Gun control follies

FRUITS OF BRITAIN’S GUN POLICY: Culture of violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decade.
Related: BBC: Handgun crime ‘up’ despite ban. “A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned.”

(Above via Instapundit)

Unfortunately, actual empirical evidence on these matters, of which there is plenty, is the very last thing the anti-gun crowd is interested in.
The self-ordained "smart ones" operating, as usual, on pure symbolism and emotion. It should be embarrassing.

Notice that there has been little or no mention of the 2011 mass shooting in Norway where a fanatic used a gun to methodically murder 69 teenagers and seriously wound 55 more, over a period of an hour and a half.  He took his sweet time, and he did a damned thorough job. There are two things to stress about that event: (And the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, which was parallel in all important respects.)

(1)  It occurred in yet another idiotic "gun-free zone" -- AKA an identified, demarcated area that serves up victims as defenseless sitting ducks:  He was able to do what he did, and do it so methodically, because the law guaranteed that nobody else had access to a gun that could have been used to stop him.  The "gun-free zone" -- a triumph of emotion and idealist fantasy over rational thought -- may be the single stupidest idea that has ever occurred to the mind of man, bar none. In a rational world, perpetrators of "gun-free zones" would be prosecuted as accessories.

Mass shooters may be crazy, but they aren't irrational, as the equipping and planning that go into these attacks demonstrates. Imagine yourself as such a person, and that you have come to believe that a Golden Age of world peace and racial harmony depends on you going into a movie theater and shooting as many people as possible. Imagine that you have a choice between a theater that allows concealed carry and a theater that declares itself a "gun-free zone." Which would you choose as the place to carry out your mission?

Critics claim that there are few incidents of ordinary citizens using a gun to stop a mass shooter.  Yes, but there are few mass shootings to begin with. And there is no way to count the number of wannabe shooters who were deterred because there was no guaranteed "gun-free zone" available to them. Said another way, if we made all places of public assembly "gun-free zones," would we expect the number of shootings to go down, or to go up? If you think the number would go down, please go have your head examined.

(2)  Gun control laws in Norway are vastly more rigorous than anything that will ever see a glimmer of possible passage in the U.S.  The lesson there is entirely lost, of course, on the anti-gun lobby where glandular reactions substitute for thinking.

Ideally, we would be able to keep guns out of the hands of the deranged and mentally unstable, and a better job of doing that should be a priority demand. But in a free society there are necessarily limits to the controls that can be placed on someone who has, so far, committed no crime. As a result, these horrible events will never be entirely prevented. The obvious implication of that unfortunate fact, it seems to me, is that we must not -- and have no moral right to -- unnecessarily restrict the right of law-abiding individuals to protect themselves, their families, and other innocents. The "gun-free zone" idea is mindless and wrong on every score and at every level.

Byron