Column: Anti-firearms nuts dead wrong: Self-defence works
Date: Apr 28, 2007 10:36 AM
PUBLICATION: The Calgary Sun
DATE: 2007.04.22
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Editorial/Opinion
PAGE: 37
ILLUSTRATION: photo by AP Students and parents embrace on Friday during
a moment of silence for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. Bob
Merrey, Caroline Merrey, who escaped the massacre by jumping out a
window, Cristine Backhus, Karen Merrey and Trey Shannon.
BYLINE: IAN ROBINSON, CALGARY SUN
WORD COUNT: 595

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Anti-firearms nuts dead wrong
Sheeplike behaviour won’t make us any safer when gunman arrives

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The geek with the gun is back, this time at Virginia Tech, and the death
toll of 32 innocents brings the anti-firearms nuts out of the woodwork,
elbowing one another out of the way in their haste to be first to climb
to the top of the pile of corpses to trumpet their message.

Even in Canada, where restrictions on owning long guns are beyond
reasonable and getting a handgun ridiculously so — unless you’re a
gangbanger who refuses to obey the law — there are people who believe
if they can limit certain freedoms just a little bit more, we’ll all be
safe within the comforting embrace of the Mommy State.

Jack Layton and Stephane Dion and Sheila Copps all dusted off their
tired, old morally and intellectually bankrupt acts and took them on the
road again.

They are the Neville Chamberlains of the modern age.

If only we’re made more defenceless, more sheeplike, somehow only then
will we be safe.

The U.S. Department of Justice found the risk of serious injury for
unarmed women who were victims of crime was 250% higher than those who
– Eek! Eek! — had a gun.

In a study of all public, mass-murder incidents in the U.S. between 1977
and 1999, economists John Lott Jr. of Yale’s law school and William M.
Landes of the University of Chicago’s law school (not exactly wild-eyed
radicals on this issue like … well … me) wrote:

“The most comprehensive empirical study of concealed handgun laws finds
that they reduce murder rates by about 1.5% for each additional year a
law has been in effect, with similar declines in other violent crimes.
And contrary to a popular misconception, permit holders are virtually
never involved in the commission of crime, let alone murder.”

These fellows found states in which law-abiding citizens can get a
concealed weapons permit, the incidence of mass-murder shootings like
the one at Virginia Tech were reduced 60%, and when they did occur, the
deaths and injuries from such attacks were reduced nearly 80%.

In other words, self-defence works.

It’s annoying to live in a culture in which we have to hire smart people
to point out what ought to be self-evident.

Lott and Landes also wrote: “One puzzle is why the media rarely reports
the role of guns in ending attacks.”

A shooting spree at a Mississippi high school in 1997 left two students
dead. An assistant principal got his handgun from his car and stopped
the attack by immobilizing the shooter until police arrived.

Of 687 news articles about the attack, only 10 mentioned the
vice-principal’s gun. That’s like reporting on the Second World War and
forgetting to mention the A-bomb.

A CBS News story noted the educator “eventually subdued the young
gunman.” No mention of how he did it.

Lott and Landes cite other examples. (The paper is available on the web,
just Google the authors’ names. For a sane Canadian perspective on gun
control, and the number of times Canadians use firearms to save their
own lives, Google Gary Mauser, a prof at Simon Fraser University.)

But merely putting forth the notion of resistance to killers is now
politically incorrect. A Fort Worth school district recently hired a
security outfit called Response Options.

It was founded by retired SWAT cops appalled by the Columbine massacre.
They decided to do something about it and came up with a program that
taught teachers and children, if someone with a gun came into their
classroom, to throw everything at him that came to hand, and swarm him
to bring him down.

The rationale is the school shooter is beyond reason.

He is there simply to kill.

There is no reasoning with such animals. And by attacking, there is a
better chance of survival for the largest number of potential victims.

As trainer Robert Browne of Response Options told the press at the time:
“Getting under the desk and doing what the gunman tells you … that’s
not a recipe for success.”

But when news got out, the school district backed off from the program.

One wonders what might have been for the victims at Virginia Tech had
anyone in the building been armed or if, at least been trained in
defence against such monsters the way they were trained in fire drills
as children.

There are now 40 U.S. states with “right-to-carry” laws. Not a single
one has rescinded the law once it passed.