Front Sight, Press

I’m really tired of writing stories about mass murders in gun-free zones. It’s an unpleasant task. You have to be really careful in the way you talk about it. The subject itself is distressing to an extreme degree, and the frequency is too high. I wish I could say that this would be the last such article, but I know it won’t be. It is very tempting to just stop seeing them and writing about them. It would leave more time for fun stuff like equipment reviews. But to ignore them seems so wrong, especially when it is a problem that could be solved if certain kinds of people would get their heads out of the sand.

The ink had scarcely dried on the Tinley Park shooting when news broke of the attack on the city council of Kirkwood, Missouri. Kirkwood is a suburb of St. Louis. On Thursday, February 7, 2008, a murderer stormed into the city council meeting. On his way into the building his shot and killed an armed police officer and then shot four more people, the first being another armed police officer. While memorials were still being held for the victims at Kirkwood, the news broke that another piece of human fecal matter had opened up on a classroom full of college students at Northern Illinois University at DeKalb. This is really tiresome, truly tragic, and completely unnecessary.

John Farnam observed in an e-mail:

On network news, we were then treated to a parade of driveling “experts” who talked about the deceased perpetrator (that, of course, none of them had ever met) and predictably cited all the usual suspects: “He played violent video games,” “He was a loner,” “His mother didn’t breast-feed him as a child,” ” His underwear were too tight,” ad nauseam.

The ultimate outcome is easy to predict: Campus officials will scurry about in an effort to appear as if they’re actually accomplishing something. No one will lose their job. Nothing will change. And, a week from now, the campus will be functioning normally, as if nothing had happened. And, the next armed VCA will encounter no more difficulty than did the last one!

Nothing is so difficult to see as the obvious, particularly when it flies in the face of Leftist dogma that dominates virtually all college campuses and that can never be questioned! More cameras, more reams of “plans,” more ” prayer-assemblies,” and more hand-wringing will accomplish nothing, any more than the last layer did, save providing employment for a few more, erstwhile unemployed, bureaucrats.

After all of this carnage, how stupid does one have to be to avoid seeing that it is the “gun-free zones” that are the problem? Almost without exception, these multiple victim psycho shootings take place in “gun-free zones.” How slow on the uptake does one need to be to not see this? How deeply brainwashed with the nanny state dogma does one have to be in order to cling to the delusion that “gun-free zones” do anything but draw maniacs to them like moths to a flame?

We are not advocating that every college freshman show up for orientation with a laptop, a semi-auto pistol and 250 rounds of ammunition. That is absurd. That is the caricature of our position that the gun prohibitionists try to hang in the air whenever we criticize their utter failure known as the “gun-free zone.” They know they have failed, but instead of discussing the issue intelligently they move to the reduction to the absurd because they know how quickly the flaws in their logic will be revealed in the light of rational analysis.

We advocate the complete abolition of gun free zones. Law-abiding adults have a natural right to self-defense regardless of where they are, be it church, shopping mall, school or any other public place. Everybody and their brother does not need to be armed, just remove the advertisement that this is one place where a psychopath can be absolutely guaranteed to meet no resistance. It’s simple. Not only do “gun-free zones” not work, they actual have the opposite effect. They draw murderous maniacs like a magnet.