The Virginia Tech shootings provoke cries for draconian gun control laws enlisting wisdom from bureaucrats and politicians comparable to those who applied their trenchant and mercurial incites to keeping out 10 million illegal aliens. However, an alternative would expand permitted concealed carry in public places.
A rigorous, twenty-year study by John Lott and William Landes from the University of Chicago Law School supports this alternative. Passage of shall issue laws correlates with large decreases in multiple victim shootings and reduced harm from shootings, which do occur.
Licensed citizens who understand shooting, and limits for use of deadly force make startling interruptions resulting in abandoned or improvised plans. The assailant may not be neutralized, but now police would respond to an incident in progress, instead of arriving for body counts and paperwork.
The absence of shootings is also important. Public place shootings provide perpetrators leading roles in theatricals executing private, malevolent fantasies. Previously imagined screams and explosions suddenly penetrate their beings, embellished by intimate self-created visual stimuli of human terror, bloody mists, broken bodies, culminating in the Gotterdammerung of suicide at their chosen moment. The latent presence of armed citizens provides a deterrent disqualifying those places, leading prospective murderers to abandon their fantasies, or to seek the supportive environment of a "gun free' zone.
Our colleges tout disturbing protocols for evacuating, witnessing, communicating, containing, coordinating, notifying, and counseling, while not revealing minimum police response times provide murderers five to ten minutes for uninterrupted violence.
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The Virginia Tech shootings provoke cries for draconian gun control laws enlisting wisdom from bureaucrats and politicians comparable to those...
Nolan Nelson
Apr 21, 2007 21:22
You all are missing the point here. This is what happens when you try to limit who can own a... [MORE]
Jack Modena
Apr 29, 2007 18:01
Every time an atrocity of this nature occurs, somehow we as a nation seem to forget the loss of X... [MORE]
A Troubled American
Apr 18, 2007 18:07
We will never get rid of guns in this country. And I say that being an anti-gun person. I have... [MORE]
Garrett
Apr 18, 2007 13:51
To Ciancaglini,Garrett,Saterlee. You are living in a dream world if you thing any kind of a law would have stopped... [MORE]
Rogers Marshall
Apr 18, 2007 18:23
There is no sanity in the 'Insanity of Gun Obsession' response. The point this person misses, and most people who... [MORE]
CR Mountjoy
Apr 17, 2007 17:46
Some of what I am reading about Cho today suggest he was crazy not evil. There is a difference.
Unfortunately, from... [MORE]
obera
Apr 17, 2007 14:49
I find the editorial's labeling of the culprit as "evil" rather unhelpful. Certainly his acts could be labelled as evil.... [MORE]
Guy B. Jones
Apr 17, 2007 14:20
Hey, 9-11 was the biggest mass slaughter in our history...No guns were involved. [MORE]
Edmond J. Gruenenfelder
Apr 19, 2007 12:26
Although it is nearly universally accepted that there are individuals who are mentally burdened, the murdered remain murdered, and the... [MORE]
George Rivera
Apr 23, 2007 20:18
As a pediatric physician, I can tell you universal allowance of handgun possession is not the answer to the escalating... [MORE]
Doreen Ciancaglini
Apr 17, 2007 14:13
Nearly twenty years ago a woman friend of mine, staunchly anti-gun, was sitting in her boyfriend's convertible waiting for him... [MORE]
A.L.
Apr 17, 2007 13:50
If it had been a tornado in VA, they would have found a way to warn the students.
It had been... [MORE]
Jay Larson
Apr 17, 2007 11:59
The constitution allows everyone the authority to own a weapon. When it was written its constructors had no way of... [MORE]
dan mckeown
Apr 30, 2007 05:30
Naturally, what we--the country with the most guns,the most murders by guns, the most weapons manufacturers and weapon sellers in... [MORE]
Don Satterlee
Apr 17, 2007 11:25
Allow me to correct Don Saterlee. Virginia Tech type incidents do not occur daily in Iraq. What does occur... [MORE]
David Eisenberg
Apr 18, 2007 12:09
>>The Second Amendment was never intended to arm violently disposed people with modern mass killing machines.
Well, that is correct. The... [MORE]