.C. it's a sign that something has gone very wrong.
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The mass killers are the abberant and thus media intensive form of killer in the US. The subculture of gangsterism in urban minority centers fuels most of our violent crime statistics. When it is safer for a young black male to be in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan than a civilian in Washington D.C. it's a sign that something has gone very wrong.
No disagreement from me here.
Seriously, what can account for our exceptional rate of these mass murder-suicides? What's changed here during the past 15 years or so that could explain it? It's true that these mass killers are basically doing what they see in Quentin Tarantino movies and the Grand Theft Auto games (which I personally love BTW), but I don't know if these alone are enough.
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Thank you for helping the conversation move forward with a good summary of your source Rog-- a good example for all of us btw!-- however it appears I have failed to make my point clear. :oops: I was not looking for a US vs. the UK/Australia comparison. Rather I was looking for intra UK/Australia before/after analysis.
Turning to the larger conversation, personally at the moment I find myself thinking more in terms of the inevitable flotsam of the anonymous interaction of modern life , , , Looking at the is guy in evo-psych terms my snap impression is of a guy in a culture somewhat alien to him who simply was always getting shut down by all the kitty flashing around him and it drove him angry bonkers. If guns didn't exist he probably be doing arson or bombs.
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I do believe that media, including video games and especially "gangsta" rap has an effect. The key element is it's effect on vulnerable populations of urban minority children and predominantly white suburban children that to a degree are living a "Lord of the Flies" existence in the midst of our country. Media, especially that which glorifies violent anti-social behavior fills the void too often left by parents and our now "value-neutral" society.
Hedonism, illegitimacy, crass displays of material wealth and criminality are destroying black communities today. Ironic, given that a strong sense of family and Christianity sustained black Americans through slavery and Jim Crow oppression.
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http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007344.htm?print=1
Michelle Malkin takes on the conduct of one of today's most popular HipHop performers.
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City Journal
Blair Breaks the Black Crime Taboo
Gangsta culture, not an unjust society, drives it, says the outgoing British prime minister.
Heather Mac Donald
12 April 2007
British prime minister Tony Blair has just broken one of the biggest taboos in Western politics: talking frankly about black crime. Give the man a medal for courage. And then ask why American pols are unable to summon such backbone in addressing the biggest impediment holding back poor black Americans: out-of-control crime rates and the gangsta culture that gives rise to criminality, problems that will be with us long after Don Imus is sent into belated retirement.
A wave of teen black-on-black murders has struck London over the last two months. Most recently, a horde of 12 black boys attacked a 14-year-old aspiring rapper with baseball bats and knives in an apartment lobby on Good Friday, killing the boy, Paul Erhahon, and seriously wounding his 15-year-old friend. Officials have charged a 13-year-old and 14-year-old with murder; the mother of the younger suspect laughed and joked during a recent court proceeding. The family of the surviving victim has received threats since the stabbing, which appears to be gang-related. Since February, nine teenagers have been shot or stabbed to death in London and other British cities.
Politicians and “community leaders” have two usual responses to such crime: ignoring it or blaming poverty and racism. Silence is eminently safe; changing the subject to poverty wins you political sensitivity points from media and cultural elites. But Tony Blair has undergone what he calls a “lurching into total frankness” in the final weeks of his premiership. And so he’s thrown out the usual politician’s playbook and spoken the truth: The violence will not end “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it,” he said yesterday in a lecture in Cardiff, Wales. The spate of killings isn’t part of a generalized crime wave, Blair said, but results from the behavior of black youth. Even more astounding than his willingness to name the violent-crime phenomenon was his rejection of the acceptable explanations for it. “We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong—it has not—but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold,” he observed.
In the past, Blair has also fingered the real “root cause” of so much underclass criminality: the breakdown in marriage. Without fathers in their lives, he has said, boys will be more at risk for antisocial behavior. He made the same point yesterday: the crime epidemic has “to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them.” And in case his audience still didn’t get the point, he rejected the usual excuse for black crime. “Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that,” Blair noted, “but I don’t think it’s the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation.”
The problem with the crime taboo is that it leaves untouched a culture that puts law-abiding black citizens—the majority of blacks—at risk. The crime taboo allows a subset of that population to destroy the hopes and lives of others. Blair called on the many upstanding black leaders and parents to take on the gang culture: “The black community—the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law-abiding people horrified at what is happening—need to be mobilized in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids.”
Blair also recognized in his speech that stronger policing is the best solution to violent crime. The police and prosecutors need to focus intensively on the youths behind the recent gun and knife attacks, he said, and take the leaders “out of circulation.”
The victim lobby of course struck back hard, denouncing Blair’s call for more assertive policing and demanding more antipoverty funding. Yet in a sign that Britain may contain pockets of sanity still unthinkable in the U.S., the ordinarily PC Commission for Racial Equality stood by Blair’s remarks, saying that people “shouldn’t be afraid to talk about this issue for fear of sounding prejudiced.”
America contains its share of lame-duck politicians at the moment—the mayor of New York City and the president of the United States come to mind. If they want to leave a legacy of leadership, they could do worse than following Tony Blair’s lead in tackling the most pressing urban problem.
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City Journal
Time for the Truth About Black Crime Rates
The lessons of the Sean Bell case
Heather Mac Donald
2 April 2007
Mayor Mike Bloomberg has the chance to transform not just New York, but all American cities, by breaking the taboo on talking about the connection between race and crime. Doing so would take courage that no politician has yet mustered. But after the manslaughter and assault indictments of three New York police officers for fatally shooting Sean Bell last November, Bloomberg has an opening: acknowledge that police officers may react too precipitously to perceived threats in charged urban settings, in exchange for a wide-open discussion about the sky-high black crime rates that encourage that reaction. Crime, not police racism, drives negative police-community relations in black neighborhoods. And until the crime rate comes down, tragedies like the Sean Bell shooting may reoccur.
After the Bell shooting, which occurred outside a Queens strip joint, critics of the NYPD followed the usual script: increasingly ugly charges of police bigotry (despite the fact that several of the officers involved were black); deployment of the threat-of-black-riots weapon; calls for convictions of the officers on the most severe murder charges; and the transformation of the highly aberrant Bell shooting into the very symbol of the NYPD. To his discredit, Mayor Bloomberg joined the rush to prejudge the officers. The day after the shooting, he declared: “It sounds to me like excessive force was used.” Even more irresponsibly, he deemed the incident “inexplicable,” thus fueling the belief that the officers could not possibly have perceived a deadly threat and all but guaranteeing that any acquittal of them would be viewed as proof that the criminal-justice system was antiblack.
Carefully omitted from the swirl of media coverage and the denunciations of the NYPD was any discussion of black crime rates. The New York Times did its usual best to shroud the issue. A March article, for instance, devoted itself to charges that the police were preying on the black community. After noting that more than half the people whom cops stop and frisk are black, Times reporter Diane Cardwell added: “City officials maintained that those stopped and searched roughly parallel the race of people mentioned in reports from crime victims.” No, actually, there is no “rough parallel” between the proportion of stops and the proportion of alleged assailants: blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes. Though blacks, 24 percent of New York City’s population, committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in the city last year, according to victims and witnesses, they were only 55 percent of all stop-and-frisks. Of course, the Times didn’t give the actual crime figures. Even a spate of vicious assaults on police officers in the week before the indictments didn’t change the predominant story line that officers were trigger-happy racists.
But the context of the Bell shooting suggests a different picture. The undercover officers and detectives involved had been deployed to Club Kahlua in Jamaica, Queens, because of the club’s history of lawlessness. Club patrons and neighbors had made dozens of calls to the NYPD, reporting guns, drug sales, and prostitution, and the police had recently made eight arrests there.
The night of November 24, undercover officer Gescard Isnora, who fired the first shots at Bell, had observed a man put a stripper’s hand on his belt to reassure her that he had a gun and would protect her from an aggressive customer. Outside the club, Isnora (who is African-American) and his colleagues witnessed a heated exchange between Bell’s entourage and an apparent pimp over the services of a prostitute, during which the pimp kept his hand inside his jacket, as if holding a gun. After the hooker refused to have sex with more than two of the group’s eight members, Bell—presumably referring to the pimp—said, “Let’s fuck him up,” and Bell’s companion, Joseph Guzman, said, “Yo, get my gun, get my gun.” Isnora reported these exchanges over his cell phone to his colleagues in the area.
Feeling the danger level mounting, Isnora retrieved his gun from his unmarked car. When he returned to the scene, Bell and his two companions had gotten into their car, ready to drive away. Isnora thought that a drive-by shooting of the pimp could be imminent, and so moved to question the car’s occupants. He held out his badge (by his account), identified himself as a police officer, and told the car to stop. Instead, Bell drove forward and hit Isnora and a police minivan, backed up, and then slammed into the minivan again, nearly hitting Isnora a second time.
Isnora, who was standing on the passenger side of Bell’s car, claims that he saw Guzman reach for his waistband. Believing that he faced a deadly threat, Isnora opened fire. The four other undercovers and detectives at the scene also started shooting, killing Bell and wounding Guzman and Bell’s other companion in the car, Trent Benefield. No gun turned up in Bell’s car. (Benefield alleges that Isnora began shooting before the car started moving, which is absurd. The barrage of 50 bullets was so fast that no witness at the scene remembers hearing more than eight rounds fired off. Bell was undoubtedly killed as soon as the shooting started, and so wouldn’t have been able to move the car forward and back and forward again, as he did. None of the officers had ever used their guns before, moreover, despite making hundreds of arrests, including for gun possession. These were not trigger-happy cops.)
Without question, the results of this episode are horrific. And the tactics stank—Isnora should never have left himself as exposed as he was. But was the officers’ perception of a deadly threat so unreasonable as to make their shooting a criminal homicide? If a judge or jury finds that they did not reasonably believe that they faced an imminent use of deadly force, then, according to the woefully inappropriate criminal code, their actions fall within the literal definition of manslaughter. (Showing what appears to be arbitrariness, the grand jury indicted two of the officers for manslaughter and assault—even though one of them, Isnora, did not even hit Bell—and a third for reckless endangerment, but didn’t indict the remaining two officers, even though all had fired their guns.)
Isnora and his colleagues knew the following, when they saw a car racing toward them whose occupants they believed could have guns: shootings at after-hours joints like Club Kahlua are by no means uncommon. Just the previous month, a patron had been fatally gunned down outside another Queens club, the third lethal shooting there in three years. This March, a club customer in Brooklyn tried to blast an off-duty cop’s head off after the two had unintentionally bumped into each other on a crowded dance floor.
Isnora and his colleagues did not know the following, but it’s a further indication of the reality of crime in New York: Bell, Benefield, and Guzman had all been arrested for gun possession in the past, according to the New York Times. Further, Guzman had a long prison record, including a sentence for an armed robbery during which he shot at his victim. And Bell and his entourage were dealing drugs, an activity highly correlated with violence.
These specific facts about the Bell shooting are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of data points that reveal a hard truth: any given violent crime in New York is 13 times more likely to have a black than a white perpetrator. While most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection, the incidence of criminal activity among young black males is off the charts. “A black kid between the ages of 18 and 24 is the scariest thing to cops,” says a police attorney, “because they know how crazy it can get.” And this is true whatever the officer’s race.
The “public doesn’t get how frightened cops are,” says a former NYPD commanding officer. “Cops are reluctant to articulate everything that goes into a shooting incident,” says another former officer, retired assistant chief Jim McShane. “They’re afraid to say: ‘Are you kidding me? I was terrified. The guy was drinking; I told him to stop; I was afraid that someone was going to get shot.’ ” When an officer thinks that he is under deadly threat, he knows that any hesitation could cost him his life. NYPD officer Steven McDonald was staring down the barrel of a small gun in Central Park in the summer of 1986, held by a 15-year-old whom he had stopped to question about a stolen bicycle. Rather than immediately responding with deadly force, he paused—and was shot twice in the head and once in the arm, paralyzing him from the neck down.
Because of these realities, it’s possible that officers are quicker to perceive—and react to—a deadly threat when dealing with young black men than they would be with other demographic groups. (Even so, fatal shootings by the NYPD are extremely rare; fatal shootings of unarmed civilians, even rarer.) And it’s undeniably true that the much greater incidence of crime in black neighborhoods means that the police activity there will be higher, leading to a greater risk of the use of force.
The NYPD’s goal at this point—understandably and rightly—is to do everything it can to prevent the death of another Sean Bell. The department’s recently announced tactical review is more than justified. But the police can only go so far in ensuring that tragic errors, when they inevitably happen, do not happen to black males. Mayor Bloomberg has already pandered enough to antipolice activists. He should now cash in his political chips and speak the truth: the black crime rate is the most important determinant of how the police interact with the black community. Unless black leaders—real or media-created—muster the will to address the crime epidemic among black youth (most of it inflicted on other blacks), the ongoing carnage will almost inevitably include an infinitesimal number of accidental police shootings of unarmed men. Criminal activity among young African-Americans is the poison of cities and of race relations; if Bloomberg can force a conversation about it, he could help reclaim urban America.
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SELLING RAPPER TELLS '60 MINUTES': WOULDN'T HELP POLICE CATCH EVEN A SERIAL KILLER BECAUSE IT WOULD HURT HIS BUSINESS AND VIOLATE HIS 'CODE OF ETHICS'
Thu Apr 19 2007 12:47:1 ET
Rap star Cam'ron says there's no situation -- including a serial killer living next door -- that would cause him to help police in any way, because to do so would hurt his music sales and violate his "code of ethics." Cam'ron, whose real name is Cameron Giles, talks to Anderson Cooper for a report on how the hip-hop culture's message to shun the police has undermined efforts to solve murders across the country. Cooper's report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, April 22 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
"If I knew the serial killer was living next door to me?" Giles responds to a hypothetical question posed by Cooper. "I wouldn't call and tell anybody on him -- but I'd probably move," says Giles. "But I'm not going to call and be like, ÔThe serial killer's in 4E.' " ( For an excerpt of Giles' interview, click here
Giles' "code of ethics" also extends to crimes committed against him. After being shot and wounded by gunmen, Giles refused to cooperate with police. Why? "Because...it would definitely hurt my business, and the way I was raised, I just don't do that," says Giles. Pressed by Cooper, who says had he been the victim, he would want his attacker to be caught, Giles explains further: "But then again, you're not going to be on the stage tonight in the middle of, say, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with people with gold and platinum teeth and dreadlocks jumping up and down singing your songs, either," says Giles. "We're in two different lines of business."
"So for you, it's really about business?" Cooper asks.
"It's about business," Giles says, "but it's still also a code of ethics."
Rappers appear to be concerned about damaging what's known as their "street credibility," says Geoffrey Canada, an anti-violence advocate and educator from New York City's Harlem neighborhood. "It's one of those things that sells music and no one really quite understands why," says Canada. Their fans look up to artists if they come from the "meanest streets of the urban ghetto," he tells Cooper. For that reason, Canada says, they do not cooperate with the police.
Canada says in the poor New York City neighborhood he grew up in, only the criminals didn't talk to the police, but within today's hip-hop culture, that's changed. "It is now a cultural norm that is being preached in poor communities....It's like you can't be a black person if you have a set of values that say ÔI will not watch a crime happen in my community without getting involved to stop it,'" Canada tells Cooper.
Young people from some of New York's toughest neighborhoods echo Canada's assessment, calling the message not to help police "the rules" and helping the police "a crime" in their neighborhoods. These "rules" are contributing to a much lower percentage of arrests in homicide cases -- a statistic known as the "clearance rate" -- in largely poor, minority neighborhoods throughout the country, according to Prof. David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "I work in communities where the clearance rate for homicides has gone into the single digits," says Kennedy. The national rate for homicide clearance is 60 percent. "In these neighborhoods, we are on the verge of -- or maybe we have already lost -- the rule of law," he tells Cooper.
Says Canada, "It's like we're saying to the criminals, ÔYou can have our community....Do anything you want and we will either deal with it ourselves or we'll simply ignore it.' "
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This personal account is from an Oakland Univ. Prof in Michigan. I find it analogous to the advance concerns about Cho and to illustrate CCP's comment about not know which sociopaths will be dangerous and which just have strange behaviors.
Op-Ed Contributor (NY Times)
The Killer in the Lecture Hall
By BARBARA OAKLEY
Published: April 19, 2007
Rochester, Mich.
THE sticky note on my door was wiggling. It was a gift from a student.
Glued to the middle of it was a cockroach.
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t that I was an unpopular professor. To the contrary — according to student evaluations, I might as well have had a sign on my forehead that said “Kindly.”
I was told later that the cockroach was a symbol of love from — well, let’s call him Rick. Rick had recently moved into the lab across the hall from my office, where he spent the night in a sleeping bag under one of the benches.
Rick, who had been a student for more than a decade, sometimes whiled away his time discussing guns and explosives with some of the more munitions-inclined faculty members. He admitted that he kept his basement stocked with a variety of “armaments.”
Sometimes I wished I had an armament, although, like Virginia Tech, my university does not allow firearms on campus. I wished that because, not only did Rick attach love-cockroaches to my door and live across the hall from my office and possess a small armory, but Rick watched me all the time. Sometimes he followed me out to my car — just to make sure I was safe.
When I complained about Rick to the dean of students, I was told there was nothing to be done — after all, “students have rights, too.” Only after appealing to that dean’s boss and calling a raft of fellow professors who had also come to fear Rick’s strange behavior was I able to convince the administration to take grudging action; they restricted his ability to loiter in certain areas and began nudging him toward the classes he needed to graduate.
In a strange way, I could see the administration’s point. Rick looked fairly ordinary, at least when away from his sleeping bag and pet cockroaches. It must have seemed far more likely that Rick could sue for being thrown out of school, than that I — or anyone else — could ever be hurt. The easiest path, from their perspective, was to simply get me to shut up.
Many professors have run across more than their share of Ricks. At least one Virginia Tech professor noticed that Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 people on campus on Monday, was potentially dangerous and did her best to warn the administration and the police. (So did at least two female students.) But there is only so much a teacher can do — “students have rights, too.”
It’s a simple fact that, for every deranged murderer like Mr. Cho there are thousands more oddballs just below the breaking point. I know one quasi-psychopathic incompetent, for example, who remained on the campus payroll for over a dozen years simply because his supervisor was afraid of being killed if he was fired.
It’s long been in fashion to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born bad.
Researchers at King’s College London have recently determined that if one identical twin shows psychopathic traits, the other twin, who coincidentally shares precisely the same set of genes, has a very high probability of having the same psychopathic traits. But among fraternal twins, who share only half their genes, the chance that both twins will show psychopathic traits is far smaller. In other words, there is something suspiciously psychopath-inducing in some people’s genes.
What could it be? Medical images of the brain give tantalizing clues — the amygdala, the “fight or flight” decision-making center of the brain, may be smaller than usual, or some areas of the brain may glow only dimly because of low serotonin levels. We may not know precisely what set Mr. Cho off, but we are beginning to home in on the unusual differences in certain neurochemistries that can make people act in bizarre and dysfunctional ways.
Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.
In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?
Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, is the author of the forthcoming “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend.”
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Cold Standard
Virginia Tech and the heartlessness of our media and therapy culture.
Friday, April 20, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
I saw an old friend on the Acela on the way to Washington, and he told me of the glum, grim faces at the station he'd left, all the commuters with newspapers in their hands and under their arms. This was the day after Virginia Tech. We talked about what was different this time, in this tragedy. I told him I felt people were stricken because they weren't stricken. When Columbine happened, it was weird and terrible, and now there have been some incidents since, and now it's not weird anymore. And that is what's so terrible. It's the difference between "That doesn't happen!" and "That happens."
Actually I thought of Thoreau. He said he didn't have to read newspapers because if you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with its numerous applications. If you know lightning hits trees, you don't have to know every time a tree is struck by lightning.
In terms of school shootings, we are now familiar with the principle.
Dennis Miller the other night said something compassionate and sensible on TV. Invited to criticize some famous person's stupid response to a past tragedy, he said he sort of applied a 48 hour grace period after a tragedy and didn't hold anyone to the things they'd said. People get rattled and say things that are extreme.
But more than 48 hours have passed. So: some impressions.
There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.
And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.
But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.
The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.
The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.
The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.
One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?
I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn't kept up with the number of tragedies. "A nation mourns." "Our prayers are with you." The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?
And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: "Oh no." "I am so sorry." "I'm sad." "It's horrible."
With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.
The last testament Cho sent to NBC seemed more clear evidence of mental illness--posing with his pistols, big tough gangsta gonna take you out. What is it evidence of when NBC News, a great pillar of the mainstream media, runs the videos and pictures on the nightly news? Brian Williams introduced the Cho collection as "what can only be described as a multi-media manifesto." But it can be described in other ways. "The self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist" is one. But if you called it that, you couldn't lead with it. You couldn't rationalize the decision.
Such pictures are inspiring to the unstable. The minute you saw them, you probably thought what I did: We'll be seeing more of that.
The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25199_Kos...h_Mass_Murderer&only
Note: The Daily Kos is one of the most popular lefty blogs.
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I suppose the following, sent to me by a usually reliable friend, belongs on the Well Armed People thread, but given the flow of the conversation here and that it addresses questions raised by Rog, I post it here.-- Marc
==========================
Some points of interest about crime, guns and violence in different countries. Not included is that in the late 90's in Florida, thieves and criminals were targeting people with rental cars. This was done because most rentals were people on vacation and were from other states. The reason for targeting these people was simple: They were not Florida citizens ( which has a concealed and carry gun law) and not likely to carry guns with them.
Australia: Readers of the USA Today newspaper discovered in 2002 that, "Since Australia's 1996 laws banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings by 43%. While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%."2
* Canada: After enacting stringent gun control laws in 1991 and 1995, Canada has not made its citizens any safer. "The contrast between the criminal violence rates in the United States and in Canada is dramatic," says Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser in 2003. "Over the past decade, the rate of violent crime in Canada has increased while in the United States the violent crime rate has plummeted." 3
* England: According to the BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40% in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997.4
* Japan: One newspaper headline says it all: Police say "Crime rising in Japan, while arrests at record low."5
* In 1998, a study conducted jointly by statisticians from the U.S. Department of Justice and the University of Cambridge in England found that most crime is now worse in England than in the United States.
* "You are more likely to be mugged in England than in the United States," stated the Reuters news agency in summarizing the study. "The rate of robbery is now 1.4 times higher in England and Wales than in the United States, and the British burglary rate is nearly double America's."6 The murder rate in the United States is reportedly higher than in England, but according to the DOJ study, "the difference between the [murder rates in the] two countries has narrowed over the past 16 years."7
* The United Nations confirmed these results in 2000 when it reported that the crime rate in England is higher than the crime rates of 16 other industrialized nations, including the United States.8
(Sorry the following chart does not format well- Marc)
High Gun
Ownership Countries
Low Gun
Ownership Countries
Country
Suicide
Homicide
Total*
Country
Suicide
Homicide
Total*
Switzerland 21.4
2.7
24.1
Denmark 22.3
4.9
27.2
U.S. 11.6
7.4
19.0
France 20.8
1.1
21.9
Israel 6.5
1.4
7.9
Japan** 16.7
0.6
17.3
* The figures listed in the table are the rates per 100,000 people.
** Suicide figures for Japan also include many homicides.
Source for table: U.S. figures for 1996 are taken from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The rest of the table is taken from the UN 1996 Demographic Yearbook (1998), cited at http://www.haciendapub.com/stolinsky.html
Also, http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/01/05/do0502.xml
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http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/LawyersGunsBurglars.htm
LAWYERS, GUNS, AND BURGLARS
David B. Kopel [FNa1]
Copyright © 2001 Arizona Board of Regents; David B. Kopel
I. Introduction
So we drove down the road, and I was lookin' for a house that looked like if there was somebody at home that it'd be somebody that didn't carry a gun or didn't have no weapons in the house, so they couldn't use them.
-- Arkansas burglar [FN1]
In recent years, litigators have begun to displace legislators as American lawmakers. Recently, more than two dozen cities and counties, under the coordination of an anti-gun organization, have filed suits against handgun manufacturers. [FN2]
While the effect of these suits may be to impose de facto handgun prohibition by driving manufacturers out of business, or by making handguns affordable only to the wealthy, these suits claim that handgun manufacturers should be held accountable for the externalities imposed by their products. For example, since city government hospitals spend money treating the victims of *346 gunshot wounds, it is argued that handgun manufacturers should be forced to reimburse city governments. [FN3]
The handgun suits are not unique; they are the latest manifestation of a growing trend to have litigators and courts decide complex questions of social policy which had previously been reserved to the legislature. Alcohol, prescription drugs, high-fat foods, and automobiles have all been discussed as potential future lawsuit targets if the handgun cases succeed. The handgun cases, it should be noted, are partly funded with the plaintiffs attorneys' winnings from the tobacco cases. [FN4]
This Article analyzes one specific reason why courts are ill-suited to exercise legislative functions, as the handgun suits and similar cases ask the courts to do: courts cannot properly assess the true socioeconomic costs and benefits of controversial products. To illustrate the point, this Article looks in detail at a very large positive externality which is overlooked in the handgun suits: the major role that widespread gun ownership plays in reducing the rate of home invasion burglaries (a.k.a "hot burglaries"). Because potential burglars cannot tell which homes possess guns, most burglars choose to avoid entry into any occupied home, for fear of getting shot. [FN5] The entry pattern of American burglars contrasts sharply with that of burglars in other nations; in Canada and Great Britain, burglars prefer to find the residents at home, since alarms will be turned off, and wallets and purses will be available for the taking. [FN6]
Consequently, American homes which do not have guns enjoy significant "free rider" benefits. Gun owners bear financial and other burdens of gun ownership; but gun-free and gun-owning homes enjoy exactly the same general burglary deterrence effects from widespread American gun ownership. This positive externality of gun ownership is difficult to account for in a litigation context (since the quantity and cost of deterred crime is difficult to measure), and may even go unnoticed by court--since the free rider beneficiaries (non-gun owners) are not represented before the court. [FN7]
Part International Comparisons of this Article looks at the differences between the behavior of American burglars and their cousins in other nations. Part Risks to American Burglars specifies the risks that American burglars face from various deterrents, including armed victims. Part Target Selection by Burglars details how burglars choose targets, while empirical data about burglary deterrence are analyzed in Part Real-world Tests of the Deterrence Model. Part Confrontations Involving Burglars looks at what happens during confrontations between burglars and victims. Part Guns Compared to Other Anti- Burglary Devices compares and contrasts defensive firearms ownership with other anti-burglary strategies, such as guard dogs. Policy implications and network effects of firearms ownership are explored in Part Policy Implications.
*347
II. International Comparisons
It is axiomatic in the United States that burglars avoid occupied homes. As an introductory criminology textbook explains, "Burglars do not want contact with occupants; they depend on stealth for success." [FN8] Only thirteen percent of U.S. residential burglaries are attempted against occupied homes. [FN9] But this happy fact of life, so taken for granted in the United States, is not universal.
The overall Canadian burglary rate is higher than the American one, and a Canadian burglary is four times more likely to take place when the victims are home. [FN10]
In Toronto, forty-four percent of burglaries were against occupied homes, and twenty-one percent involved a confrontation with the victim. [FN11] Most Canadian residential burglaries occur at night, while American burglars are known to prefer daytime entry to reduce the risk of an armed confrontation. [FN12]
Research by the federal government's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that, based on 1994 data, American youths 10 to 17 years old had much higher arrest rates than Canadian youths for every category of violent and property crime. The lone exception was burglary, for which Canadian youths were one-third more likely to be involved. [FN13] In cities such as Vancouver, home invasion burglaries aimed at elderly people have become endemic, and murders of the elderly during those burglaries all too frequent. [FN14] Unfortunately, help from the government is not always available. In Quebec, the provincial police (Sureté du Québec) are under orders from their commander to reduce arrests for burglary, because the jails are full. [FN15]
*348
A 1982 British survey found fifty-nine percent of attempted burglaries involved an occupied home. [FN16] The Wall Street Journal reported:
Compared with London, New York is downright safe in one category: burglary. In London, where many homes have been burglarized half a dozen times, and where psychologists specialize in treating children traumatized by such thefts, the rate is nearly twice as high as in the Big Apple. And burglars here increasingly prefer striking when occupants are home, since alarms and locks tend to be disengaged and intruders have little to fear from unarmed residents. [FN17]
In Britain, seventy-seven percent of the population was afraid of burglary in 1994, compared to sixty percent in 1987. [FN18] The London Sunday Times, pointing to Britain's soaring burglary rate, calls Britain "a nation of thieves." [FN19] In the Netherlands, forty-eight percent of residential burglaries involved an occupied home. [FN20] In the Republic of Ireland, criminologists report that burglars have little reluctance about attacking an occupied residence. [FN21]
Of course, differences in crime-reporting and crime-recording behavior between nations limit the precision of comparative criminal data. Nevertheless, the difference in home invasion burglary rates between the United States and other nations is so large that it is unlikely to be a mere artifact of crime data quirks. [FN22]
*349
Why should American criminals display such a curious reluctance to perpetrate burglaries, particularly against occupied residences? The answer cannot be that the American criminal justice system is so much tougher than the systems in other nations. During the 1980s, the probability of arrest and the severity of sentences for ordinary crimes in Canada and Great Britain were at least as great as in the United States. [FN23] Could the answer be that American criminals are afraid of getting shot? The introductory American criminology textbook states, "Opportunities for burglary occur only when a dwelling is unguarded." [FN24] Why is an axiomatic statement about American burglars so manifestly not true for burglars in other countries.
III. Risks to American Burglars
A. Risks to Burglars from Victims
One out of thirty-one burglars has been shot during a burglary. [FN25] On the whole, when an American burglar strikes at an occupied residence, his chance of being shot is about equal to his chance of being sent to prison. [FN26] If we assume that the risk of prison provides some deterrence to burglary, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the equally large risk of being shot provides an equally large deterrent. In other words, private individuals with firearms in their homes double the deterrent effect that would exist if government-imposed punishment were the only deterrent.
How frequently are firearms actually used in burglary situations? The only comprehensive study of the subject was undertaken by five researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC"). [FN27] Although some CDC studies on firearms have been criticized for obvious technical errors and bias, [FN28] this particular study simply reported the facts as the researchers found them. In 1994, random-digit-dialing phone calls were made throughout the United States, resulting in 5,238 interviews. [FN29] The interviewees were asked about use of a firearm in a burglary situation during the last twelve months.
*350
Thirty-four percent of the interviewees admitted to owning a firearm. This figure is low compared to dozens of other national studies of household firearms ownership. [FN30] Perhaps the telephone interviewers encountered an especially high number of people who were unwilling to disclose their ownership of a gun (and would therefore be unwilling to disclose, later in the interview, their use of that gun). [FN31] Thus, the burglary researchers are more likely to have underestimated anti-burglar firearms use than to have over-estimated it.
The researchers found that six percent of the sample population had used a firearm in a burglary situation in the last twelve months. [FN32] Extrapolating the polling sample to the national population, the researchers estimated that in the last twelve months, there were approximately 1,896,842 incidents in which a householder retrieved a firearm but did not see an intruder. [FN33] There were an estimated 503,481 incidents in which the armed householder did see the burglar, [FN34] and 497,646 incidents in which the burglar was scared away by the firearm. [FN35] In other words, half a million times every year, burglars were likely forced to flee a home because they encountered an armed victim.
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****Continued from above****
A much more limited study about home invasion burglaries has achieved more notoriety than the national study discussed above. An article by Arthur Kellermann examined police reports of burglaries in Atlanta. [FN36] Out of 198 burglaries, Kellermann found only three cases in which the homeowner used a gun against the burglar, according to the police report. From this finding, Kellermann concluded that defensive gun use against burglars was rare. [FN37]
Unfortunately, Kellermann's study could not have been better designed to produce a gross undercount. Kellermann relied on burglary report forms compiled by the Atlanta police. Those report forms, however, do not include any field for the police officer to report defensive gun use by the victim. Furthermore, Atlanta police officers are not trained to solicit information about defensive gun use from the victims. [FN38] Thus, the only time that a defensive gun use ("DGU") would be recorded on the offense report would be when an officer spontaneously decided to record it on the free-form section of the burglary offense report. In other words, *351 Kellermann used a data set (burglary offense reports) that was not designed to record DGUs, and on the basis of this data set he concluded that DGUs were rare.
Besides the obvious inadequacy of the burglary offense reports, the Kellermann study was further flawed by its failure to account for the large number of cases in which a burglary victim scares away a burglar but does not report the incident. Less than half of all burglaries are reported to the police. [FN39] From the average homeowner's viewpoint, there would be little to gain in making such a report. While society as a whole might gain something from the report, the homeowner personally would not; the burglar, while still at large, would presumably focus on other homes not known to contain an armed occupant. By making the report, the citizen might perceive that he would take some risk of being charged with an offense (especially if he fired at the burglar) or of having his firearm confiscated. This perception might be particularly strong in Atlanta, where the Mayor and his police chiefs are well known as advocates of strict gun control. [FN40] Even when reporting a burglary, a citizen might choose not to disclose his use of a firearm.
The 1994 national CDC survey, discussed above, avoided all of these problems. [FN41] By making phone calls to a national random sample, the CDC study had a better chance of receiving information from burglary victims who chose not to call the police. Because the burglary victims were talking to a pollster, rather than to a police officer from a notoriously anti-gun administration, the victims would be more likely to acknowledge defensive gun use. And because the CDC pollsters (unlike the Atlanta police) were actually asking all burglary victims about DGUs in burglaries, [FN42] the pollsters were much more likely to find out about DGUs. Accordingly, the CDC study's figure, approximately a half-million annual confrontations between armed citizens and home invasion burglars, is plausible (although perhaps low), while Kellermann's assertion that such incidents hardly ever occur is not.
The most thorough survey of citizen defensive gun use in general (not just in burglaries) found that in well over ninety percent of incidents, a shot is never fired; the mere display of the gun suffices to end the confrontation. [FN43] The CDC study did not specifically ask whether a gun was fired. [FN44] Accordingly, it is reasonable to infer that burglary DGU is similar to DGU in general, and that most incidents end with the burglar fleeing at the sight of the armed victim, rather than the victim shooting at the burglar.
*352
B. Risks to Burglars From the Judicial System
Only 13 percent of burglaries are ever cleared by an arrest. [FN45] (This means that in 13 of 100 burglaries, someone identified as the burglar is eventually arrested. One arrest can "clear" dozens of burglaries. [FN46]) Many arrests, of course, do not lead to felony convictions. Of the felony convictions for burglary, [FN47] fifty-two percent lead to a prison sentence, twenty-three percent to jail time, and twenty-five percent to probation. [FN48] The median sentences are forty-eight months for prison, five months for jail, and thirty-six months for probation. [FN49]
On the whole, state prisoners serve about thirty-five percent of the time to which they are actually sentenced. [FN50] The above figures represent felony convictions. Misdemeanor convictions resulting from a burglary result in significantly shorter sentences. Given the criminal justice system's focus on violent crimes and on drug crimes, burglary has become a relatively low priority. [FN51]
IV. Target Selection by Burglars
A. General Principles of Target Selection
Scholars have long agreed that the physical characteristics of a potential target have an important effect on its likelihood of being victimized. For example, Oscar Newman's book Defensible Space looked at the importance of architectural design, emphasizing that good architectural design would help to create "strongly defined areas of influence" that would intimidate potential predators. [FN52] In Residential Crime, Thomas Reppetto linked home burglary to a target's ease of access and visibility to surveillance. [FN53]
*353
Increasing attention to the victims of crime has led criminologists to find that certain lifestyle choices can influence the risk of being victimized. [FN54] Among important lifestyle choices are whether the potential victim's routine activities offer "guardianship" of possible criminal targets. [FN55] For example, apartments with doormen have lower burglary rates. [FN56] All this supports the common-sense conclusion that burglary rates will be higher, other things being equal, where the opportunities to perpetrate a successful burglary are higher.
Thus, as the percentage of working women in the population has increased, leaving more homes unguarded during the daytime, the percentage of daytime burglaries has also increased. [FN57] According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, between twenty-one percent and twenty-three percent of American burglaries involve an entry into a residence at night. [FN58]
B. Advance Planning by Burglars
American burglars tend to "work" at hours when persons are unlikely to be in the home. [FN59] Consistent with the desire to avoid a personal confrontation, burglars prefer houses, such as those on corners, where the risks of being observed by a neighbor are reduced. [FN60] Two hours are spent on the average suburban burglary; most of that time is spent "casing the joint" to ensure that no one is home.
One burglar told of watching a particular house and noting that the occupants all went to church for four to five hours on Sunday morning. [FN61] Another explained, "You just knock on the door to see if they're there. You bang, you *354 bang, you look through windows, nobody's in bed. I mean, you gotta make sure they're not home, make sure they're not home." [FN62]
C. In Homes and on the Street
Rengert and Wasilchick's book about how burglars work reveals that fear of armed homeowners played a major role in determining burglary targets. Burglars reported that they avoided late-night burglaries because, "That's the way to get shot." [FN63] Some burglars said that they shun burglaries in neighborhoods with people of mostly a different race because, "You'll get shot if you're caught there." [FN64]
The most thorough study of burglary patterns was a St. Louis survey of 105 currently active burglars. [FN65] The authors observed, "One of the most serious risks faced by residential burglars is the possibility of being injured or killed by occupants of a target. Many of the offenders we spoke to reported that this was far and away their greatest fear." [FN66] Said one burglar: "I don't think about gettin' caught, I think about gettin' gunned down, shot or somethin'...'cause you get into some people's houses...quick as I come in there, boom, they hit you right there. That's what I think about."
Another burglar explained:
Hey, wouldn't you blow somebody away if someone broke into your house and you don't know them? You hear this noise and they come breakin' in the window tryin' to get into your house, they gon' want to kill you anyway. See, with the police, they gon' say, "Come out with your hands up and don't do nothing foolish!" Okay, you still alive, but you goin' to jail. But you alive. You sneak into somebody's house and they wait til you get in the house and then they shoot you.. . .See what I'm sayin'? You can't explain nothin' to nobody; you layin' down in there dead! [FN67]
In contrast, Missouri is one of only nine states which has no provision for citizens to be issued permits to carry handguns for protection. Thus, a criminal in St. Louis faces a very high risk that the target of a home invasion may have a lawful gun for protection, but minimal risk that the target of a street robbery will have a lawful firearm for defense. The same authors who studied active St. Louis burglars conducted another study of active St. Louis armed robbers. [FN68] They found that "ome of the offenders who favored armed robbery over other crimes *355 maintained that the offense was also safer than burglary. . .." [FN69] As one armed robber put it: "My style is, like, don't have to be up in nobody's house in case they come in; they might have a pistol in the house or something." [FN70]
On the streets, many of the St. Louis robbers "routinely targeted law-abiding citizens," [FN71] who, unlike their counterparts in most American states, were certain not to be carrying a gun for protection. Law-abiding citizens were chosen as robbery victims because, as one robber noted, "You don't want to pick somebody dangerous; they might have a gun themselves." [FN72]
In addition to the St. Louis study, the Wright-Rossi National Institute of Justice surveyed felony prisoners in eleven state prison systems on the impact of victim firearms on burglar behavior. [FN73] In that survey, seventy-four percent of the convicts who had committed a burglary or violent crime agreed, "One reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot." [FN74]
Surveys of prisoners may not be entirely representative of criminals as a whole, since prisoners comprise the subset of criminals who were caught and sentenced to prison. [FN75] Thus, non-prisoner criminals might be more "successful," perhaps because they are more skillful, more risk averse, or are in some other way better at burglarizing. To the extent that prisoner bias would influence the results of the burglary question, it might be expected that non-prisoner burglars would be even more averse than imprisoned burglars to occupied-residence burglaries. After all, criminals who are not prisoners stay out of prison by avoiding unnecessary risks.
Fortifying the widespread presence of home defense firearms in the United States is a legal culture which strongly supports armed home defense. Colorado, for example, specifically immunizes the use of deadly force against violent home intruders from criminal and civil liability, regardless of whether lesser force would suffice. [FN76]
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****This is why Colorado has such a low rate of burgs in occupied dwellings.****
18-1-704.5. Use of deadly physical force against an intruder.
(1) The general assembly hereby recognizes that the citizens of Colorado have a right to expect absolute safety within their own homes.
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 18-1-704, any occupant of a dwelling is justified in using any degree of physical force, including deadly physical force, against another person when that other person has made an unlawful entry into the dwelling, and when the occupant has a reasonable belief that such other person has committed a crime in the dwelling in addition to the uninvited entry, or is committing or intends to commit a crime against a person or property in addition to the uninvited entry, and when the occupant reasonably believes that such other person might use any physical force, no matter how slight, against any occupant.
(3) Any occupant of a dwelling using physical force, including deadly physical force, in accordance with the provisions of subsection (2) of this section shall be immune from criminal prosecution for the use of such force.
(4) Any occupant of a dwelling using physical force, including deadly physical force, in accordance with the provisions of subsection (2) of this section shall be immune from any civil liability for injuries or death resulting from the use of such force.
Source: L. 85: Entire section added, p. 662, § 1, effective June 6.
Cross references: For limitations on civil suits against persons using physical force in defense of a person or to prevent the commission of a felony, see § 13-80-119.
ANNOTATION
Am. Jur.2d. See 6 Am. Jur.2d, Assault and Battery, §§ 64, 65, 69; 40 Am. Jur.2d, Homicide, §§ 173-176.
C.J.S. See 40 C.J.S., Homicide, §§ 100, 101, 109.
Law reviews. For article, "Self-Defense in Colorado", see 24 Colo. Law. 2717 (1995).
Prerequisite for immunity under this section is an unlawful entry into the dwelling, meaning a knowing, criminal entry. People v. McNeese, 892 P.2d 304 (Colo. 1995).
To be immune from prosecution under this section a defendant must establish by a preponderance of the evidence that he or she had a reasonable belief that the intruder was committing or intended to commit a crime against a person or property in addition to the uninvited entry. This inquiry focuses on the reasonable belief of the occupant, not on the actual conduct of the intruder. People v. McNeese, 892 P.2d 304 (Colo. 1995).
Sufficient evidence existed to support trial court's denial of defendant's pre-trial motion to dismiss on the basis defendant had not met his burden as established by the supreme court. People v. Janes, 962 P.2d 315 (Colo. App. 1998).
Trial court is authorized to dismiss criminal prosecution at pretrial stage when conditions of statute are satisfied, and this does not infringe upon prosecution's discretion to file charges. People v. Guenther, 740 P.2d 971 (Colo. 1987); Young v. District Court, 740 P.2d 982 (Colo. 1987).
Defendant bears burden of establishing right to immunity by preponderance of evidence when issue of immunity is raised at pre-trial stage. People v. Guenther, 740 P.2d 971 (Colo. 1987); People v. Eckert, 919 P.2d 962 (Colo. App. 1996).
Fact that a homicide victim was on the defendant's porch does not permit the defendant to claim immunity from prosecution for unlawful entry to defendant's dwelling unless the court finds that defendant believed that the victim intended to commit a crime or use physical force against the defendant. People v. Young, 825 P.2d 1004 (Colo. App. 1991).
Defendant may still raise immunity as defense at trial when pretrial motion to dismiss is denied. People v. Guenther, 740 P.2d 971 (Colo. 1987).
For purposes of this section, the common areas of an apartment building do not constitute a dwelling. People v. Cushinberry, 855 P.2d 18 (Colo. App. 1993).
Where pretrial motion to dismiss on grounds of statutory immunity provided in this section is denied, defendant may raise it as an affirmative defense at trial. In such case, the burden of proof which is generally applicable to affirmative defenses would apply. People v. Malczewski, 744 P.2d 62 (Colo. 1987).
Because this section creates an immunity defense as well as an affirmative defense, and because the burden of proof for each defense is different, when raised at trial, this section poses special problems when instructing a jury. In such a case, instruction based on language from People v. McNeese, which dealt with pretrial immunity, must be put into context so as not to confuse or mislead the jury about the burden of proof with respect to an affirmative defense raised at trial. People v. Janes, 982 P.2d 300 (Colo. 1999).
Defendant did not establish by a preponderance of the evidence that he was entitled to immunity under this section where he could not show the struggle and wounding of the victim took place in defendant's bedroom of the house he shared with the victim. People v. Eckert, 919 P.2d 962 (Colo. App. 1996).
Trial court did not commit reversible error by refusing to instruct the jury that it need only determine whether the victim made an unlawful entry into a part of a dwelling that was occupied by defendant, as defendant failed to show that the bedroom was exclusively his province and that the victim's entry into the bedroom was unlawful. People v. Eckert, 919 P.2d 962 (Colo. App. 1996).
Instruction requiring jury to find that defendant had a reasonable belief that victim "had committed" a crime and omitting "was committing or intended to commit" a crime was erroneous but did not constitute plain error. There was no evidence that the victim's entry into defendant's house was unlawful and, therefore, no basis on which a reasonable jury could have otherwise acquitted defendant under this section. People v. Phillips, 91 P.3d 476 (Colo. App. 2004).
Trial court erred in interpreting subsection (2) as including the concept of "remain lawfully" within the statutory phrase "unlawful entry". Defendant failed to establish the legal elements of this section to bar prosecution where the victim was initially invited into defendant's residence and, after arguing, was later asked to leave. People v. Drennon, 860 P.2d 589 (Colo. App. 1993).
The reference to "uninvited entry" in subsection (2) refers back to the term "unlawful entry" used in the same subsection. People v. McNeese, 892 P.2d 304 (Colo. 1995).
Victim's entry was unlawful and uninvited for the purposes of statute providing immunity for use of force where wife of murder victim did not have authority to invite the decedent into defendant's apartment and was staying with the defendant on the condition that she not invite the victim into defendant's apartment. People v. McNeese, 865 P.2d 881 (Colo. App. 1993).
When this section is being used as an affirmative defense, it is error for a jury instruction to place the burden on the defendant to prove the affirmative defense. People v. Janes, 962 P.2d 315 (Colo. App. 1998).
Applied in People v. Arellano, 743 P.2d 431 (Colo. 1987).
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So, Colorado has the lowest burg rate in the US, which is lower than the UK or Canada. If it works for burglaries, let's apply this to school security.
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September 02, 2004, 10:15 p.m.
Follow the Leader
Israel and Thailand set an example by arming teachers.
Islamist terrorists in Beslan, Russia, are currently holding hundreds of children hostage, threatening to execute them. No one knows how this horrible situation will end; but we do know that it could have been prevented. Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy that swiftly ended terrorist attacks against schools. Earlier this year, Thailand adopted a similar approach. It is politically incorrect, but it does have the advantage of saving the lives of children and teachers. The policy? Encourage teachers to carry firearms.
Muslim extremists in Thailand’s southern provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, and Pattani have been carrying out a terrorist campaign, seeking to create an Islamic state independent of Thailand, whose population is predominantly Buddhist.
Most teachers are Buddhists, and they have been a key target of the terrorists, who have also perpetrated arsons against dozens of schools.
As reported by the Associated Press (“Thailand allows teachers in restive south to carry guns for protection”) on April 27, 2004, “Interior Minister Bhokin Bhalakula ordered provincial governors to give teachers licenses to buy guns if they want to even though it would mean bringing firearms into the classrooms when the region's 925 schools reopen May 17 after two months of summer holiday.”
The A.P. article explained: “Pairat Wihakarat, the president of a teachers’ union in the three provinces, said more than 1,700 teachers have already asked for transfers to safer areas. Those who are willing to stay want to carry guns to protect themselves, he said.”
Gun-control laws in Thailand are extremely strict, and are being tightened even more because of three school shootings (perpetrated by students) that took place in a single week in June 2003. Two students were killed.
But though Thailand’s government is extremely hostile to gun ownership in general, it has recognized that teachers ought to be able to safeguard their students and themselves.
Will Thailand’s new strategy work? It did in Israel, as David Schiller detailed in an interview with Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Schiller was born in West Germany and moved to Israel, where he served in the military as a weapons specialist. He later returned to Germany, and was hired as a counterterrorism expert by the Berlin police office, as well as by police forces of other German cities. For a while he worked in the terrorism research office of the RAND corporation, and for several years he published a German gun magazine.
Schiller recalls that Palestine Liberation Organization attacks on Israeli schools began during Passover 1974. The first attack was aimed at a school in Galilee. When the PLO terrorists found that it was closed because of Passover weekend, they murdered several people in a nearby apartment building.
Then, on May 15, 1974, in Maalot:
Three PLO gunmen, after making their way through the border fence, first shot up a van load full of workers returning from a tobacco factory (incidentally these people happened to be Galilee Arabs, not Jews), then they entered the school compound of Maalot. First they murdered the housekeeper, his wife and one of their kids, then they took a whole group of nearly 100 kids and their teachers hostage. These were staying overnight at the school, as they were on a hiking trip. In the end, the deadline ran out, and the army’s special unit assaulted the building. During the rescue attempt, the gunmen blew their explosive charges and sprayed the kids with machine-gun fire. 25 people died, 66 wounded.
Israel at the time had some strict gun laws, left over from the days of British colonialism, when the British rulers tried to prevent the Jews from owning guns.
After vigorous debate, the government began allowing army reservists to keep their weapons with them. Handgun carry permits were given to any Israeli with a clean record who lived in the most dangerous areas: Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
All over Israel, guns became pervasive in the schools:
Teachers and kindergarten nurses now started to carry guns, schools were protected by parents (and often grandpas) guarding them in voluntary shifts. No school group went on a hike or trip without armed guards. The Police involved the citizens in a voluntary civil guard project “Mishmar Esrachi,” which even had its own sniper teams. The Army’s Youth Group program, “Gadna”, trained 15 to 16-year-old kids in gun safety and guard procedures and the older high-school boys got involved with the Mishmar Esrachi. During one noted incident, the “Herzliyah Bus massacre” (March ’78, hijacking of a bus, 37 dead, 76 wounded), these youngsters were involved in the overall security measures in which the whole area between North Tel Aviv and the resort town of Herzlyiah was blocked off, manning roadblocks with the police, guarding schools kindergartens, etc.
After a while, “When the message got around to the PLO groups and a couple infiltration attempts failed, the attacks against schools ceased.”
This is not to say that Palestinian terrorists never target schools. In late May 2002, an Israeli teacher shot a suicide terrorist before he could harm anyone.
On May 31, 2002, as reported by Israel National News, a terrorist threw a grenade and began shooting at a kindergarten in Shavei Shomron. Then, instead of closing in on the children, he abruptly fled the kindergarten and began shooting up the nearby neighborhood. Apparently he realized that the kindergarten was sure to have armed adults, and that he could not stay at the school long enough to make sure he actually murdered someone.
Unfortunately for the terrorist, “David Elbaz, owner of the local mini-market, gave chase and killed him with gunshots. In addition to several grenades and the weapon the terrorist carried on him, security sweeps revealed several explosive devices that he had intended to detonate during the thwarted attack.”
People can spend months and years studying the “root causes” of terrorism, and pondering the merits of the grievances of Islamic terrorists in Malaysia, Israel, and Russia. But it’s fair to say that schoolchildren and teachers are not legitimate targets even of people who have legitimate grievances.
No one knows if civilized nations will ever eliminate the root causes of terrorism. But we do know that terrorist attacks on schools and schoolchildren could be almost completely eliminated in a very short time — if every nation at risk of terrorist attacks on schools began following the lead of Thailand and Israel.
Adults have a duty to protect children. In Beslan at this very moment, seven people are dead, and hundreds more are in deadly peril, because the teachers lacked the tools to stop the evildoers. If we are really serious about gun laws that protect “the children,” then it seems clear that — whatever other gun laws a society adopts — every civilized nation at risk of terrorist attack ought to ensure that armed teachers can protect innocent children.
— David Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel200409022215.asp
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Barf :-P :x
From the VirginiaTech web page on how to deal with workplace violence:
http://www.ehss.vt.edu/Programs/OSD/...ceviolence.htm
What to Do When Violence Occurs
Never attempt to disarm or accept a weapon from the person in question. Weapon retrieval should only be done by a police officer.
==================================
Let's be realistic about reality
April 22, 2007
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem: ''What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.''
According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to ''fear guns.''
Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab.
And at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to "permit the use of obviously fake weapons" such as plastic swords.
But it's not just the danger of overly realistic plastic swords in college plays that we face today. In yet another of his not-ready-for-prime-time speeches, Barack Obama started out deploring the violence of Virginia Tech as yet another example of the pervasive violence of our society: the violence of Iraq, the violence of Darfur, the violence of . . . er, hang on, give him a minute. Ah, yes, outsourcing: ''the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country." And let's not forget the violence of radio hosts: ''There's also another kind of violence, though, that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters.''
I've had some mail in recent days from people who claimed I'd insulted the dead of Virginia Tech. Obviously, I regret I didn't show the exquisite taste and sensitivity of Sen. Obama and compare getting shot in the head to an Imus one-liner. Does he mean it? I doubt whether even he knows. When something savage and unexpected happens, it's easiest to retreat to our tropes and bugbears or, in the senator's case, a speech on the previous week's "big news." Perhaps I'm guilty of the same. But then Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutes of learning on the planet, announces that it's no longer safe to expose twentysomething men and women to ''Henry V'' unless you cry God for Harry, England and St. George while brandishing a bright pink and purple plastic sword from the local kindergarten. Except, of course, that the local kindergarten long since banned plastic swords under its own "zero tolerance" policy.
I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.
But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they've created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.
I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told 'em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased 'em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where's the nearest place around here where you're most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you're not in the real world.
The "gun-free zone" fraud isn't just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia's distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with "the erosion of intellectual self-defense," and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and "safe spaces" that's the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we "fear guns," and "verbal violence," and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ''The Three Musketeers.'' What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?
©Mark Steyn, 2007