OBSERVATION | 1999-05-15
On the "Talk Back Live" segment I discuss below, Professor John Lott of the University of Chicago made a point we should tell EVERYBODY about. Arguing against Clinton's knee-jerk demand for more gun control, he explained how a recent "save-the-children" gun control law had worked out.
In Mississippi, a student started shooting people in school. One of the faculty had a gun permit, and he had a gun in his car. But the car was over a thousand feet from the school, as required by the new Federal law. While people died, he had to run all the way to the car and get the gun, bring it back, and subdue the shooter with it.
As Lott pointed out, this man was a genuine hero. And, as always when a private citizen uses a gun to do a heroic deed, the press ignored his act of heroism completely.
The press ignored him, and that means respectable conservatives ignored him, too. Lott mentioned this hero and another in Pennsylvania who used a gun to subdue a school shooter. Have you heard about them from any conservative? Do you ever expect to hear about them from any respectable conservative on any talk show?
Are we all clear now on the function respectable conservatives get paid to perform?
No one who is going to kill people in a school is going to worry about the law against having a gun within a thousand feet of the school. Only this law abiding hero obeyed that law, and it cost lives. This is the only incident where this law has had any known effect.
Lott is the professor who did the University of Chicago study which demonstrated that the passage of a "right to carry" law leads to an IMMEDIATE decrease in the crime rate. As I explained last week, this is the sort of information that embarrasses liberals, so respectable conservatives never bring it up. (See May 8 article, "Armed Switzerland and the Colorado Shootings.")