Wednesday, May 02, 2007

GUN FREE ZONES ARE TARGET ZONES


I have been trying very hard to understand just why our Law Makers, College Executives, and school boards, are bent on making schools the most ideal targets for mental maniacs to commit mass murder.

By de Andréa
If one would honestly take the time to sit down and try to think of the safest place for someone to go to commit mass murder for what ever reason, it would have to be a place where people are not liable to have any way of defending themselves. What better place than a “GUN FREE ZONE”

Most of our schools from preschool to graduate schools are “GUN FREE ZONES” and therefore they are ‘TARGET ZONES” for the crazy’s that want to use our kids for target practice.

One must ask oneself, would I feel safer in a school where people have guns that have gone through an extensive eight to ten week Local, State and Federal background investigation and have had all the necessary training it takes to achieve a concealed carry permit, and has been trained in self defence and the defence of others.

Or would I feel safer in a school where the entire student body and faculty were vulnerable and helpless because one is in a “GUN FREE TARGET ZONE”

If our law makers feel so safe in a “GUN FREE ZONE” then I can’t help but wonder why some of them carry guns as well as the need to have extreme security where ever they go. Obviously they don’t think that “GUN FREE ZONES” are safe zones, heck the entire District of Columbia has been a ‘GUN FREE ZONE” for thirty years, they should feel real safe in the [Murder Capital Of The Country]. Why has it been called the murder capital of the country? Because the Capital of our country has had, for most of the thirty years a total gun ban and the highest murder rate per capita in the nation. And why is that, one might wonder??? … Because, it has been for thirty years, a “GUN FREE TARGET ZONE” just the same as our institutions of indoctrination.

I recognize that I may be the only American left that believes that the Constitutional framers knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution, and especially the Second Amendment. The entire Constitution is certainly the most profound document on earth written by men. Moreover if there was anyone left besides me that could comprehend the Second Amendment they would be humbled by the foresight and the enormity that these few simple words encompass. “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. [Emphasis mine]

Despite the …”shall not be infringed” clause, this is the most infringed law in the Constitution. I believe that the Clause was included because the framers knew, with foresight, that it would be infringed. Moreover, our government still ignores it. The framers couldn’t have made it more pellucid and yet it still seems to be full of ambiguities, especially to the hysterically blind haters of this Constitutional Republic.

Below: is an article written by Glen Reynolds, for the Rocky Mountain News containing a few true and actual practical examples of the purpose of the Second Amendment?

By Glenn Reynolds April 21, 2007

On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn't allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. "Why couldn't we meet off campus today?" she asked.

Virginia Tech graduate student Bradford Wiles also has a permit to carry a gun, in Virginia. But on the day of the shootings, he would have been unarmed for the same reason: Like the University of Tennessee, where I teach, Virginia Tech bans guns on campus. [They are “GUN FREE TARGET ZONES”]

In The Roanoke Times last year - after another campus incident, when a dangerous escaped inmate was roaming the campus - Wiles wrote that, when his class was evacuated, "Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness. That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safe with a proper means to defend myself."
Wiles reported that when he told a professor how he felt, the professor responded that she would have felt safer if he had had a gun, too. [What's more, she would have been safer.]

That's how I feel about my student as well (one of a few I know who has gun-carry permits). She's a responsible adult; I trust her not to use her gun improperly, and if something bad happened, I'd want her to be armed because I trust her to respond appropriately, making the rest of us safer.

Virginia Tech doesn't have that kind of trust in its students or its faculty, for that matter, neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses "GUN FREE ZONES," they'll make people safer, when in fact they're only disarming the people who follow rules, the law-abiding people who are no danger at all to the public at large. This disarmament merely ensures that the murderers have a free hand. If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be more difficult and may even act as a deterrent.

In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

Police can't be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it's already too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. And if they're armed, they might wind up not being victims at all.

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy - that murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

Glenn Reynolds is Beauchamp Brogan distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of the book An Army of Davids and blogs at instapundit.com.
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THE BOTTOM LINE: Not only is there overwhelming evidence that armed law abiding citizens are safer than helpless people in so-called “GUN FREE ZONES”, but anyone with the ability to think and comprehend reason and logic, rather than being hysterically blind, can understand that one is obviously safer being armed than being a helplessly disarmed TARGET.

de Andréa

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