To President Obama, the word “politics” means anyone who
disagrees with him, as in the phrase “It is time to put politics
aside.” Whenever he says that, he is really saying “It is time to
put aside anyone who disagrees with me on this issue.”
Our hearts are all still hurting over the mass shooting and
murder of 20 innocent small children at the Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut. But it was in the same breath as
the announcement of the tragedy that President Obama’s all politics
all the time ideological warriors inserted their politics, seeking
to exploit the deaths of these small children for their ideological
and political gain. For them, such gain means liquidating even more
of the liberties and even constitutional rights of all Americans
who had nothing to do with the mass shooting.
Twenty children are murdered in cold blood by a deranged gunman,
and the answer is to seize the guns and flush the effective right
to self-defense of 300 million Americans? The answer is actually
just the opposite, as I explain below. Just ask yourself what
political philosophy has had disarming the citizenry near the top
of its agenda for more than a century.
But the question we all have to ask now is are we going to
tolerate left-wing infiltrators exploiting the gruesome murder of
small children to advance the further diminution of our liberties
and constitutional rights?
More Guns, Less Crime
The sharpest person
in America on the issue of guns and crime is John Lott, the author
of the classic book, More Guns, Less Crime. Early in his
career, Lott was an economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission,
which established federal sentencing guidelines, leading to his
subsequent career as a pathbreaking thinker on guns and crime. His
book More Guns, Less Crime is the bible for understanding
how to respond effectively to the Sandy Hook school tragedy.
Lott’s book is not an opinion piece or a lawyer’s argument. What
it does is carefully present, review, and analyze copious data
county by county, city by city, state by state, all across America,
for several recent decades. Moreover, he doesn’t just cite stats
that he thinks will make his case. He presents the data through
highly sophisticated regression analysis that befits a first rate
economist formerly of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and
thoroughly explains and demonstrates what the numbers show. These
regressions
account for not only all the law enforcement variables (arrest,
execution, and imprisonment rates), income and poverty measures
(poverty and unemployment rates, per capita real income, as well as
income maintenance, retirement and unemployment payments), the
thirty-six measures of demographic changes, and the national
average changes in crime rates from year to year and average
differences across states….In addition, the [regressions] account
for the differences in various concealed-handgun laws and other
types of gun control laws.
In other words, this is the most sophisticated presentation of
the data in the world.
What the results show is that in localities where there are more
guns, there is less crime. That is because criminals avoid
victims who are or might be armed, and prefer to prey on the
defenseless and unarmed. It is this unparalleled scholarship that
has swept the states with newly enacted “concealed carry” laws.
Those laws require local authorities to issue permits to carry
concealed handguns to those who meet the specified qualifications
(known as “shall issue” laws). Lott describes the sweeping change
in his latest Third Edition of More Guns, Less Crime:
In 2007, there were about 5 million Americans permitted to carry
concealed handguns. Thirty-nine states have right to carry laws and
nine have may-issue laws. Only two states, Illinois and Wisconsin,
still completely ban people from carrying concealed handguns. That
is a big change from just the eight states that had right-to-carry
laws in the early 1980s.
Also in the Third Edition, published in 2010, are the results of
sophisticated regressions run on the effects of those conceal and
carry laws:
There are large drops in overall violent crime, murder, rape,
and aggravated assault that begin right after the right to carry
laws have gone into effect. In all those crime categories, the
crime rates consistently stay much lower than they were before the
law. The murder rate for these right to carry states fell
consistently every year relative to non-right-to-carry states.
Lott adds:
All the results indicate that violent crime falls after
right-to-carry laws are passed…. There is a large, statistically
significant drop in murder rates across all specifications. The
before-and-after average comparison implies that right-to-carry
laws reduce murder by roughly 20 percent. In all cases,
right-to-carry laws cause the trends in murder, rape, and robbery
rates to fall.
Lott quotes the Detroit Free Press on the results of
conceal and carry in one state:
“Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license
to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally
packing heat has increased six fold….The incidence of violent crime
in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has
been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The
overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and
accidents, also has declined. More than 155,000 Michiganders —
about one in every 65 — are now authorized to carry loaded guns as
they go about their everyday affairs…. About 25,000 people had CCW
permits in Michigan before the law changed in 2001.”
Conceal and carry permit holders have been incredibly law
abiding, with revocations running at about 0.2 percent or less in
most states, sometimes much less. Many if not most of these are for
infractions unrelated to guns, such as failure to maintain vehicle
insurance. People are safer around permit holders than among the
general public.
In fact, armed permit holders often serve as the first line of
defense, as
explained by David Kopel in Monday’s Wall Street
Journal:
The media rarely mention the mass murders that were thwarted by
armed citizens at the Shoney’s Restaurant in Anniston, Ala. (1991),
the high school in Pearl, Miss. (1997), the middle-school dance in
Edinboro, Penn. (1998), and the New Life Church in Colorado
Springs, Colo. (2007), among others. At the Clackamas Mall in
Oregon last week, an active shooter murdered two people and then
saw that a shopper, who had a handgun carry permit, had drawn a gun
and was aiming at him. The murderer’s next shot was to kill
himself.
Of course Lott and his work have been attacked by liberal and
leftist ideologues. But in his book he thoroughly and brilliantly
decimates them, too. It is easy for hardened gun control
campaigners to assert that “Lott has been discredited.” But there
is no basis for such assertions.
Can Liberals Reason?
Lott applies the
lessons learned from this work to mass murders such as the tragedy
at Sandy Hook Elementary. In a recent talk radio interview, he
noted that the mass murderers usually choose so-called gun free
zones such as schools, or movie theaters or shopping malls where
guns are prohibited. That is because they know they can carry out
their plan for mass murder there without being stopped.
Lott insightfully explains that these mass murderers are
consciously choosing to commit suicide in carrying out their
crimes. But they don’t want to go out quietly. They want to make a
big splash to draw national and even world attention to their pain
and their plight. This is all a reflection of the mental illness
that generally plagues them.
The lessons of More Guns, Less Crime actually apply
quite directly to this problem. When Israel suffered terrorists
targeting its schools, it ultimately decided to arm its teachers.
In fact, Israel generally follows the conceal and carry policy Lott
favors throughout society. This way, the Israeli people themselves
are the first line of defense against terrorism.
Such a policy would have prevented the extent of the killing at
Sandy Hook. School policy should seek to train as many willing
teachers as possible in each school, empowered with conceal and
carry permits to defend themselves and their children. Such permits
more generally would help to prevent such mass murders
elsewhere.
Is this just a wild west scenario? We are already living in the
wild west, but often with only the bad guys having guns. And that
is where the policies of the liberals and President Obama would
take us further. As Lott says, “The evidence should make gun
control advocates pause, as all the gun bans that I have studied
show that murder rates increase after the ban is enacted.” But our
experience with President Obama shows that he doesn’t learn from
experience. That is why he wants to expand the experience of murder
capital Chicago to the entire nation.
The bottom line is that the government does not have the power
to take away guns from dangerous criminals and mass murderers. The
government cannot stop drugs from crossing our borders, and even
showing up in prisons. The government can only stop law-abiding,
innocent victims from being armed. But there is no sense or logic
to that.
The gun control policy is even worse than that, because it
sacrifices the liberties, self-defense, and constitutional rights
of every innocent American, to an ineffective policy that will not
work, unless your policy is precisely to disarm the public because
you have nefarious plans for the American people. Just bring back
the ban on assault rifles? We already tried that, and it didn’t
work, with no significant change in the data when the ban went into
effect, and no significant change when the ban lapsed. More
effective would be to ban braindead liberals from public service.
Would that violate the Constitution? Aren’t we already discussing
policies that would violate the Constitution?
There really is no such thing as an assault rifle. They are
defined by references to their cosmetic appearance rather than to
their functionality. Banning assault rifles is really just a PR
stunt deluding the gullible that something important has been
accomplished.
Other liberal policies have only contributed to the problem as
well. Liberal deinstitutionalization policies have liberated the
mentally ill to roam the streets, giving rise to the homeless
problem as well as to more mass murderers. As Kopel also notes in
Monday’s Journal:
A 2011 paper by Steven P. Segal at the University of California,
Berkeley, “Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health Services, and U.S.
Homicide Rates,” found that a third of the state-to-state variation
in homicide rates was attributable to the strength or weakness of
involuntary civil-commitment laws.
Violence-drenched movies and video games contribute to
disrespect for life in our culture. The breakdown of the family and
widespread out of wedlock births give rise to more violence and
crime as well. The airhead liberal policy of piously declaring
certain public areas “gun free zones” very directly contributes to
mass murder.
Maybe we need to look at that idea of banning brain-dead
liberals.
