The reason why other countries are not seeing the type of gun violence we are seeing here is the drug war. In Europe, tolerance for drugs has reached epic proportions with many countries decriminalizing small amounts of drugs, usually under five grams of just about any substance. In places like Portugal, eight years after decriminalization was implemented, gang violence has dropped significantly, addiction rates have plummeted and prisons are free to hold the truly dangerous.
Here we penalize everyone no matter how much they have one them. In Oklahoma, a person can do five years for possession of a joint. How fair is that? And because we are imprisoning people for the most minor offenses, we do not have enough money to keep truly dangerous people off the street. Jails are releasing rapists and murders before drug offenders due to mandatory minimum laws and we have less money for institutionalizing people who should be off the streets. The drug war is the single biggest factor in gun violence and not one, NOT ONE, politician or media outlet has recognized this at all.
Some will say when Prohibition was around, gang violence may have been high but we didn't have the same mass shootings we have now. We also don't have any way to get insane people off the street like we did back then either. State mental hospitals have all but been eliminated nationwide and this trend needs to be reversed stat. True, many were poorly run but government inspectors could fix that. We need jobs and here again is a way to get a lot of people many new, well paying ones.
Here's some stats for you about guns:
Guns are used 2.5 million times annually or 6,860 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than they are to take lives.
* Less than 8 percent of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.
* 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.
* Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year.
* Only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The ‘error rate’ for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.
As I have said in the past, you are more likely to be shot accidentally by a cop than a civilian but gun control is the answer. Yeah I'll feel safer knowing Barney Fife has a gun and I don't.
Here's some stories about specific ways guns were used to STOP massacres from gunwatch.com:
The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting was stopped by the vice principal Joel Myrick with a Colt .45, The Appalachian School shooting was stopped by two students with handguns. Both of the above incidents were stopped by the armed citizens threatening the shooter without firing.
Pearl High School Link Appalacian Law School Link
Plans to slay everyone in the Muskegon, Michigan, store and steal enough cash and jewelry to feed their "gnawing hunger for crack cocaine" fell apart for a band of would-be killers after one of their victims fought back.
Muskegon Shooting Link
The mass church shooting in Colorado Springs was stopped by the shooter being shot by a church member with a CCW permit.
New Life Church Link
The Santa Clara gunshop shooting in 1999 was stopped by an armed citizen after the shooter declared that he was going to kill everyone. Police found a list of intended victims in his car. Only the perpetrator, Richard Gable Stevens was shot.
Santa Clara Gunshop Link
The December, 1991, Aniston, Alabama defense where a CCW holder stopped armed robbers who were herding employees, customers, and his wife into a cooler. He shot both robbers, killing one.
Aniston Shoney's Shooting Link
July 13, 2009, in Virginia at the Golden Food Market: The gunman tried to shoot several people, was stopped by a CCW carrier.
Golden Food Market Shooting Link
Just recently, in Early Texas, armed citizen Vic Stacy shot and stopped a deranged man who had just murdered two neighbors and was firing at police with a rifle. Stacy made a very long shot with his revolver, three times as far as the perpetrator was from the police officer, who had an AR-15 type rifle.
Early Texas Peach House Shooting Link
That sounds like a very good story... but it never made the national news. I wonder who made the decision to spike that story. Of course, when a mass shooting is stopped by an armed citizen, there are not as many victims. This leads to the charge that it would not really have been a “mass shooting”. I have added this incident at the request of a reader:
Abraham Dickman had a history of anger against employees of the AT&T store in New York Mills, New York. On May 27th, 2010, he walked into the store with a .357 and a list of six employees. He shot the first employee, but was stopped from further attacks when Donald J. Moore, an off duty police officer who was allowed to carry his own handgun when not on duty, drew and fired his .40 caliber, killing Mr. Dickman before he could fire any more shots.
AT&T store Link
Here is another likely candidate. College Park, GA, May 4, 2009. Two gunman entered a party and ordered the men separated from the women. Then they started counting bullets. “The other guy asked how many (bullets) he had. He said he had enough,” said Bailey. When one of the assailants prepared to rape a girl, a student was able to access a handgun and engage the two attackers in a firefight, driving one off and killing the other before the thug could rape his girlfriend. “I think all of us are really cognizant of the fact that we could have all been killed,” said Bailey.
College Park Link
Another off duty police officer stopped the Trolley Square shooting with his personal handgun. He stopped the killing and contained the shooter until police reinforcements arrived and ended the situation.
Trolley Square Shooting Link
Winnemucca NV shooting, 25 May, 2008 The shooter, Ernesto Villagomez, entered the Players Bar and Grill and killed two people. He reloaded and was continuing to shoot when a citizen with a concealed carry permit shot him and stopped the killing.
Winnemuca Shooting Link
Parker Middle School Dance Shooting 14 Year old Andrew Jerome Wurst Killed one person and wounded three others when he was confronted by James Strand who subdued Wurst with a shotgun and held him until police arrived.
Parker Middle School Dance Shooting LinK
Destiny Christian Center Shooting, April 24, 2012 Kiarron Parker rammed his car into another in the church parking lot, got out and attempted to kill multiple church members. He was only able to kill one before a member of the congregation, the nephew of the lady killed, and an off duty police officer, drew his handgun and shot Parker, stopping the killing.
Destiny Christian Center Shooting LinK
Tyler Courthouse shooting, 2005 While police officers were involved in this shooting before and after Mark Alan Wilson intervened, no more people were killed after he shot the shooter, who had body armor, and who was able to return fire and kill the CCW holder, Wilson.
Without an armed society, each of these stories would have led to far more people dead. And the media says ZERO about any of this, focusing on a symptom, which is guns, and not the cause which is poverty, mental illness, psychotropic drugs and the drug war.
It was recently noted that Adam Lanza was on an anti-psychotic drug whose side effects sometimes include becoming even more psychotic. Awesome. And his mother let him play the latest Call of Duty and left guns lying around the house. If she wasn't dead already, the mob would have lynched her by now. Her idiocy has damaged the 2nd amendment and made doomsday preppers to all look at psycho as her kid. Mind you some are, but most that I have met are intelligent, reasonable people.
Banning guns is not the answer. It will do nothing to stop crime or even more shootings. We need to start having serious discussions on ending the drug war and ways to commit dangerous people without hearings and other red tape. Involuntary commitment needs to be brought back along with some safeguards so innocent people are not being thrown into the loony bin needlessly.
Places where gun control has been enacted have been dismal failures? Don't believe me. I dare anyone to walk through Juarez, Mexico with hundred dollar bills falling out of their pocket without a weapon and see how far you get. Mexico has strict gun laws and they are one of the worst nations of Earth to live in right, exclusively because of the drug war.
What about England where the drug war is not so much an issue and gun control is severe? Since banning most types of guns, crime has soared. Here's some more stats for you.
Gun crime has almost doubled since Labour came to power as a culture of extreme gang violence has taken hold. The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year – a rise of 89 per cent.
In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold.
In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled.
That is what gun control does. It allowed the criminal class to prey on everyone else who they know to be disarmed. It allows governments to do whatever they want and not fear their populace when horrific actions are committed. See my previous column to see the hundreds of millions dead when gun control was put into effect by dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Think that can't happen here? Do you really want to find out?
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