Thread: Michigan Approves Concealed Weapons In Schools, Churches

Michigan Approves Concealed Weapons In Schools, Churches

December 15, 2012


(Talia Ralph) Michigan passed a law Friday that will allow the carrying of concealed weapons in previously off-limits areas including schools, churches, day cares and sports stadiums.

The bill cleared the Senate on Thursday, and was approved by the Republican-controlled House Friday, the same day that 27 people, including 20 children, were killed by gunfire at a Connecticut school.

“If you have pistol free zones they are actually mass murderer empowerment zones,” said Steve Dulan, attorney for the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners, who represents sportsman clubs throughout Michigan backing the bill.

“If you actually look at the history, even over the past 10 years in the US, you find that maybe all but one mass shooting has occurred in a so-called gun free zone,” he added.

Another provision in the bill eliminates county-controlled concealed weapons licensing boards, having sheriffs assume their duties instead, Click On Detroit reported.

The current law in Michigan prohibited concealed weapons in schools, churches, day cares, hospitals, dorms, casinos and any public entertainment venue that had a capacity of over 2,500 people, according to Petoskey News. Violating the law earned a civil infraction and a $500 fine, as well as a six-month suspension of a concealed pistol license.

The new law allows schools and private establishments to voluntarily stay pistol-free if they choose to, Petoskey News reported, but opponents say it goes too far, Click on Detroit reported.

The bill is now headed to the state’s governor Rick Snyder to be signed, but he told local Channel 4 that is taking a week to review the law’s language, especially in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting.

Michigan Approves Concealed Weapons In Schools, Churches - :

“If you have pistol free zones they are actually mass murderer empowerment zones,” said Steve Dulan, attorney for the Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners, who represents sportsman clubs throughout Michigan backing the bill.

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The Obama administration is planning a second-term attack on gun rights

By Wayne LaPierre 12/12/2011


Obama administration officials are deliberately keeping gun owners in the dark about the president’s gun-control agenda as we head into next year’s national election, because administration officials know that when NRA members and gun owners show up at the polls en masse, anti-gun candidates lose.

The Obama campaign’s strategy goes like this:

1. Neutralize gun owners and NRA members as a political force in the upcoming national election by pretending to be pro-gun or at least not focused on pushing a gun-control agenda;

2. With gun owners neutralized, Obama will be able to win the election. After the president is re-elected, he won’t have to answer to voters because he won’t have to face another re-election battle;

3. Launch a full-scale, all-out assault to rip the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights through legislation, litigation, regulation, executive orders and international treaties — in short, every lever of power at the administration’s disposal.

Barack Obama spent his entire political career proudly and publicly pushing for the most radical anti-gun positions you can imagine. He endorsed a total ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns. He opposed right-to-carry laws. He voted to ban nearly all commonly used hunting-rifle ammunition.

During the presidential primary debates, Obama even vowed to re-impose the discredited Clinton gun ban, which banned many commonly owned firearms used for hunting and self-defense.

Obama hasn’t had a sudden change of heart; rather, he’s making a purely political calculation by staying quiet on the gun issue until the time is right. In the meantime, he’s gearing up for his second-term assault on the Second Amendment in a number of ways.

Just consider …

• Obama loaded his administration with anti-gun zealots bent on destroying our Second Amendment freedoms.

• With the help of his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Obama made the U.S. an active partner to the U.N. gun-ban treaty. The U.N. will unveil this unmitigated attack on our sovereignty this summer and the Obama administration has vowed to implement it.

• Obama appointed two anti-Second Amendment Supreme Court justices and continues to flood our lower courts with dozens of anti-gun, activist judges.

• With the help of his attorney general, Eric Holder, Obama led a campaign to demonize law-abiding gun owners, claiming our Second Amendment rights were to blame for drug violence in Mexico. And in fact, emails recently released by the Justice Department prove that operation “Fast and Furious” was a deliberate attempt to build the case for a gun-control agenda.

• Obama unilaterally imposed gun registration in four border states — requiring gun dealers to register the sales of any law-abiding citizen who purchases more than one semi-automatic rifle within one week.

It isn’t hard to see the writing on the wall. The actions that President Obama has taken so far in his presidency clearly show his disdain for the Second Amendment and hint at his plan to gut our firearm freedoms in his second term.

Read more: The Obama administration is planning a second-term attack on gun rights | The Daily Caller

Agents visit Conn. gun shops after school massacre

By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN and MATT APUZZO


— Dec. 16 4:55 AM EST

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — While white-steepled churches and President Barack Obama prepared to comfort a grieving town Sunday, federal agents planned to fan out to dozens of gun stores and shooting ranges across Connecticut, chasing leads they hoped would cast light on the life of school shooter Adam Lanza.

Among the questions: Why did his mother, a well-to-do suburban divorcee, keep a cache of high-power weapons in the house? What experience did Lanza have with those guns? And, above all, what set him on a path to shoot and kill 20 children, along with the adults who tried to stop him?

Lanza shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, to death at the home they shared Friday, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in her car with at least three of her guns, forced his way in by breaking a window and opened fire, authorities said. Within minutes, he killed the children, six adults and himself.

All the victims at the school were shot with a rifle, at least some of them up close, and all were apparently shot more than once, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver said. All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children, eight were boys and 12 were girls.

Asked whether the children suffered, Carver said, "If so, not for very long." Asked how many bullets were fired, Carver said, "I'm lucky if I can tell you how many I found."

Parents identified the children through photos to spare them some shock, Carver said.

The terrible details about the last moments of young innocents emerged as authorities released their names and ages — the youngest 6 and 7, the oldest 56. They included Ana Marquez-Greene, a little girl who had just moved to Newtown from Canada; Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who apparently died while trying to hide her pupils; and principal Dawn Hochsprung, who authorities said lunged at the gunman in an attempt to overtake him.

The tragedy has plunged Newtown into mourning and added the picturesque New England community of 27,000 people to the grim map of towns where mass shootings in recent years have periodically reignited the national debate over gun control but led to little change.

Residents and faith leaders were sure to reflect Sunday on the mass shooting and what meaning, if any, to find in it. Obama planned to attend an interfaith vigil — the fourth time he will have traveled to a city after a mass shooting.

On Saturday, overflow crowds packed St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church. The Rev. Richard Scinto, a deacon, gave a homily.

"In the past 48 hours I've said the phrase 'I don't know' about 1,000 times," he said. "That not knowing has got to be the worst part of this whole thing."

At St. John's Episcopal Church, 54-year-old Donna Denner, an art teacher at an elementary school in nearby Danbury whose classroom was locked down after the shooting, said she feels the same way she did after 9/11 but isn't sure the rest of the country does.

"I don't know if the rest of the country is struggling to understand it the same way we are here," she said. "Life goes on, but you're not the same. Is the rest of the country — are they going about their regular activities? Is it just another news story to them?"

The rifle used was a Bushmaster .223-caliber, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak about it and talked on condition of anonymity. The gun is commonly seen at competitions and was the type used in the 2002 sniper killings in the Washington, D.C., area. Also found in the school were two handguns, a Glock 10 mm and a Sig Sauer 9 mm.

A law enforcement official said Saturday that authorities were investigating fresh leads that could reveal more about the lead-up to the shooting. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Ginger Colbrun, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said earlier there was no evidence Lanza was involved in gun clubs or had trained for the shooting. When reached later in the day and asked whether that was still true, she said, "We're following any and all leads related to this individual and firearms."

Dean Price, director of the Wooster Mountain State Range — a shooting range in Danbury — said two ATF agents visited the range Friday night and stayed into the early morning looking through thousands of names on sign-in logs.

He said that he had never seen Adam or Nancy Lanza there and that agents told him they did not find their names on the sign-in sheets.

Law enforcement officials have said they have found no note or manifesto from Lanza of the sort they have come to expect after murderous rampages such as the Virginia Tech bloodbath in 2007 that left 33 people dead.

Education officials said they had found no link between Lanza's mother and the school, contrary to news reports that said she was a teacher there. Investigators said they believe Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago, but they had no explanation for why he went there Friday.

Authorities said Adam Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job. Lanza was believed to have suffered from a personality disorder, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Another law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.

People with the disorder are often highly intelligent. While they can become frustrated more easily, there is no evidence of a link between Asperger's and violent behavior, experts say.

The law enforcement officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation.

Richard Novia, the school district's head of security until 2008, who also served as adviser for the school technology club, of which Lanza was a member, said he clearly "had some disabilities."

"If that boy would've burned himself, he would not have known it or felt it physically," Novia said in a phone interview. "It was my job to pay close attention to that."

Amid the confusion and sorrow, stories of heroism emerged, including an account of Hochsprung, 47, and the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56, rushing toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him. Both died.

There was also 27-year-old teacher Victoria Soto, whose name has been invoked as a portrait of selflessness. Investigators told relatives she was killed while shielding her first-graders from danger. She reportedly hid some students in a bathroom or closet, ensuring they were safe, a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, told ABC News.

"She put those children first. That's all she ever talked about," a friend, Andrea Crowell, told The Associated Press. "She wanted to do her best for them, to teach them something new every day."

There was also 6-year-old Emilie Parker, whose grieving father, Robbie, talked to reporters not long after police released the names of the victims but expressed no animosity, offering sympathy for Lanza's family.

"I can't imagine how hard this experience must be for you," he said.

Agents visit Conn. gun shops after school massacre

Holder: We Must Answer 'Hard Questions' About Gun Rights

Attorney General Eric Holder made a few remarks about the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School that should raise some eyebrows.

"As a nation I think we have to ask ourselves some hard questions. We gather too often to talk about these kinds of incidents. We need to discuss who we are as a nation, talk about the freedoms that we have, the rights that we have and how those might be used in a responsible way. But for now I think we should concentrate on dealing with the situation in Connecticut and we are doing, and I said, the best we can at the Justice Department and throughout federal law enforcement."

Mr. Holder has not been one to hide his hatred of guns. In March Breitbart News uncovered a video of Mr. Holder talking to the Woman's National Democratic Club in 1995. He wanted a campaign to "really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way" and to use anti-smoking ads as a way to "change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC" about guns.
In Operation Fast and Furious the ATF allowed guns to walk into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Emails have shown officers discussing how to use these stats to enforce tougher gun control laws.
It will be interesting to see how the DOJ handles the Connecticut situation.

Holder: We Must Answer 'Hard Questions' About Gun Rights

White House Gun Control Petition Quickly Surpasses Required Signature Count

Posted on December 15, 2012

An online petition calling on the White House to immediately address the issue of gun control quickly surpassed the required number of signatures Friday, hours after the Connecticut elementary school massacre.
“The goal of this petition is to force the Obama Administration to produce legislation that limits access to guns,” the petition states in part. “While a national dialogue is critical, laws are the only means in which we can reduce the number of people murdered in gun related deaths.”
Petitions on the White House’s “We the People” online petition site require 25,000 signatures within a month to garner an official administration response. The petition met that goal Friday evening; by Saturday morning it had reached more than 68,000 signatures.
“Powerful lobbying groups allow the ownership of guns to reach beyond the Constitution’s intended purpose of the right to bear arms,” the petition states. “Therefore, Congress must act on what is stated law, and face the reality that access to firearms reaches beyond what the Second Amendment intends to achieve.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney on Friday demurred on the issue of gun control, saying it was a day to mourn, not to pursue policy.
“There is — I am sure will be, rather — a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day,” Carney said.
Speaking about the shooting later on Friday, President Barack Obama vowed to take “meaningful action” to prevent more such tragedies from taking place in the future.

White House Gun Control Petition Quickly Surpasses Required Signature Count | TheBlaze.com

China Calls for ‘No Delay’ on Gun Controls in U.S.

By MARK MCDONALD

HONG KONG — The state news agency in China, the official voice of the government, has called for the United States to quickly adopt stricter gun controls in the aftermath of the shooting rampage in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 schoolchildren.

According to the state medical examiner who was overseeing autopsies of the children, all of them had been hit multiple times. At least one child had been shot 11 times.

All of the children were in the first grade.

“Their blood and tears demand no delay for U.S. gun control,” said the news agency, Xinhua, which listed a series of shootings this year in the United States.

“However, this time, the public feels somewhat tired and helpless,” the commentary said. “The past six months have seen enough shooting rampages in the United States.”

China suffered its own school tragedy on Friday — a man stabbed 22 children at a village elementary school in Henan Province. An 85-year-old woman also was stabbed.

There were no fatalities, although Xinhua reported that some of the children had had their fingers and ears cut off. The attacker, a 36-year-old man, was reportedly in custody. There was no immediate explanation for his possible motives.

On Sunday, the Web site China Smack compiled a range of comments on Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like service in China. One said: “They should issue a bulletproof vest to every American elementary school student as their school uniform.”

Another comment related to President Obama fighting back tears while addressing the nation on Friday:

In the face of Henan children suffering harm, did our country’s leaders shed a tear!? Why is it that when this kind of incident happens, they always pretend to be deaf and mute!? I’m not saying that our leaders have to be like Obama shedding tears, but can we at least be like others in facing the incident? Instead of the mainstream media not even covering it, hiding it, attempting to avoid it every time the country has a “special incident.”

China experienced a spate of attacks on schoolchildren in 2010, with almost 20 deaths and more than 50 injuries. In the fourth of the assaults, a crazed man beat five toddlers with a hammer, then set himself on fire while holding two youngsters.

In another of those attacks in 2010, Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed and killed eight primary school students in Fujian Province. Five weeks later, after a quick trial, he was executed.
My colleague Michael Wines reported at the time: “Some news reports stated that Mr. Zheng had mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence existed. Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used.”

“Most of the attackers have been mentally disturbed men involved in personal disputes or unable to adjust to the rapid pace of social change in China,” The Associated Press reported Saturday, adding that the rampages pointed to “grave weaknesses in the antiquated Chinese medical system’s ability to diagnose and treat psychiatric illness.”

Private ownership of guns — whether pistols, rifles or shotguns — is almost unheard of in China. Handgun permits are sometimes (but rarely) given to people living in remote areas for protection against wild animals.

The Chinese school assaults were carried out with knives, kitchen cleavers or hammers, the usual weapons of choice in mass attacks in China. As a precaution before the recent Communist Party Congress in Beijing, the sale of knives was banned in the central area of the capital.

Dr. Ding Xueliang, a sociologist at the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, speaking about the Chinese tragedy on Friday, told CNN that “the huge difference between this case and the U.S. is not the suspect, nor the situation, but the simple fact he did not have an effective weapon.

“In terms of the U.S., there’s much easier availability of killing instruments — rifles, machine guns, explosives — than in nearly every other developed country.”

In a blog on the Web site of The New Yorker, the magazine’s China correspondent, Evan Osnos, wrote:

It takes a lot to make China’s government — beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests — look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it.
When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded, as one did that, “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!”

Japan, too, has a near-total ban on private gun ownership, and the infrequent mass attacks there — which included a tragic rampage at a primary school in 2001— typically have involved knives.

“Almost no one in Japan owns a gun,” said Max Fisher, writing in The Atlantic in July. “Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country’s infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.”

In 2006, Japan had two gun-related homicides. “And when that number jumped to 22 in 2007,” Mr. Fisher said, “it became a national scandal.”

“East Asia, despite its universally restrictive domestic gun policies, hosts some of the world’s largest firearm exporters and emerging industry giants: China, South Korea and Japan,” according to GunPolicy.org, a comprehensive global database maintained by the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney.

In recent weeks, Chinese police officials in Jiangsu Province seized more than 6,000 illegal guns from two underground workshops and warehouses; a retired prison guard in Hong Kong was jailed for 18 months for keeping an arsenal of guns, silencers, grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his public-housing apartment; and 17 suspected gun smugglers went on trial in Shanghai as part of a joint investigation with U.S. law enforcement officials.

In the Shanghai case, more than 100 semiautomatic handguns, rifles, shotguns and gun parts were express-mailed to China from the United States. One of the masterminds on the American end was Staff Sgt. Joseph Debose, 30, a soldier with a Special Forces National Guard unit in North Carolina. He pleaded guilty to federal charges in September.

“The defendant traded the honor of his position in the National Guard for the money he received for smuggling arms to China,” said Loretta E. Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “In blatant disregard for everything he was sworn to uphold, the defendant placed numerous firearms into a black market pipeline from the United States to China.”

What’s your view? Would the United States do well to emulate China and Japan, with their comprehensive bans on guns? Or is America a special case because of its Constitutional protections of gun ownership? And apropos of the Fujian attack described above, would you support similarly speedy trials and the death penalty for mass murderers of children?

China Calls for 'No Delay' on Gun Controls in U.S. - NYTimes.com

Rahm Wants New Gun Laws in Wake of Newtown School Shooting


By Alexandra Clark and Emily Florez

| Saturday, Dec 15, 2012

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is looking for current gun laws to change.

"There is no parent and no grandparent in America that is not a resident to Sandy Hook, Conn.," Emanuel said Saturday afternoon while attending a ceremony for a new police building in District 12. "There is nobody that had their child last night, that didn't hold them a little closer, pull them in a little tighter, didn't hug them a little more.

Emanuel stressed a need for gun laws to assure an event like the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School does not happen in Chicago. The mayor is just one of many politicians in Illinois pushing for gun legislation pertaining to concealed carry of weapons.

The Newtown school shootings occurred the same week the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Illinois' ban on concealed carry weapons.

Lawmakers have 180 days to come up with a law legalizing the concealed carry of weapons.
Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy agrees with Emanuel's sense of urgency. Chicago's top cop suggested the nation needs a better firearm tracking system.

"A national recognition that there has to be some sort of tracking, not even gun control accountability for gun owners," he said on Saturday. "It doesn't mean you can't have your gun, but there's a requirement to report the lost, theft, or transfer of a firearm."

McCarthy explained most guns in Chicago are legally purchased, but illegally transferred into the city.
Emanuel will speak out again Saturday night during a vigil honoring the victims killed in Newtown, Conn., with Father Michael Pfleger.

Source: Rahm Wants New Gun Laws in Wake of Newtown School Shooting | NBC Chicago

Thursday, 04 August 2011 18:35 Ron Paul Introduced Pro-gun Legislation

Written by Raven Clabough

Texas Congressman and GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul continues to champion constitutional rights. His latest endeavor is a bill that would abolish “gun-free zones,” ultimately permitting teachers to carry firearms on school grounds. Predictably, anti-gun groups are calling the legislation “extremist.”

CNS News reports, “H.R. 2613, the Citizens Protection Act of 2011, would repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and remove all federally created criminal safety zones.”
The Gun-Free School Zones Act was first enacted as section 1702 of the Crime Control Act of 1990. The text of the act reads, “It shall be unlawful for any individual knowingly to possess a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone.”

Paul’s bill will permit individuals, including teachers, to carry firearms onto high-school and middle-school campuses.

The Gun-Free School Zones Act faced adamant opposition from Second Amendment advocacy groups like Gun Owners of America, which has indicated its support for Paul’s legislation.

According to a news release from Gun Owners of America, the Gun-Free School Zones Act protects criminals. The release points to attacks at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood, all of which are “government facilities where the private possession of firearms was prohibited.”

The release continues, “It’s time to say NO to criminal safe zones. And a great place to start is the blatantly unconstitutional Gun-free School Zones Act.”

A number of pro-gun groups argued that the shootings at Columbine High School and Platte Canyon, two high schools in Colorado, necessitated the repeal of the School Zones Act so that campuses would be safer.

Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said that despite the intentions of the School Zones Act, it ultimately created “target-rich, no-risk environments for monsters who have no fear of encountering an armed teacher or administrator, or a legally armed private citizen who might happen to be in the building.”

"This sort of thing didn't happen before the advent of gun-free school zone laws," Gottlieb said. "You never saw such an outrage in the days when high schools typically had rifle teams, and — particularly in the West — where it was common in the fall to find both teachers and students with hunting rifles or shotguns locked in their cars.”

Gun control groups, on the other hand, believe Paul’s legislation to be dangerous and extreme.
Ladd Everitt, communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said of the bill, “It’s a horrific piece of legislation that will present a direct threat to public safety. ‘Gun-free zones,’ despite the gun lobby’s propaganda, are far and away the safest places in our country.”

Everitt asserts that the bill will likely garner support only from extremist groups:

Rep. Paul’s legislation is the latest in a series of extreme pieces of legislation to come from the National Rifle Association. Bills like this have no public support whatsoever and seek to elevate the interests of the gun industry and a tiny minority of gun owners over the wishes, well-being, and safety of American families in communities across the United States.

But Gun Owners of America points out that the federal government’s efforts have unintended consequences:

No one — including politicians, the police, or the individual citizen — can predict where the next deranged serial killer will attack. And yet politicians continue to create “criminal safe zones” such as schools, churches, parks, restaurants that serve alcohol, etc., where the law-abiding are disarmed.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said gun-free school zones have “disarmed the wrong people and left our schools, and the children inside, vulnerable to this kind of atrocity.”

The most recent example may be the developing story at Virginia Tech, where students are on lockdown after three students attending a summer camp spotted what they believed to be a gunman on campus near the student dining facility. Some fear it may result in a repeat of the tragic 2007 shooting rampage that left 33 people dead.

If passed, Paul’s legislation could allow students and teachers to be armed and prepared in incidents such as these.

For now, Paul’s legislation has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

Ron Paul Introduced Pro-gun Legislation

Gun Expert Lott: Let Teachers Carry Arms, Ban Gun-Free Zones to Halt Mass Shootings

Saturday, 15 Dec 2012 06:53 PM

By David A. Patten

Banning gun-free zones and allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons could help eliminate mass shootings at schools, John R. Lott, one of the nation's leading gun experts, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview Saturday.

Lott, an author and college professor, told Newsmax that gun-free zones become “a magnet” for deranged killers who hope to burn their names into the history books by running up a big body count.

Lott’s landmark book "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws" is in its 3rd edition. He told Newsmax there is a “very good chance” the Connecticut school shooting could have been averted, if teachers there were permitted to carry concealed handguns.

It is no accident, he said, that mass shootings repeatedly have occurred in designated gun-free zones, which attract lunatics looking to murder as many souls as possible before they turn their guns on themselves.

Newsmax: Dr. Lott, your work suggests people are more secure, rather than less so, when firearms are readily available in society.

Dr. Lott: Simply telling them to behave passively turns out to be pretty bad advice . . . By far the safest course of action for people to take, when they are confronting a criminal, is to have a gun. This is particularly true for the people in our society who are the most vulnerable.

Newsmax:The media typically spins these mass shootings as an American phenomenon. They suggest we ought to be more like Europe, with strong gun control, because then we would not have these problems. Is that true?

Dr. Lott: No. Europe has a lot of multiple victim shootings. If you look at a per capita rate, the rate of multiple-victim public shootings in Europe and the United States over the last 10 years have been fairly similar to each other. A couple of years ago you had a couple of big shootings in Finland. About two-and-a-half years ago you had a big shooting in the U.K., 12 people were killed.

You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany. Germany in terms of modern incidents has two of the four worst public-school shootings, and they have very strict gun-control laws. The one common feature of all of those shootings in Europe is that they all take place in gun-free zones, in places where guns are supposed to be banned.

Newsmax: Can you give readers an example of an incident where a teacher or authority-figure with a gun was able to thwart a violent shooting?

Dr. Lott: There was the university case in the Appalachian law school. You had the K through 12 in Mississippi and the one in Edinboro, Pa. You had New Life Church [in December 2007] — you had 7,000 parishioners there when the person broke into the church with about a thousand rounds of ammunition.

But there was a woman there, a former Chicago police officer who had gotten a concealed handgun permit because she was being stalked by her ex-husband. She had asked permission from the minister there to be able to carry a concealed handgun. She was worried if she couldn’t carry it at the church there, that she would be vulnerable going to and from the church. She shot at him 10 times, wounding him, and he committed suicide . . . These types of cases occur all around us, and they usually don’t get much attention, especially if they are stopped before people are injured or killed.

Newsmax: How can society prevent such mass shootings, or are they avoidable at all?

Dr. Lott: About 75 percent of the time when these attacks occur, the killers themselves die at the scene. Even the times when they don’t die, it seems pretty clear their intent was to die, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to commit suicide, pull the trigger, and shoot themselves at the last moment.

But in their warped mind, what they want to do is commit suicide in a way that will get them attention, so people know who they were when they were here. I’s a pretty sick idea, but if you read the documents that they leave, the diaries and the video tapes, it is pretty clear that these guys know that they get more attention the more people they can kill.

So their goal is to try to kill as many people as possible. So there are two issues here. One is focusing on the attention. And I think it’s pretty clear that . . . if people stopped mentioning their names — I'm not saying that’s possible — that’s one thing that would reduce their incentive to go and commit these crimes.

The second thing is to give people the option to protect themselves. One of the things I’ve written about recently is the attack at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater. There, you have seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie when it opened at the end of July.

Out of those seven movie theaters, only one movie theater was posted as banning permit-concealed handguns. The killer didn’t go to the movie theater that was closest to his home. He didn’t go to the movie theater that was the largest movie theater in Colorado, which was essentially the same distance from his apartment as the one he ended up going to. Instead, the one he picked was the only one of those movie theaters that banned people taking permit-concealed handguns into that theater.

The problem is, whether it is the Portland shooting earlier this week, or the Connecticut shooting Friday, or the Sikh temple attack in Wisconsin, time after time these attacks take place in the few areas within a state where permit-concealed handguns are banned. It’s not just this year, it’s all these years in the past. And at some point people have to recognize that despite the obvious desire to make places safe by banning guns, it unintentionally has the opposite effect.

When you ban guns, rather than making it safer for the victims, you unintentionally make it safer for the criminals, because they have less to worry about. If you had a violent criminal stalking you or your family, and was really seriously threatening you, would you feel safer putting a sign up in front of your home stating, “This home is a gun-free zone.”

My guess is you wouldn’t do that. And I’ve never run into any gun-control proponents who would do that either. And the reason is pretty clear: Putting a sign there saying this is a gun-free home isn’t going to cause the criminals to say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to break the law, so I’m not going to go in and attack these people.’ It encourages them to do it. It serves as a magnet for him, if he’s going to engage in this attack, that that’s the place where he is going to engage in, because he finds that it is going to be easier to do it there.
Yet every time we have one of these mass shooting incidents, it renews the call from the media and the left for banning guns.

I believe that the people who are pushing for these gun controls are well intentioned. I think they’re wrong. I think the things they’re going to make life more dangerous. But it’s understandable. If you see something bad that happens, and it happens with a gun, the natural reaction is: ‘Well, if I take the gun away, bad things won’t happen anymore.’ The problem is you have to realize that when you go and ban guns, you may only take them away from good law-abiding citizens and not the criminals. And to disarm good law-abiding citizens . . . you just make it easier for crime to occur, not harder.

You also have to think about self defense. They say bad things happen with guns. But the news rarely covers people using guns defensively to stop crimes from happening. And that has a huge impact on people’s perceptions about the costs and benefits of guns.

Newsmax:So can you give us a correlation between crime rates in jurisdictions that try to ban concealed guns and the crime rate in those that do not?

If you look over past data, before everyone that was adopting [concealed carry laws], you find that for each additional state that adopted a right-to-carry law . . . you’d see about a 1.5 percent drop in murder rates, and about 2 percent drop in rape and robbery . . . Just because states are right-to-carry doesn’t mean they’ve issued the same number of fees. You have big differences in states’ training requirements.

The bottom line seems to be when you make it costly for people to get permits, fewer people get permits. You particularly price out people who live in high-crime urban areas from being able to get permits, and those are the ones who benefit the most from having the option to defend themselves.

Newsmax: Do gun free zones invite these attacks?

Dr. Lott: Yes, they’re magnets for these attacks. They make them more likely. These gun-free zones are really tiny areas within a state, and yet that’s where these attacks occur time after time.

Whenever you see more than a few murders taking place, the odds are almost a hundred percent that they are going to occur at a place where permit-concealed handguns are banned. And they were doing it, ironically, in an attempt to try and make people safe. But the problem is it is law-abiding citizens who obey those bans, not the criminals.

Look at Virginia Tech, for example, where we had 32 people killed. If you were an adult with a concealed handgun permit, you could take your permit-concealed handgun virtually anyplace in the state, except for universities and a couple of other places. There are hardly any gun-free zones in Virginia. And yet, if you were a faculty member and you accidentally carried your permit-concealed handgun onto university owned property there, and you got caught, you were going to get fired and your academic career would be over.

You're not going to get an academic job anyplace in the country. Same thing with the students: If you get expelled for a firearm-related violation, your academic career is over. Those are real penalties. Those people’s lives are going to be dramatically changed. But if you take somebody who is a killer . . . you would be facing 32 death penalties or 32 life sentences, plus other charges. And the notion that somehow the charge of expulsion from school would be the key penalty that would keep them from doing it, not 32 death penalties, is absurd. It just doesn’t make any sense . . . It represents a much bigger real penalty for the law-abiding good citizens than it does for the criminals there.

So we have to think about who is going to be obeying these laws. And it’s true for gun-control laws generally. One of the things I try and do in "More Guns, Less Crime" is show what happens to gun rates when guns are banned. It would be nice if things were that simple, that going and banning guns would eliminate crime.

But what you find happening is murder rates and violent crime rates go up. And the question is why. It’s a pretty simple answer: Because the law-abiding citizens are the ones who turn in their guns, and not the criminals.

Newsmax: Would it be a good idea to have teachers who have concealed carry permits in the schools, to better protect kids?

I’m all for that. I’ve been a teacher most of my life. I’ve been an academic. I have kids in college still, and kids below that. It’s not something that I take lightly. But it’s hard to see what the argument would be against it.

People may not realize this, but we allowed permit-concealed handguns in schools prior to the ironically named Safe School Zone Act. And no one that I know has been able to point to a single bad thing that occurred, not one.

We changed the law, and we started having these public-school shootings. So I don’t think they got the intended result that they were hoping for with that type of ban. Right now, [some jurisdictions] allow you to carry concealed-permit guns in the schools. There are not a lot of them. But there are no problems that have occurred with any of those states, either.

Newsmax: Could arming teachers and getting rid of gun-free zones have averted a tragedy such as we saw in Connecticut?

Well, I think two things would happen. One is, we see the way these killers search out places where people can’t defend themselves. So I think there’s at least a very good chance that if it is known teachers and others there would have permit-concealed handguns, it would have dissuaded the attack from occurring to begin with. Secondly, even if he did attack, it would be by far the safest course of action.

The amount of time that elapses between when the attack starts and when someone can get to the scene with a gun is very important in determining what the carnage is going to be. The faster you can get somebody [there], the more you can limit it. If you could get the police there in 8 minutes, which would be record time, that would be an eon for people who are there helplessly having to face the killer by themselves with no protection.

Gun Expert Lott: Let Teachers Carry Arms, Ban Gun-Free Zones to Halt Mass Shootings

Dry-Eyed Obama Fakes Unseen Tears, Vows Assault Weapons Ban In Code: ‘We’re Going To Take Meaningful Action’ Dry-Eyed Obama Fakes Unseen Tears, Vows Assault Weapons Ban In Code: ‘We’re Going To Take Meaningful Action’


Dec 14, 2012 94 Comments Pat Dollard RELATED – Video – Obama: ‘I Don’t Believe People Should Be Able To Own Guns’

“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” – This can only mean his long-cherished assault weapons ban, and God knows what other forms of gun control. Notice the over-long dramatic pause for the cameras, with no tears or moist eyes being visible, just wiping of his very dry eyes. He’s a talented but garden-variety sociopath displaying talented but garden-variety manipulative sociopath behavior. Keep in mind, there were never public tears for the victims of Ft. Hood or Benghazi. And, absolutely unfotgivably, you see Obama here making a speech to advance his political agenda before the still-bleeding bodies of dead children are even removed from where they fell.

video: Dry-Eyed Obama Fakes Unseen Tears, Vows Assault Weapons Ban In Code: ‘We’re Going To Take Meaningful Action’ « Pat Dollard