PA Bill Number: HB1661
Title: Further providing for schedules of controlled substances; and providing for secure storage of xylazine.
Description: Further providing for schedules of controlled substances; and providing for secure storage of xylazine. ...
Last Action: Act No. 17 of 2024
Last Action Date: May 15, 2024
'Gun-free' zones . . . until they're not :: 07/20/2015
While Thursday brought a rare confluence of events both heartbreaking and sobering, it’s even money the great course of this convergence will flow not toward a readily available solution. Instead, as the Mississippi River divides east from west, it will define the separation of ever-hardening positions.
Thursday morning, 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga alumnus with a degree in electrical engineering, shot up a strip-mall recruiting center, then drove his late-model silver Mustang convertible through the gate of a nearby U.S. Naval Reserve Center and opened fire again, killing four Marines.
That afternoon, in a rather more subdued Denver suburb, James Holmes, his hair no longer dyed orange and his eyes no longer wild, was convicted of multiple counts of first-degree murder for his attack on an audience catching a midnight movie in Aurora, Colorado, three years ago.
What’s the commonality? Evil young men armed to the teeth determined to commit mayhem, obviously, but something more; something both calculating and cowardly.
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Out of all the possible targets within their orbits, each chose places where they knew the victims would be unarmed, helpless, unable to respond. This wasn’t hard for either to sort out, either.
Signs at the entrance of the theater, the recruiting office and the reservist center declared each a gun-free zone. Which, of course, they are, right up until the fateful moment when a bad guy on some delusional mission who has spiraled beyond the gravity of petty authority shows up to demonstrate his righteous contempt for your signs and your warnings and your prohibitions and your silly, sacred conventions.
Even after all this, even after every episode of gun violence in gun-free zones, we, being peaceable, compliant and law-abiding, see such signs and — against all available evidence — figure, well, surely the people who had them posted have a security plan that deters those who don’t comply.
And repeatedly, plotters of spree killings see such signs and imagine the crook of a pale skeletal finger emerging from a black robe. Beckoning, beckoning.
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You would think, by now, we’d have figured out that the surest, simplest and cheapest solution to attacks on people in gun-free zones would be to issue razor scrapers with instructions to remove, with haste, these invitations to mayhem.
Except that there remains a noisy, dug-in contingent convinced that gun-free zones are all that separate us from the O.K. Corral in a limitless loop. They say we should be more like European countries that strictly control civilians’ access to firearms.
There’s an obvious problem with that: the Second Amendment. The founders wrote firearms into the Constitution, and recent Supreme Court rulings on the matter have dismissed the “well regulated militia” counterpoint as just so much word clutter.
Every other guarantee laid out in the Bill of Rights pertains to individuals; it’s disingenuous to claim the right to keep and bear arms belongs only to collectives under direction of the government.
Besides, a study out just last week detected at least a coincidence, and perhaps even a correlation: Since 2007, the number of concealed-carry handgun permits nationwide has nearly tripled, to 12.8 million; meanwhile, murder rates have slipped nearly 25 percent, to 4.2 per 100,000 from 5.6.
Like the man said, an armed society is a polite society.
This is not a plea for creating perpetual open seasons in our public spaces. Instead, it is an appeal to logic: Spree killers always seek the softest targets. End the systematic disarming of licensed firearms carriers and the last thing you’ll do is unleash episodes of gunplay.
This isn’t about a handful of theatergoers or Marine reservists returning fire; it’s about planting the thought of mutually assured destruction in the next would-be shooter’s head. That thought alone ought to be sufficient to keep him lashed to his PlayStation.
http://tbo.com/list/columns-tjackson/gun-free-zones-until-theyre-not-20150719/
