Where Does Our Priority Lie ?

Why is it that we protect our money and ourselves more than we protect our children?

We put armed security guards in our banks.  We crew our armored cars with multiple men armed with shotguns and handguns.

Our elected officials certainly find the funds to provide themselves with armed security whereever they want to.

Yet in the wake of the Virginia Tech incident, as schools across this nation reassess their secuirty protocols, the idea of armed security is considered off-limits and out of bounds.

Why ?

If the threat of lethal force is OK to protect your money, then why isn’t OK to protect our kids from killers ?

Any real and serious debate regarding security at our nation’s schools should include consideration of armed security or allow concealed carry license teachers be armed on school campuses.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a law-abiding citizen with a gun.  This holds true in virtually every situation, whether or not the good guy fires his/hers gun, whether the bad guy fires his/hers gun, whether the bad guy is captured, killed or commits suicide –indeed,even if no crime is ever committed.

When bad guys do act, armed good guys stop them an estimated 2.5 million times or more a year, according to multiple scholarly surveys by Prof. Gary Kleck and others.  In the vast majority of cases, no shot is ever fired.

Some times the only thing that stops a homicidal maniac is his own suicide -hastened by arrival of an armed law-abiding citizen.

I am advocating is an Honest, Sober assessment of many, good sound options to safe keep our kids in our nation’s schools.

Armed Citizen

A MAN WAS SITTING in his vehicle while his wife shopped for groceries.  To his horror, three men burst into the store with a gun, appeared fire and began robbing customers.  The man called 9-1-1, then received a call from his wife.  “I just heard her saying, ‘There is nothing in my purse,”’ he recollects.  “And there was a ‘pow.’  The phone went dead.”  The man, a concealed – handgun license holder, sprang from his vehicle and entered the store with his .45-cal. postol.  He hoped to avoid confronting the bandits, but police say that was not to be.  One of the robbers pointed a gun at the man, and he responded by firing two shots at the suspect, injuring him as his acomplices fled.  Neither the man’s wife nor any others were harmed.  “I was just worried about my wife,” the man said, noting he took no satisfaction in shooting the suspect.  “I just wanted to get her out of there.”

The Dallas Morning News, Dallas Texas, 07/05/07

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WILLIE LEE HILL, says he returned home and “butted into” a robbery in progress.  Police say the suspect struck Hill several times with an unopened soda can, rendering him unconscious.  He awoke minutes later.  Bleeding profusely and half-blind without his glasses, he managed to reach a pistol in his bedroom as the robber returned.  “He lunged toward me,” Hill said.  “There was only the bed between us, and I shot him and he fell face first on the bed.  “He didn’t move.” HIll says the gun saved his life.  “I can handle a pistol,” he said.  “I know that he was going to kill be if I hadn’t got him first.”  When police arrived, the suspect told them, “I can’t feel my legs and I got what I deserved.”

El Dorado News-Times, El Dorado, Ark., 07/28/07

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JOHNNY JOHNSON AWOKE to the sound of a gunshot and his front door being kicked in.  A security system alerted the sheriff’s office while Johnson phoned his mother.  She told him to avoid heroics and “stay low,” but Johnson had other plans.  He snuck down the hallway with a 9 mm pistol, surprising one of the intruders and shooting him mutliple times.  Police nabbed the alleged burglars and their getaway driver at a hospital.  “I’, in the right, because it’s either me or them,” Johnson said.  Police agreed.

The Times- Union, Jacksonville, Fla., 07/12/07

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TIM WELBY WAS putting tools away when he noticed his back door was suspiciously ajar.  According to authorities, he found several signs of burglary and was missing a firearm.  “As far as I know, there’s an armed person inside my house, so I go and grab my ./357 out of my nightstand,” Welby explained.  That’s when he heard noises coming from the garage apartment where ihs stepson, Tristan Pierce, resides.  In the apartment, he  encountered a man wearing a motorcycle helmet.  Thinking it might be hs stepson, he called out, “Tristan?”  Silence followed, until the helmeted man said, “Please, sir.”  When Welby knew the man wasn’t Tristan, he pointed the gun at him and said, “You move, I’ve got a biohazard on my hands.”  Hearing the commotion, several neighbors came out of their homes with guns ready to help.  One of them called 9-1-1 and the intruder was arrested without incident.

The Gabber, Gulfport, Fla., 07/12/07

 

Firearms Dealer Harassment Act

Senator Charles Schumer, [D-N.Y.] has introduced S.77, the “Anti-Gun Trafficking Penalties Enhancement Act of 2007″ which threatens federal firearm license holders [FFLs] and gun buyers in two important ways.

First, It would require that currently confidential Bureu of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [BATFE] records on firearms traces be turned over –on demaon –to any government entity, for any purpose.  [Currently, information from firearms traces can only be used in bona fie criminal investigations by law enforcement agencies.]  This bill would require that these records be made available to any government agency for any reason, or for no reason at-all, without any justification or respect for privacy.

NRA has fought for many years to maintain the confidentiality of this data and not allow it to be abused by anti-gun politicians.

Anti-gun activists and politicians have sought this confidential data for use in lawsuits against the firearms industry; its release would lead directly to increased levels of harasing lawsuits and more firearms dealers being forced out of business.  Gun buyers would find fewer dealers, higher prices and a smaller selection of firearms.

Second, S.77 would remove the restriction on BATFE that allows it only one regulatory inspection of dealer per year, and instead grant unlimited authority to go after dealers without need to show cause.  This change is completely unnecessary, since BATFE already has significant legal methods for regulating dealers and enforcing firearm transfer laws:

• Currently, BATFE can conduct FFL inspections once a year, without a warrant, to ensure all dealers operate in compliance with the law.
• BATFE can conduct an inspection of a dealer without a warrant as a part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
• BATFE can, of course, get a warrant when it suspects a dealer of criminal activities.

The law requires FFL holders to cooperate with all types of inspections.  However, BATFE is prohibited from conducting inspections outside these limits to eliminate the type of harassment that was common before passage of the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act in 1986.  But, S.77 would turn back the clock on this vital reform, with devastating consequences for gun dealers and gun owners’ rights.

Finally –and perhaps most ominously –S.77 would define certain already –illegal firearm transactions as “Racketeering Activity” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act [RICO].  Certainly, no one condones illegal sales [such as tranfers of prohibited persons] but including them in RICO is over-doing-it.

• Under RICO, if a person commits two or more acts of racketeering activity within ten years, that “pattern of racketeering activity” can subject the violator to a 20-year prison term [in addition to the current sentences for the actual firearm violations] and seizure of assets.

More disturbing, anyone “injured” by a “pattern of racketeering activity” can bring civil suit against the violator; a successful plaintiff “shall recover threefold the damages he or she sustains and the cost of the suit.”  Of course, a crime victim couldn’t be “injured” by the illegal transfer itself –only by a later criminal use of the gun-so S.77 would open a whole new path for anti-gun politicians and activists to sue gun owners and dealers for the ACTIONS of CRIMINALS.

Virginia Tech Panel Pushes Anti-Gun Agenda

“Virginia Tech Review Panel” released its report on April’s horrific mass murder on campus.  Most media attention has rightly focused on failures of communicaiton.  These include to share information between university officials, mental health counselors, campus police, and killer Seung Hui Cho’s parents, as well as the university’s failure to promptly notify students, faculty and staff promptly about the first two shootings on college grounds.  Yet while the panel effectively reviewed those issues, it used its chapter on “Gun Puchase and Campus Policies” to promote an anti-gun agenda that has no relationship to this spring’s incident.  Many of its findings and recommendations asre contradictory; none would have had an effect on Cho’s shootings.

Example:

• The panel claims it “knows of no case in which a shooter in campus homicides has been shot or scared off by a student or faculty member with a weapon.” The panel ignores the appendix to its own report, which mentions the 2002 incident at Appalachian School of Law in nearby Grundy, Va., where three students confronted and physically subdued a fellow student who had killed three peopls.  The appendix, like most media reports at the time, doesn’t mention two of the three students who stopped the attack were armed.

• The report claims people carrying guns pose a high risk of accidental shootings and suicides, or of misbehavior due to bad temper, intoxication, or other abuse.  However, the panel ignores 20 years of overwhelming data on law-abiding citizens who carry firearms in Right-to-Carry states.  Instead, it supports its argument by noting that off-duty police officers are arrested each year for assault.  Would the panel suggest disarming the police ?

• The panel calls for new restrictions on firearm sales, including those at gun shows –though the panel itself describes how Cho received his guns in an over-the-counter transaction at a gun store.

• The panel discusses the now expired federal limit on magazine capacity.  It concludes “that 10-round magazines that were legal [under the 1994 - 2004 ban] would not not [sic] made much difference in the situation.”  Even pistols with rapid loaders [sic] could been about as deadly in this situation.”  But just a page later, the panel contradicts itself, concluding that “[h]aving the ammunition in large capacity magazines facilitated [Cho's] killing spree.”

Rather than calling for new restrictions on law-abiding gun owners, the report should have focused its efforts on real solutions to preventing crime.

D.C. Petitions SCOTUS

Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced the city will appeal the U.S. Court of Apeals for the D.C. Circuit’s Parker ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since D.C. GUN BAN law-it ranks at or near the top of the list of most violent cities in the USA –earning the distinction of being the nation’s ‘MURDER CAPITAL.’

Full story:  http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Federal/Read.aspx?id=3172