Empty holsters on campus

This is an article printed in the October 24th, 2007 Washington Times. It can be found here.

All I can say is "way to go, Scott!"

Empty holsters on campus

By W. Scott Lewis
October 24, 2007

Should you ever find yourself perusing the newspaper archives at your local library, take a few minutes to track down and compare the August 2, 1966, and April 17, 2007, editions of any American newspaper. You'll undoubtedly find that, for two papers written more than four decades apart, they tell strikingly similar stories.

In both editions you'll likely see that coverage of American soldiers fighting a publicly unpopular war overseas is pushed to the back pages by news of a mass shooting on the campus of a major university. But although the headlines suggest a classic case of "history repeats itself," the facts lurking beyond the newsprint actually tell a very different story.

On the morning of Aug. 1, 1966, few people had ever considered the possibility that they might die in an indiscriminate shooting spree. But shortly before noon on that fateful day, a 25-year-old former Marine climbed to the top of the University of Texas bell tower and created a worldwide reference point for such fears.

As police rushed to the scene, officers already on the UT campus struggled to formulate a plan. At that time, the Austin Police Department had no SWAT team. Officers were armed only with service revolvers and shotguns, both useless against a sniper firing from a fortified position high above the ground.

Seeing that something had to be done, students quickly retrieved hunting rifles from dorm rooms and fraternity houses, took up defensive positions throughout the campus and returned fire. In the August 2006 edition of Texas Monthly magazine, Bill Helmer, a graduate student at UT during the shooting, recalled the experience to journalist Pamela Colloff: He said he remembered thinking, "All we need is a bunch of idiots running around with rifles." But what they did turned out to be brilliant. Once the shooter could no longer lean over the edge and fire, he was much more limited in what he could do. That's why he did most of his damage in the first 20 minutes.

Flash forward 40 years, eight months and 15 days to the campus of Virginia Tech. Once again students and faculty on a college campus find themselves under fire from a madman. But this time there are no armed citizens to fend off the attack. Students and faculty are left with little recourse but to hide under their desks, as surviving victim Emily Haas told CNN, "waiting and hoping [the shooter] wouldn't come in." Sadly, the shooter did come into Emily's room. She survived with only superficial wounds, but her professor and 10 of her classmates lost their lives to a killer whose only advantage over his victims was a complete disregard for Virginia Tech's "gun-free" policy.

Though the notion of an indiscriminate shooting spree was a foreign concept in 1966, it's now very much a part of the national consciousness. Terms like "going postal" now populate the American vernacular. Students at elementary schools now practice what to do in the event of such an attack, much the same way their grandparents practiced "duck and cover." And yet, despite this awareness of and apparent desire to prepare for such threats, any suggestion that future shooting sprees might be mitigated by armed citizens — as was the UT sniper attack — is met with scorn and ridicule.

In the decades between these two college massacres, a pervasive idea took hold in America. Many individuals, particularly those in academic circles, began to view firearms as barbaric tools of violence symbols of machismo and false bravado only carried by men with small egos and smaller anatomies. Today, anyone who advocates carrying a handgun for self-defense is called a "cowboy" and accused of having a "John Wayne complex."

Whenever anyone suggests that concealed handgun license holders be allowed to carry concealed handguns on college campuses, the same way they're allowed to at movie theaters, office buildings, shopping malls and most other places, laughter, not intelligent rebuttal, is the response. Whenever proponents of "concealed carry" point to the success of concealed-carry laws throughout the nation, as well as studies showing that concealed handgun license holders are significantly less likely than non-license holders to commit violent crimes, they are answered with mockery, rather than intelligent discourse. In the world of academia and intellectual free expression, some issues are apparently not open for discussion.

This week students on more than 100 college campuses throughout the United States are wearing empty holsters as they go about their daily routines, as a reminder to everyone who sees them that they are defenseless against anyone not concerned with following the rules. These students understand something that students at the University of Texas were able to take for granted in the summer of 1966. All people have an innate right to defend themselves.

W. Scott Lewis, a commercial real estate agent and freelance writer from Austin, Texas, serves as the media coordinator for the nonpartisan Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

DC Gun Laws Story

Here is an interesting article. It is from The National Review and can be found here. It details the real side of the helpless populace that is ignored by the politicians who continue to support a "gun ban" in Washington D.C. and make the entire district a "guaranteed victim" zone.

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October 10, 2007 6:44 AM

Just Stand There While I Die
The D.C. government has that right, and exercises it frequently.

By David Freddoso

The first time someone tried to mug me in Washington D.C., I ran away as he threatened to shoot me from behind.

DCThe second time, when the exact same situation arose, I knew better. I stopped and turned around to confront the robber as soon as he threatened to shoot: “Hey, buddy!” I said confidently. “Who do you think you’re fooling? Guns are outlawed in the District of Columbia — I know you don’t really have one.”

He shot me in the face with a crossbow.

Okay, sorry, I’m just making that part up. What really happened is I ran like hell and got away, both times. Both times, the cops showed up about an hour after I dialed 911.

I have no idea whether either of my muggers actually had a gun — they each chased me from behind, and I was too busy running to ask. But a few years back, my best friend and his brother knew for sure that real guns were being trained on their heads as they were forced for several minutes to lie face-down, just blocks from the Capitol, on the red-brick sidewalk in front of their D.C. rowhouse. They both survived the robbery (two blocks from the local police precinct), but neither of them thought to ask the important questions: “Excuse me, were those guns legally registered before 1977? Are they grandfathered under the District of Columbia Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975?”

I hope that now you can understand where I am coming from when I read District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer’s hysterical court filing in the Heller case, which may strike down the District’s 31-year-old comprehensive ban on gun ownership.

“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” wrote the District’s chief law enforcer, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”

What an excellent example of unintended humor — the District’s government is a national leader in standing by while its citizens die. Our homicide rate hit a 20-year low in 2005 — just 29 victims per 100,000 residents. That is slightly better than New York City’s rate (30.7) under Mayor David Dinkins in 1990, when the Big Apple suffered 2,250 homicides.

In 1991, the D.C. murder rate reached an astounding 81 per 100,000 — that was two years after Mayor Marion Barry famously told the Washington Press Club, “Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

D.C. residents are strictly forbidden from owning handguns, even in the privacy of their homes. Any long guns must be registered and kept “unloaded and disassembled.” It is not even legal, strictly speaking, to assemble and load your gun when you hear an intruder downstairs. A lower court ruled the ban unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will decide later this year whether to take up the case.

In the debate over the gun ban, there is a strong statistical case that an armed citizenry is safer than one disarmed by unconstitutional laws, but this argument is not even necessary. There is absolutely no valid case that the District’s gun ban makes me safer as a District resident. When Singer and Mayor Adrian Fenty (D., of course) penned a September 4 Washington Post op-ed stating that “The handgun ban has saved countless lives,” were they really suggesting that without the ban there might have been 1,000 murder victims in 1991, instead of just 482? The implication is that D.C. is so totally ungovernable that only a total deprivation of constitutional rights can make it barely livable.

It is bad enough that the District government takes away constitutional rights in the name of safety, and then fails even to provide safety. But the story is actually better than that. In their response to the attorney general’s brief, Heller and the other plaintiffs in the case responded to Singer by noting the following irony:

Petitioners correctly note that the Second Amendment “does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.” … Yet the city consistently fights to secure its right to stand by while its citizens are victimized by crime.

Yes, you read that correctly. The plaintiffs’ attorneys refer to a series of cases in which the District literally asserted its right to “stand by” while its citizens are victimized. The most dramatic is Warren v. District of Columbia, in which three women were sexually violated because of gross negligence on the part of Metropolitan police officers responding to their call. In the early morning hours of March 16, 1975, two men broke down the back door of a D.C. townhouse in Northeast and began raping a woman on the second floor. Her two roommates, hiding one floor above, called the police. According to the court’s opinion, a squad car responded, and the officer failed even to exit his car before leaving. The two women, listening to their roommate scream, called the police again. This time, an officer went so far as to knock at the door, but then left without further inspection.

Once the attackers discovered the other two women, they had their sick, twisted way with all three of them for the next 14 hours (I will not describe any of the details). The women sued the District of Columbia, which argued that “a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.” The District won the case based on what is actually a long-standing legal principle.

Singer, with her silly, dramatic argumentation, has reminded us of this fact — something for which we should all be grateful.

It is our misfortune in Washington to be governed by such simpletons, but it is also a hidden blessing that their legal team shows this level of incompetence. It may be our best chance as District residents to take our safety out of their hands and put it back into our own.

— David Freddoso is an NRO staff reporter.

London Times speaks out about gun laws

Here is the original story

From The Times

September 8, 2007

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?

British attitudes are supercilious and misguided

Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “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.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate Before Lord Cullen

Gun Control Isn't Crime Control

Gun Control Isn't Crime Control
Stricter Gun Control Laws Wouldn't Have Prevented Va. Tech Tragedy
OPINION by JOHN STOSSEL
April 26, 2007—


This past Tuesday the governor of Virginia announced he would close the loophole that allowed Seung-Hui Cho to buy the guns he used to kill 32 people -- and himself -- on the Virginia Tech campus. OK, it's a good idea to keep guns out of the hands of people who are mentally unstable. But be careful about how far the calls for gun control go, because the idea that gun control laws lower gun crime is a myth.

After the 1997 shooting of 16 kids in Dunblane, England, the United Kingdom passed one of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, banning its citizens from owning almost all types of handguns. Britain seemed to get safer by the minute, as 162,000 newly-illegal firearms were forked over to British officials by law-abiding citizens.

But this didn't decrease the amount of gun-related crime in the U.K. In fact, gun-related crime has nearly doubled in the U.K. since the ban was enacted.

Might stricter gun laws result in more gun crime? It seems counterintuitive but makes sense if we consider one simple fact: Criminals don't obey the law. Strict gun laws, like the ban in Britain, probably only affect the actions of people who wouldn't commit crimes in the first place.

England's ban didn't magically cause all British handguns to disappear. Officials estimate that more than 250,000 illegal weapons are still in circulation in the country. Without the fear of retaliation from victims who might be packing heat, criminals in possession of these weapons now have a much easier job, and the incidence of gun-related crime has risen. As the saying goes, "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."

It's true that if gun control laws had been stricter in Virginia, Seung-Hui Cho would have had a more difficult time getting ahold of the weapons he used to gun down innocent students and teachers. But it's foolish to assume that stricter gun laws will prevent maniacs like Cho from committing heinous crimes. A deranged criminal will find a way to get his hands on a gun. Or a bomb.

The sad truth is that if gun laws had been less strict in Virginia, there is a possibility that the tragedy at Virginia Tech could have claimed fewer lives.

In January 2006, a bill was proposed in the Virginia State Assembly that would have forced Virginia Tech to change its current policy and allow students and faculty members to legally carry weapons on campus. Teenage college students carrying guns makes me nervous, but shouldn't adults be able to decide if they want to arm themselves -- just in case? When the bill was defeated, a Virginia Tech spokesman cheered the action, saying, "This will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

However, one gun rights advocate lamented the bill's failure with chilling accuracy: "You never know when evil will pop up."

Back in 2002, evil arrived at Virginia's Appalachian School of Law. A disgruntled student opened fire on the school's campus, killing three and wounding more. The law school also prohibited guns on campus, but fortunately two students happened to have firearms in their cars. When the pair heard gunshots, they retrieved their weapons and trained them on the killer, helping restrain him until authorities arrived.

There's no way to know whether Seung-Hui Cho's murderous rampage could have been stopped in a similar way, but what's certain is that strict gun control laws do not always have the effect that legislators intend. More guns (in the right hands) can stop crime, and fewer guns (in the wrong hands) can make for more crime. Gun control isn't crime control.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Are Concealed Pistol owners safer than the general populace? I did the checking for my own state. These numbers are available for verification from my home state of Michigan in an annual report by the Michigan State Police http://michigan.gov/msp/0,1607,7-123-1591_3503_4654-77621--,00.html

Please feel free to double check my numbers.

The dates run from July 1 of the previous year to June 30 of the year noted.

2002:
Permits Issued: 53,000
Permits Revoked: 55
2003:
Permits Issued: 27,499
Permits Revoked: 52
2004:
Permits Issued: 31,121
Permits Revoked: 119
2005:
Permits Issued: 54,677
Permits Revoked: 121
2006:
Permits Issued: 36,754
Permits Revoked: 108

Total:
Issued 203,051
Revoked 455
Murders/Homicide during this time by CPL holders: 4

This means that 1/5 of one percent have their CPL revoked (0.22%).
They have a murder rate of 1.97/100,000 population.
The national average is 5.6/100,000 population and the Michigan average of 6.4/100,000.

Michigan CPL holders are 2.8 times less likely to commit murder/homicide than the national average and 3.2 times less likely to commit murder/homicide than the Michigan average. 0.22% have their license revoked showing that they follow the rules and laws set out for them.

Where is the evil that these guns and licenses are to provoke? Where is the blood in the streets? With 203,051 licensed civilians carrying firearms, why aren't we having old west shootouts in the streets every day?

Perhaps, just perhaps, the training, background check, and education the CPL holders have to experience means that it is most good, upstanding citizens that have these licenses. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is the character of the individual and not the presence of a weapon that decide if a crime will occur
.

First Note

The Second Amendment, as passed by the House and Senate, reads:

“

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

”

The copies distributed to the states, and then ratified by them, had different capitalization and punctuation:

“

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

”

Both versions are commonly used in official government publications. The original hand-written copy of the Bill of Rights, approved by the House and Senate, was prepared by scribe William Lambert and hangs in the National Archives.

The above from Wikipedia (I hate quoting Wiki, but it served the purpose)
I have been reading about the literal interpretation of the 2nd amendment. Being a geek, I want to know as much as possible to be able to validate or change the things I have considered. The language of the 2nd amendment has made it open to interpretation. The question becomes "does the 2nd amendment only apply to militia members?

In my research, I found a great interpretation at the "Second Amendment Sisters" website. http://www.2asisters.org/unabridged.htm Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that the rights of the individuals that are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights are assumed to have always been present. They were, and are, there and granted by the Creator and not by the Bill of Rights itself.

This brings me to my concerns about the current gun debates. It seems that those that want to prevent firearms from being in civilian hands have forgotten that the same people that founded this country were they ones that fought to overthrow it's previous ruler. They did this because they had the right to have the weapons required to do this usurping of authority. They had the same equipment as the governing military. Without this, we would have remained under the the oppression of British rule.

Any discussion of the 2nd Amendment would be fundamentally flawed if the Declaration of Independence was not included. Of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, 6 also signed the Constitution. This austire group of 56 also produced several Presidents of the United States, Presidents of the Continental Congress, and other that built the foundation of freedom upon which we have built.

As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, on September 18, 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel shouted out to him: “Well, doctor, what have we got?,” and Franklin responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We need to stand up for Franklin, Washington, Hancock, and the other men who stood up and shouted "No more!" We the People must fight to keep this Republic and to preserve our unailable rights, granted to us by our Creator. We must be stalwart and stand for truth and original intent.