WSJ: Dave Kopel
Date: Apr 18, 2007 10:55 AM
WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘Gun-Free Zones’
By DAVID B. KOPEL
April 18, 2007; Page A17

The bucolic campus of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., would seem to have
little in common with the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City.
Yet both share an important characteristic, common to the site of almost
every other notorious mass murder in recent years: They are “gun-free
zones.”

Forty American states now have “shall issue” or similar laws, by which
officials issue a pistol carry permit upon request to any adult who passes a
background check and (in most states) a safety class. Research by Carlisle
Moody of the College of William and Mary, and others, suggests that these
laws provide law-abiding citizens some protection against violent crime. But
in many states there are certain places, especially schools, set aside as
off-limits for guns. In Virginia, universities aren’t “gun-free zones”
by
statute, but college officials are allowed to impose anti-gun rules. The
result is that mass murderers know where they can commit their crimes.
Private property owners also have the right to prohibit lawful gun
possession. And some shopping malls have adopted anti-gun rules. Trolley
Square was one, as announced by an unequivocal sign, “No weapons allowed on
Trolley Square property.”
In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him
from carrying a gun on the premises and began shooting people who moments
earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.
Fortunately, someone else — off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth
Hammond — also did not comply with the mall’s rules. After hearing
“popping” sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire
on
the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other
innocent bystanders from getting hurt. He bought time for the local police
to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.
At Virginia Tech’s sprawling campus in southwestern Va., the local police
arrived at the engineering building a few minutes after the start of the
murder spree, and after a few critical minutes, broke through the doors that
Cho Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From what we know now, Cho
committed suicide when he realized he’d soon be confronted by the police.
But by then, 30 people had been murdered.
But let’s take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature
defeated a bill that would have ended the “gun-free zones” in Virginia’s
public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president
praised the General Assembly’s action “because this will help parents,
students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” In an August 2006
editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: “Guns don’t belong in
classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy
preventing same.”
Actually, Virginia Tech’s policy only made the killer safer, for it was only
the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from
having guns. Virginia Tech’s policy bans all guns on campus (except for
police and the university’s own security guards); even faculty members are
prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.
Virginia Tech thus went out of its way to prevent what happened at a Pearl,
Miss., high school in 1997, where assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved
a handgun from his car and apprehended a school shooter. Or what happened at
Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, when a mass murder was
stopped by two students with law-enforcement experience, one of whom
retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. Or in Edinboro, Pa., a few days
after the Pearl event, when a school attack ended after a nearby merchant
used a shotgun to force the attacker to desist. Law-abiding citizens
routinely defend themselves with firearms. Annually, Americans drive-off
home invaders a half-million times, according to a 1997 study by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Utah, there is no “gun-free schools” exception to the licensed carry
law.
In K-12 schools and in universities, teachers and other adults can and do
legally carry concealed guns. In Utah, there has never been a
Columbine-style attack on a school. Nor has there been any of the incidents
predicted by self-defense opponents — such as a teacher drawing a gun on a
disrespectful student, or a student stealing a teacher’s gun.
Israel uses armed teachers as part of a successful program to deter
terrorist attacks on schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are
following the Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., long-time gun control
advocates, including Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), agreed that making
airplane cockpits into “gun-free zones” had made airplanes much more
dangerous for everyone except hijackers. Corrective legislation, supported
by large bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, allowed pilots to
carry firearms, while imposing rigorous gun-safety training on pilots who
want to carry.
In many states, “gun-free schools” legislation was enacted hastily in
the
late 1980s or early 1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime. Aimed at
juvenile gangsters, the poorly written and overbroad statutes had the
disastrous consequence of rendering teachers unable to protect their
students.
Reasonable advocates of gun control can still press for a wide variety of
items on their agenda, while helping to reform the “gun-free zones” that
have become attractive havens for mass killers. If legislators or
administrators want to require extensive additional training for armed
faculty and other adults, that’s fine. Better that some victims be armed
than none at all.
The founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood the
harms resulting from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In his
“Commonplace Book,” Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare Beccaria, the
founder of criminology, which was as true on Monday as it always has been:
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are
neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things
worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to
encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with
greater confidence than an armed man.”
Mr. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute in Golden,
Colo., and co-author of the law school textbook, “Gun Control and Gun
Rights” (NYU Press).

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !