by Jack Kelly
October 24, 2015

“We have to respect the tradition in this country of people who want to defend themselves and their family from violence…. There are people at high levels in this government who have bodyguards 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The average American does not have that, and deserves the right to be able to protect their family.”

That was former Virginia senator Jim Webb making the most sensible comment during the Dem presidential candidate debate (10/13). In response, the audience sat on its hands.

The last thing in the world Democrats want to hear is common sense on guns, gun-control, gun-free zones, crime, and mass murderers.

“He said he’d been waiting to kill people for a long time,” 18 year old Anastasia Boylan told Good Morning America from her hospital bed.

Chris Harper-Mercer murdered 10, wounded Ms. Boylan and 6 others at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon Oct. 1.

Harper-Mercer asked his victims to identify their religion, she said. Those who were Christians he shot in the head.

All but two mass shootings since 1950 have taken place where ordinary citizens are forbidden to carry guns, says John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.

In the wake of the shooting, President Obama called for “common sense gun control,” citing as examples countries which essentially forbid private ownership of firearms. But no gun control measure he’s proposed would have stopped Harper-Mercer.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh found no correlation between gun laws and gun violence. A 2004 evaluation of existing research by the National Academy of Sciences failed to identify any gun control measure that had reduced violent crime.

As gun ownership in the U.S. has risen, violent crime rates have fallen. Violent crime is rampant in cities with strict gun control laws. There is very little of it in Vermont, which has none. Writing in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy in 2007, criminologists Don Kates and Gary Mauser found that in both Britain and the U.S., violent crime rates are lowest where legal gun ownership is highest.

Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark have high rates of gun ownership, but low murder rates, Kates and Mauser found. The murder rate in Luxembourg, where ownership of handguns is banned, is 9 times greater than in Germany.

The mistaken belief the U.S. has the world’s highest murder rate is a product of a Soviet disinformation campaign, Kates and Mauser said. Were it not for cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore, our murder rate would be one of the world’s lowest.

Mass killers may be insane, but they’re not stupid. They choose for their murder sprees places where they know they won’t be interrupted by a law-abiding citizen with a gun.

“The suspect in the Charleston, S.C., shootings in June originally aimed to attack the College of Charleston,” Prof. Lott noted. “He chose a church instead because the college had armed guards.”

In his 141-page “manifesto,” Elliot Rodger, 22 — who murdered 6 and wounded 14 near the University of California-Santa Barbara last year — said he ruled out various targets because he worried someone with a gun would cut short his killing spree.

Students who survived the Umpqua massacre want to get guns to protect themselves. In a Rasmussen poll in June, 68 percent of Americans said they prefer to live in a neighborhood where people own guns. In a Gallup poll last November, 63 percent of respondents said having guns in their homes makes them safer.

Those poll numbers would be higher if “mainstream” journalists hadn’t picked up where Soviet propagandists left off. Citizens use guns to ward off criminals between 200,000 and 2.5 million times a year, criminologists estimate. Good luck finding a news story that mentions this.

Every mass shooting has ended when the killer was shot by a good guy with a gun, or committed suicide when good guys with guns arrived.

“Case after case occurs where concealed handgun permit holders stop what would have been mass shootings,” Mr. Lott said. “ I have been able to find just one Associated Press story that mentions an attack occurred in a gun-free zone.”

 

— Dems Are Common Sense-Free On Gun-Free Zones was originally published at To The Point News.