I woke up to some great news this morning. A Texas bill, restoring the fundamental right of faculty and students over the age of 21 with a concealed handgun permit to carry firearms inside classrooms on public and private college campuses, tentatively passed the Texas House the night before. It passed despite the sniveling objections of school administrators, although thanks to a last-minute amendment, schools are allowed to create “reasonable” regulations pertaining to the presence of firearms on school grounds.
What constitutes “reasonable,” is anyone’s guess.
The bill still has to be approved by the Texas state Senate before it’s signed into law by the governor, and you can be sure that the gun grabbers’ disinformation machine will kick into high gear before this happens.
The clueless, quivering bottom lip horde continue to bring up the specter of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre as justification for disarming law-abiding, innocent adults on America’s campuses, likely hoping you will ignore the fact that Virginia Tech was a “gun free” campus to begin with… well, gun free other than the gunman!
This year, a survivor of that shooting and another from the Virginia Tech massacre testified in a committee hearing that arming students wouldn’t make campuses safer. William H. McRaven, chancellor of the University of Texas System and a four-star admiral who led the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, argued that the policy would endanger students and teachers.
Arming students wouldn’t make campuses safer? Do the words: Appalachian School of Law ring a bell? Yeah, that’s the one where armed students actually stopped a gunman.
Oh, did we hope no one would bring that up?
Frankly, I’m appalled that McRaven – a retired flag officer and special ops expert who oversaw the mission that ended up in the death of Bin Ladin – would forget how critical firearms are to safety and security and outright lie by claiming that concealed carry would somehow make campuses “less safe.”
Worse, the gun grabbers are using his rank to bolster his credibility on this particular issue, and he appears only too happy to allow them to do it. Using your military rank to lend credence to your political views is abhorrent to me as a veteran.
Anti-gun armedcampuses.org claims that “ gun-free policies have helped to make our post-secondary education institutions some of the safest places in the country.” McRaven must have been huffing their glue.
While homicides on college campuses are relatively rare, I would submit that has more to do with the fact that college students and professors tend to be a less violent, more law-abiding bunch writ large, so it’s doubtful that “gun free” policies have had anything to do with that, despite the disingenuous claims of the group. Additionally, the states that do allow concealed carry on its college campuses – Idaho, Utah, and Colorado – have not been made less safe by the passage of concealed carry laws.
“Our parents, students, faculty, administrators, and law enforcement all continue to express their concerns that the presence of concealed handguns on campus would contribute to a less-safe environment, not a safer one,” McRaven wrote in a letter to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus.
The paranoid fantasies of cowards do not interest us. We’ve seen time and time again that disarming the law-abiding does nothing to protect them from violence, and we’ve seen near daily reports of armed citizens stopping criminals.
Perhaps McRaven should spend a bit more time focusing on how better to educate America’s college students and a bit less time inventing excuses to render them defenseless.
I know you will be shocked, just SHOCKED, to find out that the New York Times editorial board is soiling itself over what it calls “Concealed Carry’s Body Count.” Apparently the editors at the Times decided to take on people who are legally permitted to carry firearms concealed.
In other words, they are quaking in their collective panties at the thought, and have decided to paint concealed carry permit holders as a group of murderous villains, using data from the Violence Policy Center, which they describe as a “gun safety group,” making me want to choke on my coffee.
There is no central tally of the effects, with states often barring release of concealed-carry data and Congress hewing to the gun lobby’s opposition to research on guns’ effects on public health. But a methodical gleaning of eight years of news accounts by the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety group, found that in research involving 722 deaths in 544 concealed-carry shootings in 36 states and the District of Columbia, only 16 cases were eventually ruled lawful self-defense — even though this has been a major gun rights selling point for the new laws.
In my old life, when I worked as a reporter, inflammatory words such as “horrifying,” “slain,” and “alarming” were discouraged. I was taught we were there to report the news, not tell people what to think. I realize the above-linked is an editorial, and therefore does not have to conform to those standards (I would submit that given the Grey Hag’s tendency to skew its reporting, it doesn’t abide by those standards anyway), but the outright absurdity of painting concealed carriers with the broad brush of violence and murder prompts me to take a look at the larger picture.
Enter the Crime Prevention Research Center’s study on concealed carry in America. It seems there are a few facts the NYT editorial staff either did not know, or did not bother to research.
They did not mention until the very bottom of the article (more as an afterthought), for example, that there are at least 11.1 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States. I say “at least,” because according to the CPRC, that number is likely much higher, given the fact that several states, such as New York, don’t report the number of their concealed carry permit holders. And several states have no permit requirements for concealed carry at all.
But let’s go with that 11.1 million people, which represents roughly 4.8 percent of the population.
According to the VPC, there were *GASP* 544 shootings involving concealed carry permit holders, 16 of which were ruled lawful self defense. That would leave 528 shootings between 2007 and 2014 (I’m assuming they are including 2014, as the editorial merely states there were that many shootings since 2007) or 75.4 per year.
In comparison, between 2007 and 2012 (the latest year for which the CDC has data), average of 548 people were stabbed to death per year, 425.6 were beaten to death, and 138.5 per year were strangled or suffocated.
Now let’s look at those 528 shootings. Let’s assume that these involve 528 separate concealed carry permit holders. Given that there are at the very least 11.1 million concealed carry holders currently residing in the United States, those 528 represent .048 percent of people with valid concealed carry permits. Not even a half a percent.
And this is what the NYT editorial staff chooses to hyperventilate about? These are the statistics they choose to report as some kind of horror involving those evil concealed carry holders?
Really?
So not only does the editorial staff cite a VPC report that apparently not only contains inaccuracies, such as double or triple counting cases that shouldn’t even be counted as crimes or problems with guns to begin with, but the numbers they use are so minuscule in comparison to the concealed carry population at large, that it hardly qualifies as “a problem.”
Additionally, if you look at the data, concealed carry permit holders, are a fairly law-abiding bunch.
Consider the two large states at the front of the current debate, Florida and Texas: Both states provide easy web access to detailed records of permit holders. During over two decades, from October 1, 1987 to May 31, 2014, Florida has issued permits to more than 2.64 million people, with the average person holding a permit for more than a decade. Few — 168 (about 0.006%) — have had their permits revoked for any type of firearms related violation, the most common being accidentally carrying a concealed handgun into a gun-free zone such as a school or an airport, not threats or acts of violence. It is an annual rate of 0.0002 percent.
The already low revocation rate has been declining over time. Over the last 77 months from January 2008 through May 2014, just 4 permits have been revoked for firearms-related violations. With an average of about 875,000 active permit holders per year during those years, the annual revocation rate for firearms related violations is 0.00007 percent – 7 one hundred thousandths of one percentage point.
For all revocations, the annual rate in Florida is 0.012 percent.
And the numbers are similarly low in Texas, according to the same report.
So what is it that the Grey Hag’s editorial staff is hyperventilating about?
Well… their attempts to foist the gun grabbers’ agenda onto us for the most part has been a miserable failure, even with them screeching hysterically and dancing in the blood of innocent children after the Newtown massacre.
Americans overwhelmingly kicked gun grabbers in the giblets during the last election. And while we have experienced a few notable losses, overall, the tide is turning.
Major polling data confirms the same thing: Americans oppose new gun control legislation. They treasure their right to keep and bear arms. Less than half of Americans support additional infringements on our Second Amendment rights, according to Gallup. Rasmussen points to similar results. And Pew agrees, leaving the New York Times editorial staff mourning its cause.
So what do they have left? Their limited options are to drop this ridiculous crusade against our freedoms (good luck getting them to do that!) or find faulty reporting with a bunch of skewed statistics, and use it to attack a rather large group of law-abiding Americans.
We are beginning to see what I fear is the start of something that will evolve into something really, really ugly. The erosion of the “Thin Blue Line”. There are some people that support the law enforcement community no matter what. I am not one of those. I think people like the officer (Kevin Dupre) from Cleburne Texas that called these dogs over to him by making kissing noises and then killed them need to rot in hell. I truly hope there is a special place in hell for people like him. Just so I’m clear on how I feel about this piece of scum. I’ll be honest, I can’t watch the whole video.
Just in case you are livid as well, there is a petition to have him terminated since the police chief decided he did nothing wrong. They want 150,000 signatures by 14 February 2015, they already have 148,985.
By the same token, I think the officers that used an illegal choke hold on Eric Garner needed to face legal consequences. There are some nasty Law Enforcement types out there that crave power and abuse it.
That being said, the majority of the Law Enforcement Officers I’ve dealt with have been good people. Trying their best to carry out their calling. They have a genuine desire to protect the helpless, to stop crime, make their towns safer for good people. They are truly “Sheepdogs”.
The Thin Blue line refers to the line that police form between good people and predator thugs. It’s the same kind of mindset as the military, and to a lesser degree concealed carry holders. Speaking for myself, I did not get my concealed carry endorsement to protect society in general, but myself, and my family when I’m with them. The members of the Thin Blue Line willingly, on a daily basis, put themselves at risk in harms way to protect law abiding citizens, people they’ve never even met.
I know it well. A few hundred years ago I was a member of the “Thin White Line” meaning Emergency Medical Services, airborne variety. We did search and rescue, emergency transport and “scene flights”. Those are usually “high drama” as you are landing at the scene of whatever, car crash, shooting, stabbing, heart attack, sudden infant death, ________ tragedy. If it’s a scene flight, it wasn’t good. Often at these scenes you would have very upset people, they could be family members, friends or just bystanders. Before we would land, the LZ (landing zone) would be secured usually by the Fire Department and law enforcement. But for law enforcement the fun didn’t end there. Once we were on the ground, they also kept the crew and the helicopter safe. I’ve had upset family decide I was going to talk to them, RIGHT THEN, and unfortunately I was trying to stick a tube in an airway to ventilate the patient. Law enforcement peeled the guy off me and I finished my job, upset family member was very determined though and previous law enforcement hero repeated heroic act and got him off me as we were loading the patient in the helicopter. This was also during a time when one of the local gang initiations was to “pop” someone in a jacket. Which meant us, or the ambulance crews, fire or police. Securing a scene is not always easy I don’t suppose.
So through the years, most of my contact with law enforcement has been on the same team, apart from an odd ticket every 20 years or so. And I’m very supportive of our local law enforcement where I live, well, the Sheriff’s department anyway.
And this is where I differ from the “peaceful protesters” we’re seeing such a plethora of lately. For them, it doesn’t matter if the innocent child (read 300+ lb charging water buffalo) was committing a crime as Michael Brown was, on top of a “white hispanic” like Trayvon Martin pummeling the snot out of George Zimmerman or walking away as Eric Garner was, if the person that died was black, and the narrative can be exploited, get ready cause it’s going to be. Not far from Ferguson another young black man named Antionio Martin had made the choice more than once to commit armed robbery, assault and armed criminal action. Quite the list of accomplishments since he was 17. It ended badly as it often will when police who had been called about the theft have a gun pointed at them. They shot him. So far the Chief of that officer is standing behind him pointing out the choices Mr. Martin made had everything to do with the outcome of the situation.
I haven’t heard when the race pimps will arrive in town to foment it being burned to the ground yet.
The execution of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos I think is the beginning of a response to the attacks by politicians such as Warren Wilhelm (aka Bill diBlasio) Barry Sotero (aka Barak Obama), non-Govorner Jay Nixon, Eric Holder and flotsam and jetsam Sharpton and Jackson. Also getting into the act are the schools of higher “education” (chuckle, guffaw) colleges. Like the charming editorial in the CUNY by the editor in chief calling for armed war against the police. I think there is already plenty of hostility toward the LEO community. While I didn’t hear it in the American press, in an Israeli newspaper ran an article that the gun man that killed Liu and Ramos had invited bystanders to come, follow him and watch what he was going to do. Yet in that community it apparently didn’t even prompt a phone call from any of the people in the hood to the police to say something might be afoot.
For campus firebrands it must be quite a chore deciding who to hate more on any particular day.
If it’s Monday it must be the Jews and if it’s Tuesday it must be the cops. Is that how it works?
This we know about the darlings who have turned our universities into gulags against free thought and free speech. They want to boycott Israel and they want to divest from law and order and they want to sanction anyone who makes them feel “uncomfortable.”
Quite a good column that, worth the read. You can find out the direction the future of our country is being steered by the hallowed halls of higher education.
So what’s the endgame? I don’t know, I can’t find my crystal ball at the moment, but a conversation with a couple of co-workers one day was pretty interesting. One of them opined that the police would soon become afraid to intervene in anything involving one of the protected by politician class of people. I could well see how that could be possible. And since this protected class largely appears to be the criminal element this won’t go well for law abiding citizens. And since our law-breaker in chief doesn’t seem to think local police forces are up to the job of “fairly” applying the law, perhaps it is time for him to begin to implement the plan he first put forth in July 2008, of a “Civilian National Security Force” that would be “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded as the US Military.” You can read about how helpful this type of security force has been in history, and how he has gone about starting to create it. Don’t remember him saying it?
And the idiots applaud on, never questioning “What the heck does THAT mean?” nor did the media jump on it.
But as Ronn Torossian points out, Hitler hired PR firms, the terrorists of today hire PR firms (which by the way ofter refuse Israeli business) but Obama and his left wing ideologues? They don’t need to hire PR firms, the media does it for free for him.
The current regime has done everything it can to divide this country, by race, economic class, religion and now law-abiding and LEO community vs. gangs that are becoming ever more violent in response to the encouragement.
Where does it all end, I don’t know. But I’d fasten my seatbelt, cause it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Additional thoughts, what will happen to a town when firefighters can’t fight the fires because they are taking incoming fire, from the “peaceful protesters for social justice?” As they did in Ferguson and had to pull back. When EMS, Emergency Medical Services can’t get in to help the injured for the same reason?
Another aspect that is coming into play. I found out today a large area mall was shut down the day after Christmas during the large shopping day due to fights breaking out in the mall. It was one of several malls across the country so attacked. Not spontaneous, planned. In the story one Mother says she TOOK her teenage daughters to the mall at a certain time due to a message the girls received on social media telling them what time to be there. WHO does that? I mean, really, did the Mother not know what was going to happen? Did she not ask her kids? Yesh! The economic impact of things like this is going to be awful. Whole shopping centers shut down because the police can’t protect them, even when calling in mutual aid.
Bumpy ride? Societal norms under attack? In the past, what has followed attacks on a culture? Yeah, buckle up.
Jews. Guns. No compromise. No surrender.
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