Gun Free Zone Strikes Again

The ‘Nuge, gotta love him. I’m talking about Ted Nugent the guitar playing, gun carrying voice of the Americana I feel is slipping away. I found this article by him today, while it strikes on a lot of the same things that the last article I posted does, it also take a different angle on it. Pay attention to where he talks about how we have lost the sense of self defense. We have become so dependent as a society, God have mercy on us.

Teditorial: Gun Free Zones Strike Again
GUN FREE ZONE STRIKES AGAIN by Ted Nugent
Here we go again. Someone tell me why, with nearly 3000 articles written worldwide within 48 hours following the tragic slaughter at the Omaha, Nebraska Westroads Mall this week, that not a single one of them mentioned the most important fact of all. Thousands of “professional” writers converging on such an event, sharing their sleuthing in the world’s most respected publications and electronic media, yet not a single one of them saw it meaningful in their “reporting” of the crime to mention all the “no guns allowed” signs throughout the mall? Got agenda? Sig heil!

Even though Nebraska recently got a small piece of their Second Amendment back by finally allowing law abiding citizens their “God given right” to keep and bear arms, it is truly anti-American and downright bizzarro that private property and business owners can deny (as in “infringe”) this “inalienable” right bestowed upon free men by our Creator. This of course is the liberal dream known as “gun free zones.” As in Columbine, VA Tech, Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and at every other location where the wanton slaughter of unarmed, helpless victims is a virtual guarantee.

Except of course at the Salt Lake City mall last year where an armed off duty cop properly defied that mall’s “gun free” policy, who, virtually indistinguishable for all practical purposes from an armed law abiding citizen, was able to thwart a mass shooting about to unfold, were it not for a good guy with a gun. How dense must someone be to hide from this information and fact? Denial runs deep in a growing population of “we the sheeple.” For shame.

When did a nation of rugged individuals turn into helpless whiners, crying and running in fear from danger and evil? When did we abandon our natural instinct to counterpunch and attack evil, overpowering it and neutralizing it into submission? When were we forced to dial 9-1-1, losing and wasting precious, decisive time, instead of doing the right thing and stopping bad guys ourselves? When did we trade in independence for dependency? When did we decide that we can’t handle tough situations ourselves, and we need to call big brother while we cower and hide like little, helpless children? Pathetic.

Everyday in this country, according to the Department of Justice and every study ever conducted, armed, law abiding citizens stop dangerous, violent confrontations from escalating into death and tragedy, simply by having a gun handy to provide real “equality” on the mean streets of America. Dedicated cops across America will be the first ones to tell you that they not only can’t possibly be there to protect us, but that they also have no legal requirement to do so. By the time the police show up, many innocents will likely perish at the hands of evil while good people hang around hoping and praying. Does anyone still not know this reality? Is it possible to still hide from this life and death truth? If you have no soul, apparently so.

I would highly recommend that we finally learn from all these senseless tragedies. Get real. Get rid of politicians who support gunfree slaughter zones. Get rid of Gunfree zones. Get a gun, learn to use it, and do the right thing. Bad guys should be shot dead, not Christmas shoppers.

Communicate directly with Ted Nugent at tednugent.com.

When violence looms and every second counts, recall that the police are only minutes away!

I found this article online today. I had planned on writing on this subject at some point in time, but the author of this paper (Mark Harmon) does a good enough job that I thought I’d just post his letter instead.

M.D. Harmon

December 14, 2007

Has anyone ever wondered why people with guns who have kissed sanity good-bye never take out their uncontrollable rage on the nearest police station?

Nor do they drive off to the nearest Army base, shooting range or hunting club to vent their murderous frustration.

It should only take a moment’s thought to understand why: Those places have people who have relatively easy access to weapons themselves.

It’s one thing to be homicidal and suicidal, but it’s quite another to consider that one’s murderous intent could be brought to an untimely halt through the immediate application of superior firepower.

However, there are places that draw these people like magnets, and they, too, are easy to locate: They are the places where the possession of firearms is forbidden, and that fact is widely advertised.

Some of these places even go so far as to publicly display their vulnerability to mass murder through the posting of signs that say “No Guns Permitted” or “Gun-Free Zone.”

Virginia Tech was proud of its “gun-free” status, and boasted about how safe a place it was once it posted signs forbidding firearms on campus.

Thirty-two people died there last April as the cost of that exercise in hubris and futility.

Other places where firearms are typically banned are stores, including shopping malls, government buildings, including schools, and places of worship.

We saw in the Columbine shootings how effective gun bans are for schools.

And in Omaha last week, eight people died in a shopping mall before the shooter, cornered by police, killed himself.

In Ogden, Utah, last February, a man killed five people in a mall before an armed off-duty police officer pinned him down until help could arrive.

And just this past weekend, a disturbed youth who had posted violent diatribes against Christians on an Internet site killed two students at a Colorado missionary center.

He later showed up at a church that had an association with the missionary group carrying multiple weapons and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

But because of the earlier shootings, the church had activated its voluntary security force, composed of members who had licenses to carry concealed weapons and the training to use them.

The gunman killed two teenage girls in the church parking lot and wounded their father before he entered the church.

But once he got inside, he was confronted by one of the church’s volunteer guards, Jeanne Assam, a former police officer armed with a pistol.

As witnesses described it, she advanced on the shooter yelling “Surrender,” and when he raised his weapon, fired several shots, bringing him to the ground. Police reported that the badly wounded gunman then shot himself to death.

Assam, dubbed “Dirty Harriet” by one writer, was credited by the church’s pastor with having saved 50 to 100 lives.

It’s almost enough to make a fair-minded, thoughtful person conclude that armed, law-abiding citizens might have saved countless more lives at places like those listed above.

But not in the view of the confiscation crowd. They point at the weapons the gunmen used and say that banning them would halt such shootings.

Problem is, there’s precious little evidence to support that view, and much to disprove it.

Different parts of this country display disparities in rates of serious crimes. But that crime rate has been falling steadily for almost 20 years. While many factors undoubtedly contribute to that trend, including tougher sentencing laws, the ability of people to defend themselves also counts.

The 40 states (including Maine) where concealed-carry permits are readily available to law-abiding people report on average a 22 percent lower violent crime rate, a 30 percent lower murder rate, a 46 percent lower robbery rate and a 12 percent lower aggravated assault rate than the 10 states where the possession of firearms by honest citizens is greatly restricted.

As University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds (who blogs as “Instapundit”) noted after the VT murders last spring, “People don’t stop killers. People with guns do.”

He wrote, “Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school’s vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene.”

Police, he notes, can’t be everywhere, and when they do arrive, it’s usually too late for at least some victims.

However, “one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. (But) if they’re armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court ponders whether the Second Amendment protects our right of self-defense with firearms, the actual case is being proved by people like Jeanne Assam.

M.D. Harmon is an editorial writer. He can be contacted at:

mharmon@pressherald.com

An apple a day

You remember that line we were told as a kid: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”…. Well, I’ll be eating a boat load of apples from now on. I was driving in to work this morning (I know, work on a Saturday, very unredneck, I should be fishing) listening to the radio when a commercial more like a PSA came on concerning doctors.

The jest of the message was that you should ask your doctor every question you can think of b/c doctors cause 10’s of thousands of deaths a year.

Excuse me, but WHAT? Ya, they CAUSE deaths, how? Well, it seems by various methods, like misdiagnosis, goof ups in surgery and so on. Now these are generally accidental, but still caused by doctor, and there are an alarming amount of them. Just how many you wonder, well depending on what stats you want to believe between 100,000 and 200,000 per year.
This is the High estimate, and this is the low one.

I’m sorry, but that is a huge number of accidental deaths. Let me try and quantify that for you. Guess how many deaths DUI cause each year… 16,694 That kinda puts it in perspective. Maybe we can get the Mothers against drunk driving (MADD) folks to form a group against crappy doctors.

How about gun violence? Guns are horrible evil things that kill tons and tons of people a year right? Wrong. Here are some facts for you. Not propaganda, just facts. I recognize that there is a lot of fact-bending out there so I turned to the CDC for this figure. In the last year that we have stats for (2004) the CDC reports…. drum roll please….. 649 accidental gun deaths. Yup that’s right folks, less than 1,000 people per year. More people die from swimming pools, falling, and tons and tons of other stuff than from accidental gun deaths each year.

How about murders and suicides using guns? Good question, lets look at the year 1998 (just b/c I have stats for that year) Both the Brady Campaign (very anti gun) and the NRA (very pro gun) state that in 1998, 30,708 people in the United States died from firearm-related deaths. Of that number they break it down to roughly 17.5K Suicide, 12K Assault, and 900 Accident. (figures rounded).

What’s my point in all this? Guns, both intentional and accidental Kill less people than doctors do. (to be completely correct, guns don’t kill people any more than cars do. People kill people, plain and simple. Some choose to get drunk and use a car to do it, others beat people with baseball bats, you don’t blame the tool, you blame the user.)

Makes you rethink ‘simple’ procedures huh? Apple anyone?