Beginning in March 1993, under the Clinton administration, the army forbade military personnel from carrying their own personal firearms and mandated that “a credible and specific threat against [Department of the Army] personnel [exist] in that region” before military personnel “may be authorized to carry firearms for personal protection.” Instead of having the intended effect of protecting our soldiers from gun violence, and providing for them a “safer” environment, it had exactly the opposite effect. The anti-gun policies which were enacted provided a an environment at Ft. Hood for Major Nidal Hassan to open fire on soldiers and civilians as if they were “fish in a barrel”.
Beyond limiting high capacity magazines or the internet availability of ammunition, the ultimate in gun control of course would be an outright ban on guns. There is overwhelming evidence that total gun bans are essentially ineffective. One only has to look at the tragedy of the theatre shooting in Aurora Colorado. Colorado has tough gun control laws, and the theatre posted a sign that firearms were prohibited by all (including concealed carry permit holders). Nonetheless, the shooter was able to maim and murder large numbers of innocent victims without any effective resistance. Dr. John Lott Jr, author of the definitive study on guns called More guns, Less crime writes that with a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. Despite more than 4% of the adult population of Colorado having concealed handgun permits, the theatre gunman, intent on killing a lot of people, could be confident because of Colorado’s laws, that law-abiding citizens would literally be “sitting targets.” The ban against non-police carrying guns usually rests on the false notion that almost anyone can suddenly go crazy and start misusing their weapon or that any crossfire with a killer would be worse than the crime itself. But in state after state, permit holders are extremely law-abiding. They can lose their permits for any type of firearms-related violation. After consulting with several of my law enforcement friends, none have been able to cite a single example on record of a multiple-victim public shooting in which a permit holder accidentally shot a bystander. And, not considered at all by the anti-gun crowd is the deterrent effect of a potential mass murderer having to worry that one of his targets might be armed.
The fact is that Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. have the toughest gun control laws in the country. Their laws are so tough in fact that the Supreme Court has declared their anti-gun statutes as unconstitutional being an unreasonable infringement on the Second Amendment rights of the citizens. Yet Washington D.C. is often referred to as the “murder capitol” of the country, and gang-related gun violence in the city of Chicago is up almost 40% this year alone.
So, how effective would it be to liberalize the rights of citizens to carry firearms and to use firearms for the protection of life and property? Criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns to defend themselves each year. Out of that number, 400,000 believe that but for their firearms, they would have been dead. Professor Emeritus James Q. Wilson, the UCLA public policy expert, says: "We know from Census Bureau surveys that something beyond 100,000 uses of guns for self-defense occur every year. We know from smaller surveys of a commercial nature that the number may be as high as 2 1/2 or 3 million. We don't know what the right number is, but whatever the right number is, it's not a trivial number." Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney David P. Koppel studied gun control for the Cato Institute. Citing a 1979-1985 study by the National Crime Victimization Survey, Koppel found: "When a robbery victim does not defend himself, the robber succeeds 88 percent of the time, and the victim is injured 25 percent of the time. When a victim resists with a gun, the robbery success rate falls to 30 percent, and the victim injury rate falls to 17 percent. No other response to a robbery – from drawing a knife to shouting for help to fleeing – produces such low rates of victim injury and robbery success." When asked if additional gun laws would be beneficial or have no effect, most Americans, like Ice-T, get it. They oppose shifting power to the criminal. And they don't need the National Rifle Association to tell them: The only people willing to abide by additional gun laws are the law-abiding.
