The Newtown Ct shooting A dark day in our history

[mrerick]

I join Marc in being concerned about these marketing efforts. They play into the artificial violence that is constantly viscerally served up in movies and video games. Spending thousands of hours in front of and interacting with this stuff has an effect, especially on people without developed judgement centers.

The predominantly young men that perpetrate violent massive crimes invariably have been attracted to these efforts to make carnage attractive. Sometimes those that consume these trash fantasies find the means, take the path of least resistance, and act them out.

The traditional hunting, collecting and marksmanship culture that encourages personal growth is being left in the dust by these things. I, for one, don't like it a bit.

When I teach firearms safety classes, I'm always thankful for the individuals and families that come to our club for training.

When on the range we shoot at printed NRA targets and round paper plates... They work just fine.

Marc

[cirelaw]

What is unfortunate are most of the psychologsts and their MD cousins really need help recognizing as parents that something is different and seek another opinion. Many this the easiest way out is handing their patients a magic pill with 2 refill and see ya in 3 months.I know that any of them bother to pull up the Physicians Desk Reference. There are hit with often pretty drug reps. They are the ones in skirt and ties carrying a brief case full of samles, pens etc. TKS God its gotten tighter. But now there are far fewer samples to give to needy patient that have no insurance or such the co-pays that criples their household budget! I don't know how the new year will be but I do know we have lost more then these poor victims. The effects of such will effect all of us in some way in y for a long way to come if not forever. We, our familys were also attacked. One sick bastard has made us all realize that no one is safe from a sick piece of sh&&* A tragety for years to come! God Bless us all! I thank this forum and its owners for allowing us an outlet!!!

[calibrator]

I saw 2 videos posted on Calguns this A.M. regarding new News releases about the Oregon Mall shooting. One was from the local TV station and the other was an interview of an off-duty security guard.

You WILL NOT see this on any of the MSM outlets.

It is now known that the 22 y.o. security guard was shopping with a female friend who was baby-sitting a child when the gunman opened fire in the food court, killing 2. The Security Guard drew his CCW legal Glock #22 and confronted the shooter from behind a pillar when the shooters AR jammed. The Security Guard refrained from firing due to the fleeing crowd despite having a sure sight picture on the shooters head. The shooter seeing this, ran away and that's when he shot himself, rather than face an armed by-stander.

I wish I could link to this to share a small positive note in ALL the madness. You will not likely hear about it otherwise. I think ALL schools should have a full-time staff member who is trained to respond with superior force in these situations. Gun-free Zones will always be where Monsters go to make their mark in history despite ALL the new "Feel-Good" laws that will be passed.

[FleetMan]

Remember that phrase, "Never allow a crisis to go to waste." We will see this one exploited like we have never seen before!

[lew1]

Well, I have taken a shotgun to the range, not to shoot trap or skeet, but to make sure of the pattern and to maintain the feel for them. In the same vein, I take my pistols and my two FA weapons. There are other things besides trap and skeet.

[Shadowsix]

Originally Posted by lew1

Well, I have taken a shotgun to the range, not to shoot trap or skeet, but to make sure of the pattern and to maintain the feel for them. In the same vein, I take my pistols and my two FA weapons. There are other things besides trap and skeet.

I know there are other things besides trap & skeet and have taken my shotgun to the range and shoot paper targets to see the pattern also or even at distant metal targets. I'm just a little uneasy when I go to the range and there is someone who has one of those bleeding zombie torso's on a stand and proceeds to blast in to pieces with 00 buck shot and slugs

[saab-bob]

Charlie
On your comment about then Gov. Reagan shutting down all the mental hospitals and letting all the patients out on the street to save money. Here is a counterpoint article to that revisionist history

http://onespeedbikerpolitico.blogspo...al-health.html
I grew up in CA and remember this.
Bob

[lew1]

Originally Posted by saab-bob

Charlie
On your comment about then Gov. Reagan shutting down all the mental hospitals and letting all the patients out on the street to save money. Here is a counterpoint article to that revisionist history

http://onespeedbikerpolitico.blogspo...al-health.html
I grew up in CA and remember this.
Bob

Thank you, but I was not talking about gov. reagan, nor had I mentioned him.

[cdmech]

Originally Posted by Shadowsix

Very true! I too have seen these bleeding zombie torsos, zombie paper targets, and exploding targets and figure it's video games and other entertainment media (movies, films) that is driving this and wonder a little about those who get into guns & shooting for that reason.

I guess what I mean is that it feels like the reasons people buy guns has changed. ALLOT of people are buying "black" guns ONLY because the media is hyping up that they are evil and noone except law enforcement should have them. People are buying guns because they hate being told what they can and can't do. And the gun industry is capitalizing on this attitude to sell guns. I'm generalizing of course, but that's what is striking me lately. Awhile back someone posted a picture from the 1950's of the Los Angeles High School Shooting team practicing in the hallways of their school. Everyone commented that that would never happen again. But I was thinking about that picture. Nicely dressed boys with white shirts and ties, girls with skirts and blouses shooting wood stocked 22's at round discs. With some exceptions, that's not what is being advertised today. If it doesnt look like your going to go blast away at Resident Evil nobody is interested. Maybe that's why the liberals don't like us.
Marc

[lew1]

Originally Posted by Shadowsix

I know there are other things besides trap & skeet and have taken my shotgun to the range and shoot paper targets to see the pattern also or even at distant metal targets. I'm just a little uneasy when I go to the range and there is someone who has one of those bleeding zombie torso's on a stand and proceeds to blast in to pieces with 00 buck shot and slugs

I have not seen the zombie targets you mention. But people come in all sizes, colors, preferences, smarts, etc. Likewise so do shooters. Smile and maybe try to educate them.

[lew1]

Originally Posted by cdmech

I guess what I mean is that it feels like the reasons people buy guns has changed. ALLOT of people are buying "black" guns ONLY because the media is hyping up that they are evil and noone except law enforcement should have them. People are buying guns because they hate being told what they can and can't do. And the gun industry is capitalizing on this attitude to sell guns. I'm generalizing of course, but that's what is striking me lately. Awhile back someone posted a picture from the 1950's of the Los Angeles High School Shooting team practicing in the hallways of their school. Everyone commented that that would never happen again. But I was thinking about that picture. Nicely dressed boys with white shirts and ties, girls with skirts and blouses shooting wood stocked 22's at round discs. With some exceptions, that's not what is being advertised today. If it doesnt look like your going to go blast away at Resident Evil nobody is interested. Maybe that's why the liberals don't like us.
Marc

You are seeing capitalism at work. People like what they cannot have or are afraid that they will not be able to have and the gun companies taking to that cue have played to that.

As to the 1950's I remember being at my high school, attending a festival "in the school building" and winning a raffle where I had a choice between a 22 rifle and a 22 pistol. I won and picked the rifle.

That does not happen any more.

Then our physical ed instructor was a marine sergeant from the local recruiting station. Somehow, some place he was able to get a supply of M1 Garands. And we used them in the PT exercises in the school yard next to the Catholic Cathedral. 12, 13, 14 and 15 year (the age of all the students) old boys practicing close order drill, etc with the rifles. We even stripped the rifles. And none of us hurt our thumbs.

When we were 15 and seniors he let us attach the bayonets and practice some fancy drills with them.

We all wore dress pants, shirts and ties.

Our parents did not object, the priests did not object, the bishop did not object, the people walking on the street did not object.

The above is in the same time frame as the instance you cited.

I doubt if such would be seen today.

[padredan]

true not ever to be seen again

[padredan]

Early tonight in chapel services i was humbled to hear a 91 year old former world war two paratrooper by the name of percy spears offer up a beautifull prayer for the victims of this tragedy and all the survivors, He prayed as if he knew each one and their familes, very humbling just to be there.

[Olle]

The gunman's mother owned the guns, which makes you wonder why a woman would buy two 9mm pistols and an AR-15. It really sounds like straw purchases to me. Another thing to think about is that all these mass shootings happen in "gun free zones", where some people think that gunmen will stop at the door, turn around and go home when they see the "no guns" sign. In real life, they see it as a "no resistance" sign. It's obvious enough: If people break the current laws, more laws won't help a bit.

Originally Posted by suum cuique

A very sad incident. I even can't imagine how the parents and relatives suffers. But I think that the anti gun lobby will use this sad incident to go for their total goal, an almost total gun ban like in Japan.

This a the gun banners phantasy:
http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...deaths/260189/

What they don't see is the differences in culture, and that's really where it starts. As already mentioned, violence is glorified through movies, games etc and it's simply becoming a part of our culture. If you look at it, gun laws are more strict now than, let's say 30 years ago, but for some reason mass shootings have become more common. Warped minds will always find means to do harm to others, and there's no way to erradicate everything that can be used to do that. If you look at another sad example: Was there any discussion about bathtubs after Andrea Yates killed her children? Would there have been a debate about guns if she had used a gun?

The saddest part is that while people are mourning the dead, others use the tragedy to push their agenda. The question is not what we can do about guns, it's what we can do about people.

[Steve Lempitski]

We know that something on a Federal level WILL happen. The deaths of 20 6 and 7 year olds will be the last straw for the American public. Im thinking the result may be a 1934 NFA type act that designates these military/assault style weapons as class 3 weapons to restrict them from the general public...Any other thoughts?

[Curly1]

I read in the paper yesterday the moms was a into guns and went to the range with her sons.

[mrerick]

The presence of a citizen in the Oregon mall that had a concealed handgun permit, and that was able to stop that crime should remind us all (including the anti-gun hysterics):

The USA has a long history that clearly proves prohibition of things cannot correct behavior. (Alcohol; drugs; prostitution... etc).

Prohibition doesn't work; repeating the same mistakes (by enacting more gun prohibitions) cannot solve the problem.

The only thing that can correct the behavior of a violent criminal is immediate overwhelming counter-force.

Marc

[lugerholsterrepair]

4 Awful Reactions to Sandy Hook School Shooting - And Thoughts on a Better Response
Nick Gillespie
REASON.COM
Dec. 15, 2012

Horrific events such as the mass shooting at Newtown, Connecticut's Sandy Hook
Elementary School are terrible enough in showcasing the evil that men do.

But they also regularly bring out the worst in observers, commentators, and
pundits who will never let a lack of knowledge or expertise stand in the way of
making grand pronouncements.

Here's a short tour of four of the least-helpful reactions to an attack that
slaughtered more than two dozen Americans - most of them kids 10 years and
younger. They come courtesy of a former presidential candidate (Mike Huckabee),
an international media mogul (Rupert Murdoch), an Oscar-winning filmmaker
(Michael Moore), and a famous crusading journalist (Geraldo Rivera).

Following that is a discussion of the reality of gun violence in America and
what might actually address some of the issues in play. (To read this article as
a single page, click here.)

Next: God has left the building...

1. Mike Huckabee: "We have systematically removed God from our schools."

The former governor of Arkansas, Republican hopeful for president, and Fox News
host says we've got no reason to be surprised when adult gunmen shoot up
educational establishments.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed
God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree
that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning.
"Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

I don't doubt the governor's sincerity, but among other things, he might want to
think about the declining rate of school violence. According to data compiled by
the National Center for Education Statistics, schools have been getting safer
and less violent at least over the past couple of decades - despite what
Huckabee would doubtless consider a period of rising godlessness. During the
school year of 1992-93, for instance, the number of on-location murders of
students and staff at K-12 public schools was 47 (out of population of
millions). In 2009-2010 (the latest year for which data is listed), the number
was 25. Over the same period, the rate on victimizations per 1,000 students for
theft dropped from 101 to 18. For violent crimes, the rate dropped from 53 to
14. And for "serious violent" crimes, the rate dropped from 8 to 4.

Next: It's never too late to blame George W. Bush...

2. Michael Moore: "killer... used an assault weapon called The Bushmaster."

Michael Moore is no stranger to bombastic, offensive statements. Who can forget
(despite trying really, really hard) when he denounced the butterfly ballot
fiasco in Palm Beach, Florida during the 2000 presidential election as the final
act of Kristallnacht?

No one has made more money off of bashing George W. Bush so it wasn't surprising
that Oscar-winning documentarion tweeted this:

In addition to his two handguns, the killer in CT this morning used an assault
rifle called The Bushmaster.

And in case you didn't get his wry, humorous intent, he followed up with this
retweet of a comment by a follower in Australia:

@MMFlint I didn't know you guys named your guns after presidents. How cute

Cute is one word for it.

Moore, of course, made the film Bowling for Columbine, which was named for one
of the most notorious mass shootings in memory and tried to explore why America
had always been more violent than other countries - even ones such as Canada and
Switzerland that have similar or higher rates of gun ownership. As Reason's
Brian Doherty noted, Moore was enough of a truth teller in his documentary to
acknowledge he didn't really know:

Except for one scene - in which Our Hero himself apparently pressures Kmart into
promising to phase out ammunition sales - Moore offers no suggestions for how to
make America a less depressing place. He raises many of the obvious explanations
for the high number of American shooting deaths - our violent history, our
violent pop culture, the presence of so many weapons - and then debunks them
all. Bowling for Columbine does not make a pro-gun control case. It is more
existential nightmare than political document.

Next: We need to ban guns that are already illegal...

3. Rupert Murdoch: "When will politicians find the courage to ban automatic
weapons?"

Speaking of Australians and Twitter, media magnate and longtime gun control
advocate Rupert Murdoch took to the short-message system to blurt:

Terrible news today. When will politicians find the courage to ban automatic
weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy.

Perhaps Murdoch's focus was distracted by the ongoing ethics charges against
various personnel in his global media empire or maybe he just doesn't care about
details. As Mediaite's Josh Feldman points out, none of the weapons reported to
have been used in the Sandy Hook shooting was automatic. In fact, according to
gun-control-promoting Mother Jones, none of the weapons used in mass killings at
least since 1982 have been automatic guns.

Feldman could have also pointed out that it's already illegal for Americans to
own fully automatic weapons (more commonly called machine guns) that were made
after 1986. (According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and
Explosives [ATF], an automatic weapon allows a shooter to fire more than one
round with a single trigger pull). Of the 250,000 or so legally registered
machine guns kicking around, many are at shooting ranges or in the hands of
dealers. The only way that citizens can legally own such weapons made before
1986 is by going through an extensive approval process run by ATF.

Not only has machine gun ownership has been strictly controlled since 1934, the
use of fully automatic weapons - whether legal or illegal - in criminal activity
is vanishingly small. So getting rid of the few machine guns still in legal
circulation would have just about zero effect on anything.

Next: How can we make school even more like prison?

4. Geraldo Rivera: "I want an armed cop at every school."

After running through his resume, which includes interviewing Charles Manson and
visiting wartime Iraq and Afghanistan, legendary broadcaster Geraldo Rivera told
Bill O'Reilly on the latter's show:

This is the worst thing ever and there's a scene I can't get out of my mind. You
have these babies who had never seen evil, who are in the flower of innocence,
and here's a grownup dressed in camouflage and he's killing the children and
he's reloading... I want an armed cop at every school, we have to protect these
children as if they were gold.

The raw emotionalism of Rivera's response - like President Obama, he choked up
in describing the massacre - is understandable, but provides absolutely zero
insight into how society or individuals should react.

Like 88 percent of public schools in the country, Sandy Hook Elementary already
controlled access to its building and its students; the alleged shooter Adam
Lanza reportedly shot through the security system that was in place. Could an
armed presence at the school have prevented Lanza from killing all or some of
his victims? It's possible, though given the low and falling number of violent
crime on K-12 campuses nationwide (see Mike Huckabee section above), this seems
like a misplaced emphasis at best, and the next step toward a greater lockdown
environment at schools at worst.

Next: The reality of gun violence and how to deal with it...

The Sandy Hook Elementary shooting has understandably already energized the
debate over gun control. During his first term in office, President Obama was
widely understood to be in favor of tighter federal gun ownership laws but made
no real moves toward that end. As Craig R. Whitney, the author of Living with
Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment, told me in a recent interview
(the video will run next week), the two actions that Obama took actually
expanded gun rights: The president allowed for individuals to carry loaded guns
into national parks and to check guns as luggage on Amtrak trains. These actions
- along with Obama's failure to push for a renewal of the ban on "assault
weapons" - caused the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence to give Obama an F
for his first year in office.

At the start of a second term and facing a terrible economic situation (much of
it due to his own policies) and an equally awful foreign-policy situation, it's
plausible that Obama will turn to gun control as a way reconnecting with his
liberal base and as an attempt to soothe the nation. At a press conference about
the shooting, the president said, "We're going to have to come together and take
meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the
politics."

And his spokesman Jay Carney has also said that the president will fight to
reinstate the ban on so-called assault weapons (an imprecise category of guns
that typically targets semi-automatic weapons festooned with military-style
detailing).

None of that will be easy, for a number of reasons. Over the past several
decades, virtually every state in the country has liberalized its gun control
laws. In 2008 (in the Heller decision) and 2010 (McDonald), the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld an individual right to bear arms. Despite a number of high-profile
gun-violence cases - including this year's mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado
movie theater and 2011's shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords - the past
20 years has seen a sharp and continuing decrease in violent crime.

In 1992, for instance, the violent crime rate per 100,000 residents was 758. In
2012, it was 386. Between 2000 and 2009 (the latest year for which I could
easily find data) use of firearms in violent crime had decreased from a rate of
2.4 per 1,000 to 1.4 per 1,000.

So gun violence overall is down significantly from where it was about 20 or
more. At the same time, comfort with guns, which are present in about 45 percent
of households, has been increasing. Gallup reports that in January of this year,
only 25 percent of Americans wanted to see gun laws be made more strict.
Two-thirds either wanted laws to stay the same or be less strict, while 8
percent had no opinion. It's likely that those percentages will shift somewhat
over the coming weeks or even months, but the long-term trend lines - that
include the years of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and other gun-related massacres -
will make it difficult for gun control proponents to gain large majorities.

Beyond all questions of politics is a more basic question of efficacy. What
exactly might be done to prevent mass shootings, especially at locations such as
schools? In the wake of the Giffords shooting by Jared Lee Loughner, there were
many calls for institutionalizing more people who seemed mentally unhinged and
potentially violent. The same thing is happening now, for obvious reasons (by
various accounts, none of which has been fully substantiated yet, presumed
gunman Adam Lanza was unhinged). As Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote regarding
Loughner, even the most vociferous propopents of locking up potential killers
grant that maybe 10 percent of schizophrenics become violent. Academic studies
of presumptive detention of the mentally ill suggest that mental health
professionals do about as well, and sometimes worse, than regular people in
figuring out who exactly is going to go postal. Such results should temper any
and all calls to start rounding up more people in the name of protecting
innocents.

The general decline in gun-related violence and the inability even of mental
health professionals to identify future mass killers should be the essential
starting points of any serious policy discussion generated by the absolutely
horrific slaughter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
We should also add a third starting point: Few good policies come from rapid
responses to deeply felt injuries. Many of the same people who are now calling
for immediate action with regard to gun control recognize that The Patriot Act,
rushed through Congress in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was a
terrible piece of legislation that ultimately did nothing to protect Americans
even as it vastly expanded the state's ability to surveil law-abiding citizens.
There's no reason to think that federal, state, or local gun control laws
promulgated now would result in anything different.

If hard cases make bad laws, it's even more true that rare crimes make terrible
public policy. In a piece for Quartz, journalist Lenore Skenazy recalls that the
deadliest school massacre in U.S. history took place in Michigan in 1927, when a
disgruntled school-board official blew up 38 people, including himself. She
writes that the real difference between now and then is the immediacy of the
media, which shrinks the distance between victims and the rest of us. Even as
that allows us to have more empathy for the grieving, it creates the conditions
for an overreaction that will ultimately be little more than symbolic:

I expect we will now demand precautions on top of precautions. More guards. More
security cameras. More supervision. We will fear more for our kids and let go of
them even more reluctantly. Every time we wonder if they can be safe beyond our
arms, these shootings will swim into focus.

Will this new layer of fear and security make our children any safer? Probably
not, but for a reassuring reason: A tragedy like this is so rare, our kids are
already safe. Not perfectly safe. No one ever is. But safe.

That’s a truth the folks in 1928 America understood. We just don’t feel that way
now.

Acknowledging the horror of what happened and mourning for innocent lives
snuffed out and families destroyed by the incomprehensible act of a madman is
precisely what the country should be doing right now. If it seems as if that is
a passive non-reaction, that's because too many people understand what mourning
entails. After that can come a policy battle that can be fought with passion but
not with emotionalism and ignorance of relevant, basic facts standing in for
rational analysis and honest debate.

________________________________________

A Needless, Senseless, Tragedy
James Simpson
AMERICAN THINKER
12-15-2

Losing a child is the worst possible thing that can happen. Losing 20, as
occurred in Newtown, Connecticut is a monstrous, indescribable tragedy. My heart
bleeds for those devastated families. Their Christmases, their lives, will never
be the same.

Some have used this tragedy as an opportunity to vilify our "gun culture" and
predictably, right up to the President, have said we need "meaningful action",
by which of course he means more gun control. But guns are not the problem here.

Throughout the last century, up until the gun control act of 1968, there were
few restrictions on gun ownership, save the heavy regulation of automatic
weapons. A kid could order a rifle through the mail. There were no Columbines,
no Virginia Techs', no Auroras, no Newtowns. There were many people with mental
illnesses, ADD, Asperger's, autism and other problems, although perhaps they
went by different names. But these kinds of things just did not happen.

What changed? What changed is that our society became unhinged from its bedrock
belief in God. In earlier times, churches were filled on Sundays and people
generally conformed to a code of decency and behavior accepted throughout
society. We swore less, raged less, dressed more modestly, frowned upon
braggarts and liars, respected authority and approached life with a modesty and
humility borne both of hard experience and religious training.

Of course there were exceptions, but for all our collective failings as human
beings, we took our religions and our religious beliefs seriously. Organized
religion, especially Christianity, demands a level of decency, modesty and
humility that is largely missing in today's distracted, self-absorbed,
ego-driven, anything-goes culture. And we are reaping the rewards.

Back in the 1920s, a group of German Communists started the Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt, Germany. It would become known as simply the Frankfurt
School. Its goal was to implement communism in the West quietly by gradually
subverting popular culture -- a movement known as Cultural Marxism.

Early on, these people recognized that Christianity was the single greatest
impediment to the advancement of communism in the West and they set out to
destroy it by every means possible. Soviet propagandist and organizer Willi
Munzenberg articulated the school's goals:

We will make the West so corrupt it stinks... [We will] organise the
intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink [sic]. Only
then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can
we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Today their goal has been largely accomplished. We have been lured away from the
moral anchors of our Judeo/Christian heritage, and the result is visible all
around us: broken homes, endemic divorce, unwed mothers, convenience abortions,
crime, drug and alcohol abuse, increasingly toxic sexual licentiousness - which
brought us AIDS, among other things - and an increasingly ignorant class of
people, so self-absorbed and unaware, they can't even name our Capital.

Our culture is indeed becoming so corrupt it stinks, and it is not surprising
that evil now finds such an easy home here. Gun control will not cure this.
Stricter laws will not cure this. Stricter enforcement may not even cure this.
The only cure is a healthy society, a humble society; a society whose strong
Christian heritage used to make it uncool to feed off others, uncool to boast,
uncool to have a self-serving attitude; uncool to ignore the Golden Rule.

This is nothing new. The pattern has been repeated since the days of antiquity.
When a society finds and abides in God, health, peace and affluence follow; when
it forgets God, disaster is not far behind.

We as a nation have forgotten God.

________________________________________

High court fight looms over right to carry a gun
FOX NEWS
12-16-12

The next big issue in the national debate over guns -- whether people have a
right to be armed in public -- is moving closer to Supreme Court review.

A provocative ruling by a panel of federal appeals court judges in Chicago
struck down the only statewide ban on carrying concealed weapons, in Illinois.

The ruling is somewhat at odds with those of other federal courts that have
largely upheld state and local gun laws, including restrictions on concealed
weapons, since the Supreme Court's landmark ruling declaring that people have a
right to have a gun for self-defense.

In, 2008, the court voted 5-4 in District of Columbia v. Heller to strike down
Washington's ban on handgun ownership and focused mainly on the right to defend
one's own home. The court left for another day how broadly the Second Amendment
may protect gun rights in other settings.

Legal scholars say the competing appellate rulings mean that day is drawing near
for a new high court case on gun rights.

The appeals court ruling in Chicago came early in a week that ended with the
mass shooting in Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 children at
an elementary school and the presumed gunman.

Laurie Levenson, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said that
along with thorny legal issues, "we have the overlay of these tragedies hitting
us on a somewhat regular basis."

The author of a book that traces the battle over gun control in the U.S. said he
thinks Supreme Court intervention is likely in the short-term. "Since the Heller
case, the next great question for the Supreme Court to decide was whether there
is a right to carry guns in public," said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, whose
book "Gunfight" was published last year.

Roughly 40 states make it easy for people to carry a gun in public. But in
California, New York and a few other states, local and state regulations make it
difficult if not impossible to get a license to carry a weapon. Illinois and the
District of Columbia have been the only places to refuse to allow people to be
armed in public.

"In some of our most populated states, the right does not exist either because
it's completely forbidden or practically forbidden," said Alan Gura, the lawyer
who won the Heller case at the Supreme Court.

Gun rights advocates and gun control supporters are as split over the issue of
having guns in public as they were over whether the Constitution protected gun
ownership at all -- and along the same lines.

Jonathan Lowy, an attorney with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said,
"If law enforcement makes a determination that somebody would increase the
danger to the public by carrying a loaded gun on the streets, then that person
should not be carrying a loaded gun. Some people in the gun lobby want to tie
the hands of law enforcement."

But Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association,
said, "Clearly, the individual right under the Constitution does not apply only
to your home. People have lives outside their home and the constitutional right
applies outside their home."

Sometimes, LaPierre said, "The only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good
guy with a gun."

Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals employed similar
reasoning in his majority opinion striking down the Illinois law. Posner said
that threatening confrontations do not only or even principally occur at home.
"A Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough
neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower," the
judge said.

He homed in on the distinction between inside the home and on the street in his
questioning of another recent appeals court ruling that upheld New York's
restrictive law on granting people permits to carry concealed weapons. A
unanimous panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement
that people demonstrate a special need to carry a concealed weapon does not
violate the Constitution.

"Our principal reservation about the Second Circuit's analysis is its suggestion
that the Second Amendment should have much greater scope inside the home than
outside simply because other provisions of the Constitution have been held to
make that distinction," including the right to privacy that underlies the high
court ruling striking down sodomy laws. "Well of course, the interest in having
sex inside one's home is much greater than the interest in having sex on the
sidewalk in front of one's home. But the interest in self-protection is as great
outside as inside the home," Posner said.

In dissent, Judge Ann Williams said governments have a strong interest in
regulating guns on the street. "It is common sense, as the majority recognizes,
that a gun is dangerous to more people when carried outside the home. When
firearms are carried outside the home, the safety of a broader range of citizens
is at issue. The risk of being injured or killed now extends to strangers, law
enforcement personnel, and other private citizens who happen to be in the area,"
Williams said.

Gura represents the challengers to the New York law and he said he will ask the
high court to review the 2nd Circuit ruling. Illinois Attorney General Lisa
Madigan has not yet said whether the state will ask the full 7th Circuit court
to reconsider its ruling or appeal to the Supreme Court.

So far, the Supreme Court has turned down appeals asking it to say more about
guns. But that reluctance might fade if the court were presented with a split
between appeals courts, typically a strong factor in attracting the justices'
interest.

The Second Amendment talks about "the right to keep and bear arms and it's as if
some courts want to take giant eraser to the words `and bear' and pretend that
they're not there," said David Thompson, managing partner of the Cooper and Kirk
law firm in Washington. Thompson represented some plaintiffs in the Illinois
case.

Northwestern University law professor Eugene Kontrovich said the difference
between the New York and Chicago courts over what it means to bear arms could be
enough to persuade the Supreme Court to intervene.

Winkler, the UCLA professor, said he thinks the Illinois statute would fall if
it were to put to a test at the Supreme Court, probably by the same 5-4 vote as
in Heller. But it is hard to predict how the Supreme Court might rule on
restrictions that fall short of an outright ban on the right to carry a loaded
weapon in public for self-defense, he said.

"Public possession is a different issue than having a gun in your home," he
said.

________________________________________

TED NUGENT: Criminal Monsters€™ Will Not Be Deterred By Gun Free Zone Laws
Paul Scicchitano
NEWSMAX
12-16-12

As pressure mounts for lawmakers to tighten gun laws in the wake
of the Connecticut school massacre, conservative rocker and Second Amendment
advocate Ted Nugent tells Newsmax that “evil criminal monsters will never be
deterred by the insanity of gun free zone laws.�

In an exclusive interview, Nugent insists that so-called gun free zones only
empower potential killers such as Adam Lanza, who took the lives of 20 first
graders on Friday when he opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

"€œIndisputable statistics show clearly that gun free zones around the globe are
always where the most innocent human lives are slaughtered,"€� insists Nugent, who
is on the board of the National Rifle Association.

The documented genocide in Rwanda, Sudan, Germany, Norway, Scotland, England,
Canada, North and South Korea and elsewhere prove them wrong again and concludes
that people everywhere forced into unarmed helplessness will always be victims
of violent crime."

Nugent, who is a Newsmax contributor, said that two million Americans defend
themselves with privately owned firearms every year and he pointed to another
school incident where the principal halted a similar disaster by retrieving his
handgun from a vehicle.

"Unarmed and helpless is unarmed and helpless," Nugent insisted. "That so much
of our society is entrenched in the irresponsible mindset that unarmed and
helpless is an okay condition is inviting such multiple shooting tragedies."€�

Nugent said that he dreams of a society where "political correctness and the
sheep like behavior that goes with it are discarded" and he drew comparisons to
the 9/11 attacks, which called attention to the need for greater air travel
security.

"Surely there must be teachers somewhere, like professional pilots after 9-11,
that would be willing to be armed, trained and prepared to protect innocent
children in their care,"€� he said.

Nugent added that most mass shootings occur in jurisdictions with “extreme
restrictions� on firearms.

"But most telling, again, is the fact that they have all occurred in gun free
zones or where for many reasons, no one was armed or prepared to stop the evil
doer,"€� Nugent said.

________________________________________

The Aussie Lesson: Less Guns, More Crime
AWR Hawkins
BREITBART.COM
15 Dec 2012

Amid the push for more gun control in the wake of the Conn. shooting, it's
important to remember the lesson gun control laws have taught us in other
countries -- namely, that less guns lead to more crime.

We saw this clearly in Australia when Aussies were disarmed by de jure measures
in 1997.

To accomplish this, the Australian government sponsored a $500 million buyback
on all privately owned firearms that led to a ban. Australian politicians who
supported the move "promised a lower crime rate once the ban was in place."

Did lower crime result? No. Instead armed robberies rose significantly and home
invasions rose as well.

Moreover, assaults involving guns rose more than a 25% and murders with a gun
rose nearly 20%.

Note -- crime with guns increased after the gun ban was passed. How could this
be possible? It's possible because criminals don't obey gun bans, just like the
Conn. shooter didn't obey myriad gun laws in the act of committing his crime.
Thus, when law abiding citizens turned in their guns to comport with the ban,
they left themselves in a state of defenselessness: in a position from which
they were helpless when confronted by an armed individual, or gang of
individuals.

To be fair, proponents of gun control will point out that some (but not all) of
the sharpest increases in crime fell back from their highest numbers over time.
Yet this is a very strange argument, because it appears to be an admission that
sacrificing an untold number of lives in the short-term is worth implementing an
anti-gun ideology.

We would be wise to see the timelessness of George Washington's often quoted
phrase, a "free people ought...to be armed." In so doing we grasp the larger
lesson that the ability to defend ourselves is part and parcel to our freedom.

The second we are unarmed we are likewise no longer free.

________________________________________

Time for Schools to be Gun-free Free
Selwyn Duke
AMERICAN THINKER
12-16-12

If there's anything the Newtown massacre has proven, it's that school zones
billed as "gun-free" cannot be guaranteed to thus be.

They're only virtually certain to be good-guy-gun-free.

And it's time for this symbolism-over-substance policy to end.

The fact is that we're making the good easy prey for the wicked, and this has
been acknowledged by some current and former law-enforcement officials. As Vice
President and Public Information Officer of the National Association of Chiefs
of Police Jim Kouri writes:

[F]ormer police detective Mike Snopes believes that gun free zones invite
killers.

"The killer in [Newtown] came armed for bear and couldn't care less about some
gun law. The school's anti-gun law prevented any adults working at the school
from having access to a firearm. If the school's principal had been armed and
trained, she might have saved many lives. Had several people been armed at
that school, the shooter, suspect Adam Lanza, would have possibly been stopped
at the front door by a hale [sic] of bullets," said the former NYPD detective.

[...]According to former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, "The [Newtown] suspect
goes to the principal's office while the announcements are playing, over the
PA, to the whole school. Everyone in the school hears shots being fired. Had
teachers or school employees been armed, instead of fleeing and allowing the
killer to walk around the facility unimpeded, the school staff could have
surrounded the madman and ended the attack....

Adding to the case against gun-free zones is NYPD Detective John Baeza, who
"noted that the location of the Colorado movie theater shootings occurred at a
large shopping mall that was a gun free zone," writes Kouri.

Of course, as is the case with any individual incident, there's no way to know
precisely what would have transpired in Connecticut had the good guys not been
declawed. Maybe Adam Lanza would have been stopped; maybe not. But it doesn't
matter because good policy isn't based on individual incidents, but on what
makes sense considering the full scope of an issue.

And answer me this: how can "gun-free" zones have any positive effect at all on
average? People planning mass murder won't care about a law prohibiting firearm
possession in their target area. Outlawing guns in schools guarantees that only
outlaws will have guns in schools.

Having gun-free zones is foolish and, to me, frankly, irritating. Why? Because
they're a prime example of the liberal tendency to subordinate substance to
symbolism. Gun-free-zone prohibitions are feel-good laws. They make about as
much sense as having the U.N. declare Afghanistan a war-and-Sharia-free zone or
the Congo a rape-and-child-soldier-free zone and thinking we've accomplished
something. And for this reason they aren't just wrong-headed, but morally wrong.
For there is nothing virtuous about harming society with bad policy simply
because it makes you feel better about yourself.

Of course, rescinding gun-free-zone laws wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be
a move in the right direction. And advocating such helps to counter the activism
of people such as Little Big Gulp (a.k.a. Mayor Michael Bloomberg), who are
using the Newtown tragedy to move us in the wrong direction and further curtail
Second Amendment rights. Remember that the best defense is a good offense.

Whatever we do, however, it's seldom wise to make policy in an emotionally
charged atmosphere. When passions have been stoked, it's prudent to abide by
that age-old advice to take a deep breath and count to 10 before acting. For if
something truly is a good idea today, it was also a good idea six months ago -
and will be six months from now.

[padredan]

Outstanding, Jerry

[Olle]

Originally Posted by mrerick

The only thing that can correct the behavior of a violent criminal is immediate overwhelming counter-force.

And sometimes not even that. According to the news this morning, the gunman killed himself right after hearing the police sirens. It seems like it wouldn't have taken much resistance to prevent this tragedy, the perpetrators are most often cowards.