Contributed by: filbert Monday, July 20 2015 @ 06:34 AM CST
This is because criminals and psychopaths don’t give a damn about some sign on a door or a lawn proclaiming an office, a building, a park, or a campus to be “gun-free.”
Because criminals and psychopaths don’t give a damn about laws and rules, just generally.
What does get their attention is the capability of their prospective victims to return fire, to put the criminals’ and psychopaths’ own safety at serious, imminent, and immediate risk. Criminals and psychopaths may be evil, but they are not that stupid.
On the other hand, a sign proclaiming a “gun-free zone” is nothing more than a big, flashing neon sign saying to those who are so inclined to “come victimize us, we won’t fight back.” Almost all of the mass shootings which have occurred in the developed world over the past couple of decades have occurred in areas which have been decreed to be “gun-free.” Somehow, the perpetrators of the shootings missed the memo saying that they have to obey the “gun-free zone” sign.
Because criminals don’t give a damn about rules and laws, and because they prevent otherwise law-abiding people from a crucial self-defense tool (i.e. a firearm), “Gun-free zones” are deeply, profoundly immoral. They are the moral equivalent of telling people that they can not wear coats and warm shoes on a cold winter day. Mass shootings result from firearm bans as surely as frostbite results from prolonged exposure of human skin to sub-freezing temperatures.
The only move for a prudent society is to protect its members from the effects of predictable phenomena.
Freezing temperatures happen. So do criminals and psychopaths. Wishing either of them away is equally delusional.
It is not guns which should be banned. It is “gun-free zones,” and the mentality of wishing away the most unpleasant aspects of predictable human nature.