'Victim Disarmament Zone, Part II: What Do We Do About It?'
By John Longenecker (04/18/07)
Good For The Country as a syndicated feature isn't for gun owners; the feature is written for the non-gun owner and heads of household who may be hearing what is at issue for the very first time, looking for just how to protect their kids at home and away from home, such as at school, in church and in shopping malls.
It’s time now to bring a rather obvious solution to the problem of mass shootings – or knifings or other raw brutality – in places we sanctify and hold precious. Safe we thought, because we are only now beginning to accept that these locales are no longer immune on grounds of decency.
Let us first understand that decency is out the window when it comes to the planning and follow-through of the angry and... indecent. They want to hurt us where it hurts the most. It’s time for heads of household to muster the guts to meet them.
Congress has made federal law and states have made state law that it is illegal to carry your personal weapon within 1,000 feet of a school and certainly onto a school campus. Presidential candidates somehow believe that weapons regulation is reasonable, but this is easily discredited by the sovereignty of the individual and the right to refuse. The Second Amendment is unique among the civil rights. Put another way, Congress and oval office do not tell us, we tell you.
Does Congress believe murderers are aware of the law of sovereign citizens, much less obey the law?
Let’s get real.
A Victim Disarmament Zone is any area outlined by law that says that honest citizens cannot be armed there, and that criminals come to know this. This means that violence of all kinds goes unanswered in plenty of time to finish what they came to do. Sometimes, it’s mere minutes.
But some surprising features ought to come to light that every household should know in approaching this problem in preparedness for how they will meet and manage an encounter with violence..
1. Gun owners are trained better than most people know. For simple self-defense, hundreds of thousands if not millions by now practice with their weapons to a very high degree of competence, safety and purpose, largely out of interest and the incentive of preparedness. Nuts who murder people are not law-abiding, they are criminals, and they will always be able to lay their hands on whatever they need. It’s stupid to write a law which will never touch the criminal.
2. Police derive their authority from the people: in authorizing law enforcement, we never gave up any of our own authority. An individual – on campus or not – has all the legal authority one needs to stop a crime in progress, especially a mass murder, but is barred by tragically misguided rules. Why obfuscate this legal authority and why punish citizens who could stop such a rampage with that authority? Are officials afraid gun owners will rampage or that Independence impeaches the need for such compelled dependency on officials?
3. For the millions of crimes reported annually, there are many, many comparable numbers of violent acts which are de-escalated which go unreported. As with rape, for every incident turned in, there are perhaps ten that go unreported. How? Because when an incident is de-escalated, it’s a non-issue for many. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that citizens use their weapon (a gun) to de-escalate a violent act more than 2.5 million times a year. Expert investigators estimate that a few more million per year are unreported due to factors such as repeat offender environments in inner city and rural areas.
The proposal is not to arm faculty, nor arm Security on campus, nor even to develop rapid response teams of trained volunteers,. That would simply concentrate more control away from the optimal answer into an area that restates "Don’t do anything until we get there," something shooters absolutely rely on in those four minutes.
[If shooters know the Principal is armed, they can simply wait him out or take him / her out first. Or they can note when he/she goes off campus. Where’s that weapon, in a drawer somewhere? Locker? Is it put away if the Principal goes to lunch or a meeting? Too easy to bypass, too hard to mobilize, too much don’t-do-anything-until-we-get-there.]
The real solution is to unshackle the real authority, that of the parents and other citizens; ours is the supreme authority and shouldn’t be tampered with by trying to find more official supervision and more exclusion of parents and other citizens.
This is the core of the problem, after all: disarming the real authority of the nation into a dependency on agencies which cannot possibly have the same interests nor the same reaction time in the most urgent time of need. This interference with Independence to cultivate more and more dependency on agencies to the exclusion of parental authority has got to stop.
Consider bystander CPR as an identical model: who would be against it? Believe me, in the middle seventies, physicians and attorneys opposed it on the very same grounds as gun control activists oppose concealed carry of weapons. The secret of CPR success is, of course, in intervening while waiting for the Paramedics to arrive instead of "Don’t do anything until we get there." In some places, there is a fair chance that someone in the immediate area can administer life-saving CPR in the most critical moments. Consider bleeding, consider near drowning or near electrocution. Any of these is not well-served in the public interest if citizens are to be discouraged and taught to do nothing until some team arrives.
Yet, schools, churches, airports, workplace and other locales become somehow demarcated as announced Victim Disarmament Zones. As I like to say, shooters find them as advertised.
Don’t tell the murderers another day that they have the four minutes they need to kill kids, and still have enough time to commit suicide. After-the-fact policy is powerless when during-the-fact response of an armed citizen could be ever-present.
Think about the consequences of this official stubbornness. Kids are killed because officials continue to balk at the most obvious solution: take schools, churches, airports, shopping malls and other locales off the list of victim disarmament zones, and put thugs on notice that someone – you don’t know who – is possibly armed and only a few paces away.
There should be no such thing as a Victim Disarmament Zone anymore. Disarming citizens is coercing dependency on agencies – agencies not up to the job.
2008 Presidential candidates, Congress and states need to understand that voters and constituents of theirs do not find violence, it finds us, and that, under our system, when an armed citizen is on scene, the law is then already on scene.
John Longenecker is President of the Good For the Country Foundation, a patriotic non-profit organization at http://www.GoodForTheCountry.org/
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