VA-ALERT: VCDL Update 2/4/13 CONT. Part 2
Posted: Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:03:17
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12. Guns stop three home invasions, store robbery
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Walter Jackson emailed me this:
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From Breitbart.com: http://tinyurl.com/a2mtecz
By Mary Chastain
January 22, 2013
Guns came to the rescue of three homeowners and a business this weekend.
Five people tried to break into a home in Oklahoma City, OK. The woman homeowner and her friend shot two of them with her gun. The other burglars fled to another house to escape the gunfire. The shooting victims are in serious to critical condition, but the woman and her friend were unharmed.
Without warning, a man tried to kick-in the door of a home in San Antonio, TX. The mother quickly called 911 while her son shot at the man through the door. The man shot his gun before he fled. The mother and son were unharmed and police are still looking for the suspect.
Two men in San Antonio, TX tried to steal some beer from a store, but were stopped because a customer had his concealed weapon. The suspects left with nothing and the police will not charge the customer.
In Canyon Lake, TX, a man used his shotgun to defend his neighbor against her ex-boyfriend, who was carrying a baseball bat. He heard the sound of breaking glass and decided to investigate. He found a man trying to break into his neighbor's trailer and confronted him. The suspect walked towards him with the baseball bat despite being told numerous times to stop. The man had no choice but to shoot the suspect in self-defense.
The homeowner threw her ex-boyfriend out in November, but he kept harassing her. He showed up several times and last week he broke in and pulled a gun on her. After that, she left her trailer and was not there the night he appeared with the baseball bat. The owner of the trailer park, Walter Chapman, is glad she was not there and her neighbor was armed.
"It's good that he had it," Chapman said. "There's no telling what could have happened had he not had a gun."
It is a very good thing all these people had guns. Everyday ordinary people prove why the Framers gave America the 2nd Amendment.
Please follow Mary Chastain on Twitter @maryclimer and send her any recent armed citizen stories.
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13. How to stop mass shootings? [Video]
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James Durso emailed me this:
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From ebaumsworld.com: http://tinyurl.com/b88l8k7
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14. The school shooting the media won't report
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An armed guard stops a school shooting and the main-stream-media yawns.
Bill Hine emailed me this:
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From The Daily Witness: http://tinyurl.com/aqreybz
By Claire Galafaro & Daniel Gilbert
January 11, 2013
On Monday morning, Thomas Richard Cowan loaded 13 bullets into two handguns, left his German shepherd chained to the fence and drove eight miles from his home in Kingsport to Sullivan Central High School. Whatever his mission, it was the 62-year-old Vietnam veteran's final drive.
For about an hour, Cowan's armed invasion spread panic throughout the school before a burst of officers' gunfire brought him down. No others were injured.
No one knows why Cowan pointed his Honda in the direction of the Blountville, Tenn., high school, where his brother is a janitor. He is described - in court records and interviews - as a peculiar man with a history of erratic, sometimes criminal, behavior and a deep suspicion of the government.
He parked his car Monday morning in a handicapped space just in front of the school's main entrance. Second period was just getting under way at 9:10 a.m. when Ashley Thacker, a junior, arrived at the main entrance of her high school. Thacker, 16, had been at a doctor's appointment and was on her way to a music theory class as she approached the locked doors.
She noticed a man standing in the 10-foot waiting area between the two sets of doors, waiting to be buzzed in. His bald crown was framed with brown hair. He had a mustache, she remembered, and he was holding a cane.
He told her to go on ahead of him. But she never made it through the doors.
Instead, Melanie Riden, principal of Sullivan Central, came striding through the locked doors.
"He pulled out his gun and started pointing it at people," Thacker said.
Cowan trained a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol at Riden's face, said Sullivan County Sheriff Wayne Anderson. Carolyn Gudger, the school resource officer, drew her gun, then shielded the principal's body with her own.
Thacker remembers Cowan shouting something - possibly including the words "10 years" - but she isn't sure. She turned and ran out the set of public doors to the mulch pile in the front of the school, and hid behind bushes.
"He might shoot someone," Thacker remembered thinking. "I just wanted to get out of there."
Riden fled and Gudger inched back into the school, leading Cowan through the scattered pastel chairs in the empty cafeteria. It was a tactical move, meant to lure the gunman into a more contained place, Anderson said.
Sullivan County dispatch sent out a chilling alert: "Man with a gun at Central High School."
Riden, reached by phone Monday night, said she could not comment without permission from Sullivan County Director of Schools Jubal Yennie.
Gudger told him to drop his weapon; he demanded she drop hers. Once, he tried, unsuccessfully, to lunge for her gun.
Cowan repeated one thing only, Anderson said. That he wanted to pull the fire alarms.
"I don't know why, we can only speculate about that and I think everyone will speculate why he wanted to pull a fire alarm," Anderson said. "Either to get the kids out of class or, I don't know. We don't know."
Flattened against the bushes, Ashley Thacker waited two minutes, she thinks. "I didn't hear anything else, so I thought Officer Gudger had arrested him."
She was wrong. As she approached the school, two assistant principals opened a window and yelled at her to run away. Crying and shaking, Thacker ran to her car and drove a half-mile to her parents' business.
The view from the classroom
At about 9:15 a.m., a shaken voice came over the intercom.
"Code red. Lockdown."
There was profanity in the background. This was no drill, students realized.
With the announcement, teachers sprang into action - locking doors and papering over windows, turning off the lights and closing window blinds. Students huddled in the corners of classrooms, sitting in the darkness and searching for information with a storm of text messages.
Casey Deel, a 17-year-old senior, was on his way to a doctor's office when his girlfriend, Alicia Edwards, sent him a text at 9:15 a.m.
"There's a code red lock down. im scared," the 16-year-old junior texted from her government class.
"r u serious?" Deel texted back. He skipped his appointment.
In Kayla Nichols' cosmetology class, students squeezed into a storage room the size of a parking space, and locked the door, the 17-year-old said.
Ryan Kendrick was in algebra class, just off the main office. The 17-year-old senior thought he heard the gunman making threats - about not leaving the building alive and taking others with him - and Gudger urging him to calm down.
Then he heard a volley of gunshots.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
Kendrick and his friend, Andrew Ray, began to pray.
Landon Sillyman was in his honors biology class, where the teacher had instructed students to put their heads on their desks in the darkened classroom. The 14-year-old freshman estimated the suspense lasted about an hour.
But it was all over in minutes, Anderson estimated. One hundred and twenty seconds after Cowan drew his gun, two deputies, Lt. Steve Williams and Sam Matney, arrived. They entered through separate doors and met Cowan and Gudger - still in a moving standoff - as they reached a science pod behind the cafeteria. Cowan wavered; he jerked his gun from Gudger to the other deputies then back again. The three officers told him, again, to drop his weapon. He wouldn't.
So they opened fire. Some students counted five shots, others counted six. Anderson would not say how many rounds hit the gunman.
Cowan fell to the ground, his shoes just feet from door to the library full of teenagers. The pistol in his hand had seven bullets in the magazine and another in the chamber. He had a second handgun in his back pocket, loaded with five rounds.
"That's how close he was," Anderson said. "We all know this could have been much more dangerous."
A troubled history
In a file at the Kingsport General Sessions courthouse, there is a handwritten note by a police detective:
"This is the fellow we discussed," it reads. "He needs a mental eval."
The note was written in 2001, after Cowan was charged with stalking. According to court records, a newspaper carrier said that twice he followed her as she drove her route.
When she turned, he turned. When she stopped, he stopped.
"At one point, he followed [her] into a driveway and would not let her pull out," the affidavit reads. "Both instances put [the carrier] in fear as she does not know the defendant."
The case was later dismissed because a witness did not show up at court.
The same affidavit also recites an incident from the previous year, when Cowan produced a gun at the Kingsport Police Department.
According to court documents, he arrived at the police station in February 2000 to talk with officers about "a problem that has been discussed with him several times in the past."
Cowan confessed that tucked in the waistband of his blue jeans, he had a loaded .380-caliber Jennings handgun - the same type of gun used in Monday's standoff. He was convicted of unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon, sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to seek a mental evaluation and counseling.
He did not do either, court records show.
His brother, Rodney Cowan, a janitor at the high school, declined to elaborate Monday evening on his brother's history or character.
"Right now, I haven't got a comment," he said. "We're just trying to get everything figured out."
A "textbook" response?
At a Monday afternoon news conference at the Board of Education building in Blountville, Yennie, the director of schools, read from a prepared statement that lauded police, staff and students for following their emergency protocol.
"The students were never in any danger," he said. "And Carolyn Gudger performed her job admirably to ensure the safety of students and staff."
Anderson, too, said the school's protocol worked perfectly. He hailed it "textbook" and "perfect."
"These officers saved children's lives today," Anderson said.
But some students were not reassured.
Camry Collins, a 17-year-old senior, wonders about the effectiveness of the second set of locked doors. She said she does not feel safer despite the outcome of Monday's intrusion.
"Tomorrow, the same thing could happen again," she said.
And tomorrow, Carolyn Gudger, Monday's uncontested hero, won't be there.
"Gudger is the "bomb-diggity," Collins said. "She goes out of her way to protect us."
Gudger and the other two deputies involved in the shooting are on administrative leave as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation concludes its investigation.
Anderson said they are doing well, considering. Cowan was taken to the hospital by helicopter, where he was pronounced dead at 10:15 a.m.
"This is not TV; you don't shoot somebody then go to the local bar and have a drink and talk about it and laugh and go on and do something else," Anderson said to dozens of teachers, school administrators and students packed into the news conference. "This is very, very - I can see by your faces how traumatic it is for you. You can imagine being that officer in that spot."
An unusual man
Thomas Cowan's house, on Mountain View Avenue in Kingsport, is hung with a brand-new American flag and an empty hummingbird feeder. His lived alone with his dog, Radar.
Cowan's next-door neighbor, Jessica Strom, had heard of a gunman at Sullivan Central on the news, but she never connected it to Cowan.
"Not Tom. No way," she said in an interview.
When showed a photograph of Cowan released Monday by law enforcement, Strom clutched her head in both hands and said, "Holy crap." She sank to the ground and discussed what she knew of her "unusual" neighbor.
Cowan often talked about government conspiracy theories, Strom said. He believed the government used electro-magnetic waves to make his dog bark. He only used disposable cell phones because he believed the government was listening in on his conversations, she said.
"He didn't seem to be crazy," Strom said. She and her husband "just kind of ignored him," when he spouted his conspiracy theories. "We let him say his piece and go on."
Last week, he went to the Dollar General store where Strom works and purchased the American flag, and some household goods.
"Why Central, though?" Strom wondered. She had no answer.
In his newspaper box was an old, yellowed newspaper from Jan. 4, 2007, still wrapped in plastic. The lead story that day was about a fugitive wanted in Pennsylvania who drew a gun on Johnson City police officers.
The headline read, "JC police kill gunman in shootout."
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15. GEICO Insurance cancels gun manufacturer's policy because he is in firearm business
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C.S. Miller sent me this via Facebook:
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From Conservativetreehouse.com: http://tinyurl.com/bzb5jgr
January 23, 2013
[SNIP]
Because he makes gun parts for a living this policy holder received a letter from GEICO cancelling his auto insurance. The letter says his auto insurance is being cancelled because he owns a company that manufactures parts for firearms:
(fyi, to insure the authenticity I have submitted a copy along with a request for verification to GEICO via email we'll see their response)
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16. 2A Supporters: Punching back twice as hard [Video]
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James Durso emailed me this:
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From nicedeb.wordpress.com: http://tinyurl.com/b6u68uo
January 19, 2013
[SNIP]
Thousands of 2nd Amendment Supporters Rally in Albany (Updated with Videos from Across the Nation)
Gun rights rallies took place all across the nation, today, as Americans from New York to Washington rallied to show their support for the 2nd Amendment. Albany New York, where some of the strictest gun laws in the nation were recently passed, saw thousands of patriots come out to protest the new laws.
YNN reported:
ALBANY, N.Y. - Thousands of pro gun rights activists are rallying at the state Capitol today. The rally is being held in conjunction with the group Guns Across America, a national series of rallies supporting the Second Amendment.
Many at today's rally are pushing to repeal the newly enacted SAFE Act.
The Democrat and Chronicle reported:
Chanting "Freedom," "U.S.A." and "Cuomo's Gotta Go," several thousand people expressed opposition to the new law championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The measure is the first and toughest law in the nation since the Newtown. Conn, school shootings last month. Cuomo and supporters have hailed the law as a critical step toward curbing gun violence in the state and nation.
Gun owners, however, said they are being unfairly targeted by the new law and were dismayed by the quick passage of it by lawmakers. The bill was adopted hours after it was printed.
Rallies that took place in other State capitols, today....
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Pictures from the 2nd Amendment rally at New York State Capitol
Bill Max sent me this:
http://tinyurl.com/as4k2rg
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Update: Pictures from around the country http://tinyurl.com/agz4mol
And here's a report from Boston. http://tinyurl.com/b4b8bux
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17. Fox News poll: Twice as many favor more guns over banning guns to reduce crime
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Jack Doyle emailed me this:
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From FOX News: http://tinyurl.com/b88o87h
By Dana Blanton
January 18, 2013
Nearly twice as many voters say there would be less violent crime if more law-abiding Americans owned guns, than if guns were banned.
In addition, while American voters generally favor strengthening gun laws, 71 percent do not think tougher laws can stop shootings like the one last month in Newtown, Connecticut. Some 22 percent say new laws can prevent the next Sandy Hook.
These are just some of the findings from a Fox News poll released Friday.
Click here for full poll results.
Majorities of gun owners (81 percent), non-gun owners (58 percent), Democrats (58 percent), independents (72 percent) and Republicans (85 percent) say the people who do these kinds of things "will always find the guns" to commit violent acts.
The Fox News poll asked a similar question after previous shootings and the one-in-five believing that tougher laws could make a difference has mostly held steady.
After the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, 19 percent of voters felt stricter laws could help. That went to 21 percent after the Tucson shooting involving Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (2011) and 22 percent in the new poll.
Twenty children and six adults were killed in the December mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown. Police identified two of the guns the shooter used as semiautomatic weapons, including one commercial model of the military M-16 rifle.
On Wednesday President Obama announced several gun-control proposals. Among them: requiring background checks for all gun buyers and banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The poll asked about these as well as other possible ways to reduce gun violence. (A portion of the interviews were conducted before Obama's formal announcement.)
The most popular suggestions are requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers (with 91 percent favoring this proposal), providing services for mentally ill people who "show violent tendencies" (89 percent) and improving enforcement of existing laws (86 percent)
Large majorities also favor mandating mental-health checks on gun buyers (83 percent) and requiring criminal background checks on anyone buying ammunition (80 percent).
Smaller majorities favor putting armed guards in schools (60 percent), banning high-capacity clips (56 percent), banning assault weapons (54 percent), and reducing "access to violent movies and video games" (52 percent).
The least popular suggestion tested -- and the only one a majority opposes -- is allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns on school grounds (42 percent favor, 52 percent oppose).
While large majorities of all demographic groups favor universal background checks, there are wide differences on other proposals. For example, on the bid to ban assault weapons, women favor it by a margin of 26 percentage points, while men oppose it by 4 points.
Democrats favor banning assault weapons by a 49-point margin, while Republicans oppose it by a 32-point margin. Gun owners oppose banning assault weapons by a 14-point margin, while non-gun owners favor it by 44 points. It is worth noting Republicans (65 percent) are much more likely than Democrats (38 percent) to be gun owners.
Most voters believe action will be taken on gun laws this year. They think gun legislation is much more likely to get passed (77 percent) than, for instance, immigration reform (48 percent), which is something Obama has said is a second-term priority.
Overall, voters are about twice as likely to say there would be less violent crime in the U.S. if more law-abiding people had guns, than if guns were banned (58 percent to 28 percent).
And by an 11 percentage-point margin, voters consider protecting the constitutional right to own a gun more important than protecting citizens from gun violence (51-40 percent).
Meanwhile, by an extremely wide 50-point margin, voters think gun permit holders have the right to keep that information private. A New York newspaper, not far from where the Newtown shooting took place, published the names and addresses of individuals with gun permits in its area. Voters have mixed feelings over who was more at risk after the information was published -- those living in homes listed as having a gun (35 percent) or those not having a gun (45 percent). Another 12 percent said both were equally at risk.
In response to the post-Newtown push for new gun restrictions, the National Rifle Association suggested putting armed guards in schools and rejected most other proposals.
A 56-percent majority of voters have a favorable opinion of the NRA, up significantly from 43 percent in March 2000. The number having a positive opinion of the group roughly matches the number of voters who have a gun in their home.
The NRA's favorable rating among gun-owning households is 71 percent, while among non-gun households it is 38 percent.
Finally, the 52 percent of voters saying someone in their household owns a gun is up from 45 percent in January 2011, and is the highest level of stated gun ownership in a Fox poll. Interviews conducted from 1999 through 2011 found between 42 and 50 percent of voters reported having a gun in their home.
If guns were outlawed, nearly two-thirds of gun-owners say they would defy the government and keep their guns (65 percent).
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cell phone interviews with 1,008 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from January 15 to January 17. The full poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
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18. "Active shooter" training
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Roy Scherer emailed me this:
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The Chesterfield County police presented a training/awareness seminar in Chesterfild the other day, about what to do if you suddenly find that you're confronted with a maniac trying to kill people. They say, "Run. Hide. Attack."
This is notable, I think, because most of the time the last option is not even mentioned in these "citizen training" presentations. Chesterfield at least mentions it.
A few words of wisdom which we don't hear all that often in these sorts of training situations are:
'One's last option is to "fight," according to the video. One should "act with aggression" and "commit" to whatever violent course of action one's decided to do to eliminate the shooter.'
And...
"Do the best with what you got."
From Progress-Index.com: http://tinyurl.com/adu4o2o
By Shelton Bumgarner
January 23, 2013
CHESTERFIELD - It is the nightmare scenario that has played out too often in our nation and has been most recently seen at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. What do you if you are in a public place and someone starts shooting?
About 90 volunteers from various local organizations recently took a closer look at what to do in a situation where fractions of a second can mean the difference between life and death when there is an "active shooter" in a public place.
Organized by the Chesterfield Emergency Planning Committee in cooperation with the Chesterfield County Police Department and Chesterfield County Emergency Management, the video presentation was shown to members of Chesterfield Neighborhood Watch, Community Response Team and the Citizen Corps.
The video and presentation were given by Chesterfield police Cpl. Catron, a crime prevention specialist. The short video titled "Run. Hide. Fight." is a product of the Department of Homeland Security and available both on YouTube and the Chesterfield County government website, Catron said.
"Once you have an individual in a confined space, things have gotten about as bad as they can get," he said, speaking of an "active shooter" who was on the rampage.
According to the video, the first thing to attempt to do in the event of an "active shooter" situation is simply to run. Additionally, the video said, encourage others to leave "but don't let them slow you down with their indecision."
If you find yourself in an "active shooter" situation and can't run, your next option is to "hide," the video said. "Turn out lights and lock doors," the narrator said.
One's last option is to "fight," according to the video. One should "act with aggression" and "commit" to whatever violent course of action one's decided to do to eliminate the shooter.
"Kind of scary stuff," Catron said once the video ended.
According to Catron, the usual "active shooter" situation lasts between 10 about 15 minutes. "That 10 to 15 minutes will seem like an eternity to the victims," Catron said.
Catron said once an "active shooter" event has begun, one should quickly decide which of the three options described in the video is the best solution. He did note, however, that even the most basic aspects of an "active shooter" event may elude the normal citizen. "Do you know what gunshots sound like?" he asked rhetorically.
Be sure to know where the shots are coming from, Catron said. "You don't want to run into the situation."
If your best option is to hide, Catron said, get behind something or get into a closet.
"An active shooter is moving systematically from room to room," he said. "You should find as much protection as you can possibly can get."
Catron noted that one should always be aware of one's environment and be "running scenarios" in your head as to what you'd do in the event of an "active shooter" incident. "Train your brain," he said. He told the audience that one should ask themselves, "'If I heard someone firing a gun, where would I go?'"
If you are hiding, you need to remember to turn off your cellphone, Catron said. "If your cellphone goes off, you just got exposed," he said.
Only as a last resort should someone confronted by an "active shooter" fight the individual, Catron said.
"Limit yourself to one thing," he said. "Do the best with what you got."
Once the police arrive, be sure to follow their commands and not do anything that could make them perceive you as a threat. No matter what, he said, remain calm.
"There's a gun in your face, remain calm," Catron said with a chuckle. "Most people will not be able to remain calm."
Catron said some basic things for interacting with the police are "don't rush towards them" when they get there and "don't ask the officer questions."
He stressed that if you're a witness to an "active shooter" incident, do not leave the scene until the police tell you can do so. "It may seem funny. It's not."
Catron also said if you call 911 for any reason, "Never ever ever hang up, whatever you do."
Catron said that the police department had refurbished phones available that only had the ability to call 911.
"If you can keep your cool and your composure," Catron said in conclusion, "you're most likely to survive."
Audience members appreciated what they heard.
"It was phenomenal," said Pamela McCartt of Chesterfield. "It was very informative. It was very basic. I feel much more informed. I will go home and tell my family and friends about this."
Enid Virago of Chesterfield County echoed those sentiments.
"I think this is really helpful," she said. "I liked how it was very specific about what actions you can take."
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19. Senator Feinstein declares war on pistol grips
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From Examiner.com: http://tinyurl.com/bewg9ur
By Mike Stollenwerk
January 25, 2013
[SNIP]
Yesterday in a dramatic ceremony on Capitol Hill, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D - California), amidst a backdrop of normal garden variety one-shot-per-trigger-pull firearms, declared war on pistol grips. Feinstein stated that because "[o]ur weak gun laws allow . . . mass killings to be carried out again, and again, and again in our country . . . the bill she and her colleagues are introducing would bar the sale, transfer, manufacture and importation" of . . . rifles [with] pistol grip[s]."
Senator Feinstein's office did not return phone calls from the examiner.com. But the Christian Science Monitor reported that Feinstein's' bill would not affect "[t]rue military rifles, such as the M16A2, [which] are automatic, capable of firing multiple bullets with one pull of the trigger [which have been] been tightly controlled in the US since the 1930s."
Senator Ted Cruz (R - Texas) declared that Feinstein's proposal would have done "nothing" to prevent the Newtown tragedy and vowed to fight to defeat the bill. OpenCarry.org co-founder John Pierce agrees with Senator Cruz, but went further, calling Feinstein's legislation "ludicrous and laughable" considering that "nobody has ever been killed by a pistol grip."
Philip Van Cleave, President of Virginia's largest gun rights group, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said that Feinstein's approach to public safety "is cosmetic, just a gimmick. If a pistol grip on a rifle is a threat to public safety, then why should we allow pistol grips on pistols?," asked Van Cleave.
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20. Holder begins gun-control push
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From The Hill: http://tinyurl.com/alcf32c
By Megan R. Wilson
January 25, 2013
The Justice Department is taking the first steps toward carrying out President Obama's executive actions on gun control.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday released three proposals to strengthen the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which was one of the 23 actions ordered by Obama last week to tackle gun violence.
The proposed regulations would give local law-enforcement agencies access to the gun-sale database that is maintained by the FBI. The rules would also preserve records of denied weapons sales indefinitely.
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act already requires federal background checks for gun purchases, but not every firearm sale is covered under the law.
Currently, law enforcement agencies cannot perform a NICS check when transferring, returning or selling weapons that have been confiscated, seized or recovered. The new rules would change that, allowing officials to perform a background check on people who receive those weapons to ensure that they are permitted to own a gun.
Obama ordered the rule change in a Jan. 16 memo that called for "rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun."
Holder is also proposing that the NICS hold on to records of denied weapon sales that are more than 10 years old. When the NICS was established, the Justice Department ordered that the records be moved to a storage facility after 10 years, which Holder says is no longer necessary.
"The FBI has therefore determined that for NICS' own internal business operations, litigation and prosecution purposes, and proper administration of the system, NICS shall retain denied transaction records on site," Holder wrote in a notice to be published in Monday's Federal Register. "The retention of denied transaction information ... will enhance the efficiency and operational capability of the NICS."
The proposed rules would also give Native American tribes access to NICS. Currently, only federal, state, or local agencies can perform the checks, which leaves out "domestic dependent nations" recognized by the United States.
The Justice Department isn't the only part of the administration that has been asked to take action in response to last month's school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The president has also ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to get involved.
One of Obama's directives was to ensure coverage of mental health treatment in Medicaid and under the healthcare reform law. He also ordered increased training of school staff to help them recognize signs of mental illness.
The CDC, meanwhile, was directed to study the causes of gun violence. The president urged Congress to approve $10 million for the agency to examine whether there are links between shooting sprees and violent entertainment.
Comments on the Justice Department proposals are due by March 28.
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21. The stale claim that 40 percent of gun sales lack background checks
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John Sabol emailed me this:
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From The Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/bfvb83s
By Glenn Kessler
January 21, 2013
"The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that's kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it's hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check."
--President Obama, remarks on gun violence, Jan. 16, 2013
"Studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement."
--"Now Is the Time: The president's plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence," released Jan. 16
"That's why we need, and I've recommended to the president, universal background checks. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the people -- and there's no -- let me be honest with you again, which I'll get to in a moment. Because of the lack of the ability of federal agencies to be able to even keep records, we can't say with absolute certainty what I'm about to say is correct. But the consensus is about 40 percent of the people who buy guns today do so outside the NICS [National Instant Criminal Background Check] system, outside the background check system."
--Vice President Biden, remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Jan. 17
Regular readers of this column know that we are often suspicious when politicians inject the phrase "up to" before citing a statistic. That's because it often suggests the politician is picking the upper value in a range of possibilities.
A reader expressed deep skepticism of this 40-percent figure when Obama used it. We were further struck by Biden's admission he could not say with "absolute certainty" that it was correct. So let's investigate.
The Facts
The White House says the figure comes from a 1997 Institute of Justice report, written by Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago. This study is based on data collected from a survey in 1994, just the Brady law requirements for background checks was coming into effect. (In fact, the questions concerned purchases in 1993 and 1994, while Brady law went into effect in early 1994.) In other words, this is a really old figure.
The data is available for researchers to explore at the Interuniversity consortium on political and social research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Digging deeper, we find that the survey sample was just 251 people. (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.) With this sample size, the 95 percent confidence interval will be plus or minus 6 percentage points.
Moreover, when asked if he or she bought from a licensed firearms dealer, the possible answers included "probably was/think so" and "probably not," leaving open the possibility the purchaser was mistaken. (The "probably not" answers were counted as "no.")
When all of the "yes" and "probably was" answers were added together, that left 35.7 percent of respondents indicating they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, though as we noted the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.
Moreover, when gifts, inheritances and prizes are added in, then the number shrinks to 26.4 percent. (The survey showed that nearly 23.8 percent of the people surveyed obtained their gun either as a gift or inherited it, and about half of them believed a licensed firearms dealer was the source.)
Cook and Ludwig, in a lengthier 1996 study of the data for the Police Foundation, acknowledge the ambiguity in the answers, but gave their best estimate as a range of 30 to 40 percent for transactions in the "off-the-books" secondary market. (The shorter 1997 study cited by the White House does not give a range, but instead says "approximately 60 percent of gun acquisitions" involved a licensed dealer.)
Interestingly, while people often speak of the "gun show loophole," the data in this 1994 survey shows that only 3.9 percent of firearm purchases were made at gun shows.
Ludwig acknowledged that "our estimate is clearly not perfect." He said that a larger sample size would have provided a more precise estimate of off-the-books transactions, but he and Cook were not involved in the design stage of the survey. He added that one reason why the data is so old is because the federal government has generally stopped funding such research.
"While there is no perfect estimate in social science, we'd have a better estimate for this proportion had the federal government not decided to get out of the business of supporting research on guns and gun violence several years ago," he said.
Ludwig and Cook were among the social scientists who signed a letter to Biden earlier this month calling on ending barriers to firearms research. The letter includes an interesting figure, comparing how many National Institute of Health awards have been given for firearms research versus infectious diseases.
Major NIH research awards and cumulative morbidity for select conditions in the US, 1973-2012
Condition Total cases NIH research awards
Cholera 400 212
Diphtheria 1337 56
Polio 266 129
Rabies 65 89
Total of four diseases 2068 486
Firearm injuries >4,000,000 3
One of the executive orders signed by Obama on Jan. 16 directed the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence, based on a legal analysis that congressional restrictions on spending money to advocate for gun control does not apply to such inquiries.
There is a bit of irony here. While the 40-percent figure appears overstated and out of date, it remains the most cited statistic on the secondary market because foes of gun control have thwarted extensive research on guns. Advocates of gun controls thus continue to rely on a flawed statistic nearly two decades old.
Cook and Ludwig, in a paper that released this month at a gun-violence conference hosted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that there appears to be little or no impact from the Brady law in reducing the homicide rate, even though government officials (such as Obama) routinely tout the number of people prevented from buying guns because of background checks.
"One explanation is that the type of person who is disqualified from legally buying a gun but shops at FFL [dealer with a federal firearms license] anyway tends to be at relatively low risk for misusing a gun," Cook and Ludwig write in "The Limited Impact of the Brady Act: Evaluation and Implications."
So is there any other, recent data that might provide some insight into the impact of the off-the-books gun market?
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, will report data from a 2004 survey of inmates in state prisons in a chapter in a book titled "Reducing Gun Violence in America," to be published Jan. 28 by Johns Hopkins Press.
The offenders were incarcerated from crimes committed with handguns, and this is how they reported how they obtained the guns:
Licensed gun dealer: 11 percent
Friends or family: 39.5 percent
"The street:" 37.5 percent
Stolen gun: 9.9 percent
Gun show/Flea market: 1.7 percent
In other words, only a relatively small percentage was purchased from licensed dealers. Obama's proposal on universal background checks, however, allows for "limited, common-sense exceptions for cases like certain transfers between family members and temporary transfers for hunting and sporting purposes."
The Pinocchio Test
We are faced with a conundrum here. We generally believe politicians should use the most up-to-date and relevant information available, but congressional foes of gun control have made it difficult to improve on obviously stale information.
The small sample size is also a serious problem, but again, roadblocks have made it difficult to do a more comprehensive survey.
At the same time, President Obama and the White House gun-violence plan act as if the information is fresh and relevant; it has also been repeated as current information by the news media. The Obama gun-violence plan cites "studies," but in fact these all are merely riffs on the same, relatively small survey taken nearly two decades ago. Generally, we would rule such claims are deserving of a
Pinocchio or two.
Vice President Biden, meanwhile, deserves kudos for acknowledging that the information is suspect and may not be entirely accurate. He at least frames it with some caveats, which is proper.
So, we are going to take a wait-and-see approach with this statistic. Going forward, gun-control advocates should be much more upfront about its problems, especially the fact that it is old information. The 30-to-40 percent range that Cook and Ludwig first deduced should be the norm, not the "up to 40 percent" claim. Moreover, advocates should routinely acknowledge this is stale information-which they are certainly free to blame on gun-industry lobbying.
We will be watching, and urge readers to keep track as well.
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22. RTD LTE: Provide trained teachers the option to carry
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Clayton Rhoades emailed me this:
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From Richmond Times-Dispatch: http://tinyurl.com/aecd2ss
January 24, 2013
Provide trained teachers the option to carry
Editor, Times-Dispatch:
Adam Lanza shot 26 people in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut. James Holmes is charged with shooting 70 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 34 people at Columbine High School. Jared Loughner shot 19 people including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. And Seung-Hui Cho shot 49 people at Virginia Tech.
During 2012, there were more than 2,600 shootings in Chicago (where handguns are mostly banned). It is safe to say that most, if not all, of these killers did not attend gun-safety courses or were otherwise trained professionals. Yet, they all successfully shot lots of people.
Nevertheless, a common argument from those opposed to arming teachers or letting the general public carry firearms is that they are not trained and may miss their target during a defensive shooting.
How is it that thugs, gang members, individuals high on drugs and those with mental illnesses all manage to shoot their victims but responsible gun-owners who undergo criminal background checks, attend gun-safety courses, obtain concealed handgun permits, and commonly practice at shooting ranges are expected to have a zero-accuracy rate? Why are those who take seriously their own self-defense treated as if they are incapable of actually hitting a target while lunatics have no problem shooting their victims?
We must recognize that murderers are targeting victims where guns are banned. During the Sandy Hook Elementary murders, it took police 20 minutes to arrive at the school after the first calls for help. It is time we provide the option for those individuals holding a Virginia concealed handgun permit (employees and visitors) to carry firearms onto school grounds to help defend themselves and our children. To do otherwise is unconscionable.
Clayton W. Rhoades. Midlothian.
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23. Why young women want AR-15's
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James Durso emailed me this:
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From National Review: http://tinyurl.com/b3bsayb
By Celia Bigelow & Aubrey Blankenship
January 23, 2013
Sorry, President Obama. As young women, we prefer an AR-15 "assault" rifle with a 30-round magazine for self-defense.
In fact, we wouldn't want to be stuck at home without one. In the wake of mass murders like Sandy Hook and the horrific rapes and murders of thousands of women each year, pepper spray, mace, or five-round handheld pistols aren't going to cut it.
So what's a girl to do? When choosing our tool for home defense, we want the best - in accuracy, handling, and aesthetics. The best choice by all three criteria is - hands down - the AR-15.
AR-15s are the most popular rifle in the U.S.; more than 3 million Americans own one. And its popularity isn't with criminals - assault rifles account for only 0.6 percent of murders every year. Rather, the semi-automatic AR-15 is the gun of choice for many hunters, target shooters, and home defenders.
Critics pin the allure of AR-15 on Hollywood (think Angelina Jolie's "Wait, why do I get the girl gun?" in Mr. and Mrs. Smith), video games, and the military, but women especially haven't chosen this weapon on a whim.
Our goal when defending against a home invader is simple: to hit where we aim. One shouldn't underestimate the value of target practice, but using an accurate weapon is the key to hitting a target with ease and confidence.
The AR-15 is lightweight and practical. As light as five pounds, it produces low levels of recoil, and it's easy to shoot. It also looks intimidating, which is what you want when facing an assailant or intruder. But don't let its appearance intimidate you. Assault rifles such as the AR-15 aren't more "dangerous," as liberals claim. They don't fire faster than other rifles, and don't normally contain more powerful ammunition.
Accuracy? Check. Ease in handling? Check. Intimidation factor? Check. An AR-15 might be a woman's best friend.
We are rational women who, as law-abiding citizens, understand the need - and the right - to defend ourselves. We don't want to be caught underprepared in the kind of desperate situation that happens too frequently to people across America.
This past week in Georgia, an intruder entered the home of a mother and two children. The mother grabbed her two children and her gun, and proceeded to hide in a crawlspace in the attic. When the intruder entered the attic, the mother fired and hit him with five out of six shots (he still lived).
Imagining ourselves in a high-stress, violent situation, we want a gun with enough ammo, and more, to get the job done. Sometimes, you only get one shot. At other times, you may need more. When you don't have time to reload in the heat of a home invasion, the AR-15's 30-round magazine gives you the flexibility and security a handgun will not.
High-capacity magazines serve as a life-saving insurance mechanism, a self-defense back-up if something doesn't go according to plan. Yet you would never think of these guns in this sense by listening to anti-gun zealots and their allies in media.
Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines have been under fire from our nation's legislators since the Newtown massacre. It only took Senator Dianne Feinstein two days to announce her intention to reinstate the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban to get "these dangerous weapons of war off our streets." New York governor Andrew Cuomo took it upon himself to make his state the first to tighten gun laws post-Newtown, proudly outlawing magazines over seven rounds because "no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer."
Senator Feinstein and Governor Cuomo: We may not need ten bullets to kill a deer, but we sure need them in our own defense. Criminals rarely use assault rifles. Nearly ten times as many murders are committed with hammers and clubs, and 35 times as many with knives. Does that mean we need to ban those too, Senator Feinstein? Banning assault weapons will only take weapons away from my house - not from criminals on the street.
Criminals with the intent to harm or kill will always find ways to do so. If they want to kill with an assault rifle or using high-capacity magazines, they will also find a way to do so, regardless of the law. As young, responsible women, we want the ability to defend ourselves against these criminals, and we should be able to do so with weapons of equal or greater power.
Violence is always going to exist. As women, we should possess the right to best defend ourselves against it, whether with a handgun or our much preferred AR-15. So, Mr. President, use the First Amendment as much as you like to rail against our AR-15s, but hands off our Second Amendment right to use them.
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24. Gender gap on most gun issues is massive, polls suggest
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From GOPUSA.com: http://tinyurl.com/bf5jd9b
By The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
January 21, 2013
When Wisconsinites were polled last year about a new state law allowing possession of concealed weapons, most men supported it.
But women were overwhelmingly opposed.
In fact, no other issue in Marquette Law School's broad and frequent polling of Wisconsin voters last year so divided the sexes -- not Medicare, "Obamacare," gay marriage, taxes, school funding, collective bargaining, recalls, mining, military spending, abortion or immigration.
In one January 2012 poll, the gender gap on "concealed carry" was a massive 27 points -- 59% approval among men, 32% among women.
This is a look at two key fault lines in public opinion about guns. Gender is one. Partisanship is the other.
Democrats and Republicans have drifted far apart on guns, as they have on so many issues. That poses a huge obstacle to getting legislation passed in a period of divided government, because there is so little common ground between the parties.
The gender gap on guns also has big political implications. Just as the Democratic Party may have been hurt with male voters in the past by supporting gun control, the Republican Party risks compounding its problems with female voters in taking a hard line against gun restrictions.
Overall, national polls point to a public shift in favor of stricter gun laws since the school massacre last month in Newtown, Conn.
But while there's broad support for some changes in the gun laws, the public is divided over others -- by region, age, type of community (urban, suburban, rural), and especially gender and party.
Gender gap on guns
As a simple yardstick of opinion on the issue, the nonpartisan Pew poll asks whether it's more important to "protect the right of Americans to own guns" or to "control gun ownership."
Pew has consistently found big differences between men and women on this question over the past 20 years.
In Pew's latest national poll (Jan. 9-13), 51% of men but only 38% of women said it was more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns; 57% of women but only 44% of men said it was more important to control gun ownership.
The gender gap was modest among the most partisan voters. But it was massive among political independents.
Among independents, 58% of men said it was more important to protect gun rights, compared with 36% of women; 60% of women said it was more important to control gun ownership, compared with 38% of men.
The gender gap is much bigger on some gun issues than on others, polls indicate.
There are huge differences between men and women on banning semiautomatic weapons, a step favored by 67% of women but only 48% of men in Pew's most recent national survey.
There's also a big gender gap over arming teachers and school officials, an idea backed by 47% of men but only 32% of women.
The gender gap is smaller on two proposals seen as having a better chance at passage: banning high-capacity ammunition clips, supported by 57% of women and 50% of men, and background checks for private gun sales and gun shows, backed by 88% of women and 83% of men.
The "concealed carry" issue cited is not part of the national post-Newtown gun debate. But it does illustrate how divided men and women can be on gun issues in a swing state with lots of gun owners -- about half the voters in Wisconsin on Nov. 6 said they had a gun in their household, according to the exit poll done here.
Marquette Law School polled on the legalization of concealed weapons three times last year, and each time there was a huge difference -- 23, 25 and 27 points -- in the percentage of men and women who supported the law. No other issue Marquette polled on during the year produced such a large gender gap.
"You're seeing the potential for women reacting to an issue quite differently than men," says political scientist Charles Franklin, who conducted the Marquette polls. "And it has a partisan impact, reinforcing women's support for Democrats and reinforcing men's support for Republicans."
Partisan gap on guns
The partisan gap on guns is bigger than the gender gap and has been growing over time.
On Pew's basic yardstick of gun rights vs. gun control, there is a chasm between the parties: 70% of Republicans say it's more important to protect gun rights compared with 22% of Democrats; 73% of Democrats say it's more important to control gun ownership compared with 27% of Republicans. Independents were almost evenly divided on the question.
Other polls indicate a similar pattern. In a survey this month by Gallup, 64% of Democrats wanted stricter gun laws, but only 18% of Republicans did.
Gap has grown over years
These differences are much bigger today than they were 10 or 20 years ago, according to Pew's polling.
In 1993, 45% of Republicans and 25% of Democrats said protecting gun rights was more important than controlling gun ownership.
In 2007, 50% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said protecting gun rights was more important.
But during Barack Obama's presidency, that gap has grown much wider -- not because Democratic attitudes have changed, but because Republicans have become that much more in favor of gun rights.
"This issue has become a much more partisan issue, even (more) than it was a decade ago," says Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center. "The Republican Party has more clearly become an anti-gun control party and the Democratic Party, while it still may have a fair amount of diversity on the issue, has become more pro-gun control."
Because the distance between the parties is even bigger among members of Congress than it is among voters, the partisan gap over guns is now a huge obstacle to legislative action on the issue.
The shift in public opinion toward gun restrictions since the Newtown school shooting could prompt Congress to act on the most popular and least divisive proposals, such as expanding background checks.
But polls also say that overall public support for stricter gun laws, while rising since Newtown, is still lower than it was during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
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25. Ending gun violence requires commitment, not all of it voluntary
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From Human Events: http://tinyurl.com/a5nwqvc
By Ann Coulter
January 23, 2013
The good news is: Obama and the Senate Democrats have no intention of passing more idiotic gun legislation in response to the Newtown massacre. The bad news is that they also have no intention of passing any legislation about the mentally ill, which would actually do something to reduce these mass shootings.
Instead, the Democrats will jawbone about "assault weapons" and other meaningless gun laws for the sole purpose of scaring soccer moms into hating the National Rifle Association. Expect to hear a lot about Republicans preferring "the gun lobby" to "children." (Which is evidently not at all like preferring the teachers lobby to children.)
Democrats are hoping to pick up another dozen congressional seats in 2014, so they need terrified women.
Just don't expect a vote. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid cannot afford a vote on any of these nonsense gun laws because he needs to protect the seats of Democrats who have to get re-elected in districts where voters know something about guns.
Even the stupidest politician has to know how utterly meaningless "assault weapon" bans are. (In fairness, New York's Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and Gov. Andrew Cuomo may not know.) But Democrats need to gin up the most easily fooled voters.
"Assault weapons" are defined as "whatever politicians say they are." The guns that are banned and the ones that aren't are functionally identical. They're all semi-automatics.
Semi-automatics shoot one bullet per trigger pull - that's the definition. Any handgun manufactured since the Civil War is a "semi-automatic." The most basic self-defense revolver for women is a "semi-automatic."
An example of a gun that is not a semi-automatic is a musket. Also those guns where a "BANG!" flag pops out when the clown pulls the trigger.
An automatic firearm - what militaries and drug cartels have - continuously fires when the trigger is pulled. They have been subject to a near-total federal ban in this country since the 1930s, so they're irrelevant to the discussion.
The only differences in the semi-automatics the Democrats want to ban and the ones they don't are purely cosmetic details, such as bayonet mounts or pistol grips.
When is the last time anyone was killed with a bayonet in this country? Bayonets were rarely used even during the Civil War. Obama mocked the idea of bayonets during one of his debates with Romney. Now he's terrified of them!
Semi-automatics with bayonets are some of the guns Democrats call "assault weapons." It would be like defining 12-inch hunting knives with camouflage-colored handles - but not those with black handles - as "assault knives." Assault weapons are the semi-automatics that look scary to soccer moms.
An example of the intentional obfuscation about semi-automatics (or "guns") is the "Violence Policy Center" webpage, which states: "Semiautomatic assault weapons are civilian versions of automatic military assault rifles (like the AK-47 and the M-16) and automatic military assault pistols (like the UZI)."
This would be like saying: "Little girls' pink bedrooms are civilian versions of military prisons (like Guantanamo) and terrorist rendition prisons (like CIA Black Sites)."
Yes, exactly alike, except the "prison" part.
Since not all Democrats get to run for office in New York, congressional Democrats can't risk taking votes on such silly laws. Your guns will be safe, but your children won't, because we'll still have the mentally ill showing up at movie theaters, subway stations, shopping malls and schools.
If soccer moms want to worry about something, they should worry more about schizophrenics than guns.
In the late 1980s, New York City Mayor Ed Koch tried to institutionalize Joyce Brown, a mentally ill heroin addict living on the street who went by the name "Billie Boggs" (after local television host Bill Boggs). Brown was defecating on herself, removing all her clothes, burning money, running into traffic and shouting obscenities at passers-by. In other words, she was a prototype for Occupy Wall Street.
Brown's family desperately wanted to have Brown committed to Bellevue Hospital. A Columbia psychiatrist argued for her institutionalization. The neighbors supported her commitment.
But the New York Civil Liberties Union wanted Brown back on the street. Her NYCLU attorney, Robert Levy, boasted that "Billie Boggs" was as sane as "a member of the board of the Civil Liberties Union."
A New York judge, Robert Lippman, agreed -- but not the way I do. Instead of ordering the entire NYCLU board institutionalized, he ordered the release of this poor, mentally disturbed woman. She promptly spoke at Harvard. (Princeton already had Peter Singer.) Then she was back on the street, taking heroin and getting into fights with other homeless people.
Schizophrenics are generally incapable of knowing they need help. Without involuntary commitment, they are abandoned to the streets, getting beaten up, sexually abused, stolen from and set on fire. They also sometimes push people onto subway tracks, murder grandmothers, slaughter firemen and enter "gun-free zones" to commit mass murder.
But the Democrats won't do anything about it. Even if you do not hear voices that tell you to kill strangers, liberals say: "Either we are all mad or none of us is mad." Then they get mouthy about banning guns with bayonets. On which they will not vote. Montana's Sen. Max Baucus has to get re-elected.
12. Guns stop three home invasions, store robbery
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Walter Jackson emailed me this:
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From Breitbart.com: http://tinyurl.com/a2mtecz
By Mary Chastain
January 22, 2013
Guns came to the rescue of three homeowners and a business this weekend.
Five people tried to break into a home in Oklahoma City, OK. The woman homeowner and her friend shot two of them with her gun. The other burglars fled to another house to escape the gunfire. The shooting victims are in serious to critical condition, but the woman and her friend were unharmed.
Without warning, a man tried to kick-in the door of a home in San Antonio, TX. The mother quickly called 911 while her son shot at the man through the door. The man shot his gun before he fled. The mother and son were unharmed and police are still looking for the suspect.
Two men in San Antonio, TX tried to steal some beer from a store, but were stopped because a customer had his concealed weapon. The suspects left with nothing and the police will not charge the customer.
In Canyon Lake, TX, a man used his shotgun to defend his neighbor against her ex-boyfriend, who was carrying a baseball bat. He heard the sound of breaking glass and decided to investigate. He found a man trying to break into his neighbor's trailer and confronted him. The suspect walked towards him with the baseball bat despite being told numerous times to stop. The man had no choice but to shoot the suspect in self-defense.
The homeowner threw her ex-boyfriend out in November, but he kept harassing her. He showed up several times and last week he broke in and pulled a gun on her. After that, she left her trailer and was not there the night he appeared with the baseball bat. The owner of the trailer park, Walter Chapman, is glad she was not there and her neighbor was armed.
"It's good that he had it," Chapman said. "There's no telling what could have happened had he not had a gun."
It is a very good thing all these people had guns. Everyday ordinary people prove why the Framers gave America the 2nd Amendment.
Please follow Mary Chastain on Twitter @maryclimer and send her any recent armed citizen stories.
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13. How to stop mass shootings? [Video]
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James Durso emailed me this:
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From ebaumsworld.com: http://tinyurl.com/b88l8k7
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14. The school shooting the media won't report
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An armed guard stops a school shooting and the main-stream-media yawns.
Bill Hine emailed me this:
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From The Daily Witness: http://tinyurl.com/aqreybz
By Claire Galafaro & Daniel Gilbert
January 11, 2013
On Monday morning, Thomas Richard Cowan loaded 13 bullets into two handguns, left his German shepherd chained to the fence and drove eight miles from his home in Kingsport to Sullivan Central High School. Whatever his mission, it was the 62-year-old Vietnam veteran's final drive.
For about an hour, Cowan's armed invasion spread panic throughout the school before a burst of officers' gunfire brought him down. No others were injured.
No one knows why Cowan pointed his Honda in the direction of the Blountville, Tenn., high school, where his brother is a janitor. He is described - in court records and interviews - as a peculiar man with a history of erratic, sometimes criminal, behavior and a deep suspicion of the government.
He parked his car Monday morning in a handicapped space just in front of the school's main entrance. Second period was just getting under way at 9:10 a.m. when Ashley Thacker, a junior, arrived at the main entrance of her high school. Thacker, 16, had been at a doctor's appointment and was on her way to a music theory class as she approached the locked doors.
She noticed a man standing in the 10-foot waiting area between the two sets of doors, waiting to be buzzed in. His bald crown was framed with brown hair. He had a mustache, she remembered, and he was holding a cane.
He told her to go on ahead of him. But she never made it through the doors.
Instead, Melanie Riden, principal of Sullivan Central, came striding through the locked doors.
"He pulled out his gun and started pointing it at people," Thacker said.
Cowan trained a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol at Riden's face, said Sullivan County Sheriff Wayne Anderson. Carolyn Gudger, the school resource officer, drew her gun, then shielded the principal's body with her own.
Thacker remembers Cowan shouting something - possibly including the words "10 years" - but she isn't sure. She turned and ran out the set of public doors to the mulch pile in the front of the school, and hid behind bushes.
"He might shoot someone," Thacker remembered thinking. "I just wanted to get out of there."
Riden fled and Gudger inched back into the school, leading Cowan through the scattered pastel chairs in the empty cafeteria. It was a tactical move, meant to lure the gunman into a more contained place, Anderson said.
Sullivan County dispatch sent out a chilling alert: "Man with a gun at Central High School."
Riden, reached by phone Monday night, said she could not comment without permission from Sullivan County Director of Schools Jubal Yennie.
Gudger told him to drop his weapon; he demanded she drop hers. Once, he tried, unsuccessfully, to lunge for her gun.
Cowan repeated one thing only, Anderson said. That he wanted to pull the fire alarms.
"I don't know why, we can only speculate about that and I think everyone will speculate why he wanted to pull a fire alarm," Anderson said. "Either to get the kids out of class or, I don't know. We don't know."
Flattened against the bushes, Ashley Thacker waited two minutes, she thinks. "I didn't hear anything else, so I thought Officer Gudger had arrested him."
She was wrong. As she approached the school, two assistant principals opened a window and yelled at her to run away. Crying and shaking, Thacker ran to her car and drove a half-mile to her parents' business.
The view from the classroom
At about 9:15 a.m., a shaken voice came over the intercom.
"Code red. Lockdown."
There was profanity in the background. This was no drill, students realized.
With the announcement, teachers sprang into action - locking doors and papering over windows, turning off the lights and closing window blinds. Students huddled in the corners of classrooms, sitting in the darkness and searching for information with a storm of text messages.
Casey Deel, a 17-year-old senior, was on his way to a doctor's office when his girlfriend, Alicia Edwards, sent him a text at 9:15 a.m.
"There's a code red lock down. im scared," the 16-year-old junior texted from her government class.
"r u serious?" Deel texted back. He skipped his appointment.
In Kayla Nichols' cosmetology class, students squeezed into a storage room the size of a parking space, and locked the door, the 17-year-old said.
Ryan Kendrick was in algebra class, just off the main office. The 17-year-old senior thought he heard the gunman making threats - about not leaving the building alive and taking others with him - and Gudger urging him to calm down.
Then he heard a volley of gunshots.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
Kendrick and his friend, Andrew Ray, began to pray.
Landon Sillyman was in his honors biology class, where the teacher had instructed students to put their heads on their desks in the darkened classroom. The 14-year-old freshman estimated the suspense lasted about an hour.
But it was all over in minutes, Anderson estimated. One hundred and twenty seconds after Cowan drew his gun, two deputies, Lt. Steve Williams and Sam Matney, arrived. They entered through separate doors and met Cowan and Gudger - still in a moving standoff - as they reached a science pod behind the cafeteria. Cowan wavered; he jerked his gun from Gudger to the other deputies then back again. The three officers told him, again, to drop his weapon. He wouldn't.
So they opened fire. Some students counted five shots, others counted six. Anderson would not say how many rounds hit the gunman.
Cowan fell to the ground, his shoes just feet from door to the library full of teenagers. The pistol in his hand had seven bullets in the magazine and another in the chamber. He had a second handgun in his back pocket, loaded with five rounds.
"That's how close he was," Anderson said. "We all know this could have been much more dangerous."
A troubled history
In a file at the Kingsport General Sessions courthouse, there is a handwritten note by a police detective:
"This is the fellow we discussed," it reads. "He needs a mental eval."
The note was written in 2001, after Cowan was charged with stalking. According to court records, a newspaper carrier said that twice he followed her as she drove her route.
When she turned, he turned. When she stopped, he stopped.
"At one point, he followed [her] into a driveway and would not let her pull out," the affidavit reads. "Both instances put [the carrier] in fear as she does not know the defendant."
The case was later dismissed because a witness did not show up at court.
The same affidavit also recites an incident from the previous year, when Cowan produced a gun at the Kingsport Police Department.
According to court documents, he arrived at the police station in February 2000 to talk with officers about "a problem that has been discussed with him several times in the past."
Cowan confessed that tucked in the waistband of his blue jeans, he had a loaded .380-caliber Jennings handgun - the same type of gun used in Monday's standoff. He was convicted of unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon, sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to seek a mental evaluation and counseling.
He did not do either, court records show.
His brother, Rodney Cowan, a janitor at the high school, declined to elaborate Monday evening on his brother's history or character.
"Right now, I haven't got a comment," he said. "We're just trying to get everything figured out."
A "textbook" response?
At a Monday afternoon news conference at the Board of Education building in Blountville, Yennie, the director of schools, read from a prepared statement that lauded police, staff and students for following their emergency protocol.
"The students were never in any danger," he said. "And Carolyn Gudger performed her job admirably to ensure the safety of students and staff."
Anderson, too, said the school's protocol worked perfectly. He hailed it "textbook" and "perfect."
"These officers saved children's lives today," Anderson said.
But some students were not reassured.
Camry Collins, a 17-year-old senior, wonders about the effectiveness of the second set of locked doors. She said she does not feel safer despite the outcome of Monday's intrusion.
"Tomorrow, the same thing could happen again," she said.
And tomorrow, Carolyn Gudger, Monday's uncontested hero, won't be there.
"Gudger is the "bomb-diggity," Collins said. "She goes out of her way to protect us."
Gudger and the other two deputies involved in the shooting are on administrative leave as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation concludes its investigation.
Anderson said they are doing well, considering. Cowan was taken to the hospital by helicopter, where he was pronounced dead at 10:15 a.m.
"This is not TV; you don't shoot somebody then go to the local bar and have a drink and talk about it and laugh and go on and do something else," Anderson said to dozens of teachers, school administrators and students packed into the news conference. "This is very, very - I can see by your faces how traumatic it is for you. You can imagine being that officer in that spot."
An unusual man
Thomas Cowan's house, on Mountain View Avenue in Kingsport, is hung with a brand-new American flag and an empty hummingbird feeder. His lived alone with his dog, Radar.
Cowan's next-door neighbor, Jessica Strom, had heard of a gunman at Sullivan Central on the news, but she never connected it to Cowan.
"Not Tom. No way," she said in an interview.
When showed a photograph of Cowan released Monday by law enforcement, Strom clutched her head in both hands and said, "Holy crap." She sank to the ground and discussed what she knew of her "unusual" neighbor.
Cowan often talked about government conspiracy theories, Strom said. He believed the government used electro-magnetic waves to make his dog bark. He only used disposable cell phones because he believed the government was listening in on his conversations, she said.
"He didn't seem to be crazy," Strom said. She and her husband "just kind of ignored him," when he spouted his conspiracy theories. "We let him say his piece and go on."
Last week, he went to the Dollar General store where Strom works and purchased the American flag, and some household goods.
"Why Central, though?" Strom wondered. She had no answer.
In his newspaper box was an old, yellowed newspaper from Jan. 4, 2007, still wrapped in plastic. The lead story that day was about a fugitive wanted in Pennsylvania who drew a gun on Johnson City police officers.
The headline read, "JC police kill gunman in shootout."
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15. GEICO Insurance cancels gun manufacturer's policy because he is in firearm business
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C.S. Miller sent me this via Facebook:
--
From Conservativetreehouse.com: http://tinyurl.com/bzb5jgr
January 23, 2013
[SNIP]
Because he makes gun parts for a living this policy holder received a letter from GEICO cancelling his auto insurance. The letter says his auto insurance is being cancelled because he owns a company that manufactures parts for firearms:
(fyi, to insure the authenticity I have submitted a copy along with a request for verification to GEICO via email we'll see their response)
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16. 2A Supporters: Punching back twice as hard [Video]
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James Durso emailed me this:
--
From nicedeb.wordpress.com: http://tinyurl.com/b6u68uo
January 19, 2013
[SNIP]
Thousands of 2nd Amendment Supporters Rally in Albany (Updated with Videos from Across the Nation)
Gun rights rallies took place all across the nation, today, as Americans from New York to Washington rallied to show their support for the 2nd Amendment. Albany New York, where some of the strictest gun laws in the nation were recently passed, saw thousands of patriots come out to protest the new laws.
YNN reported:
ALBANY, N.Y. - Thousands of pro gun rights activists are rallying at the state Capitol today. The rally is being held in conjunction with the group Guns Across America, a national series of rallies supporting the Second Amendment.
Many at today's rally are pushing to repeal the newly enacted SAFE Act.
The Democrat and Chronicle reported:
Chanting "Freedom," "U.S.A." and "Cuomo's Gotta Go," several thousand people expressed opposition to the new law championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The measure is the first and toughest law in the nation since the Newtown. Conn, school shootings last month. Cuomo and supporters have hailed the law as a critical step toward curbing gun violence in the state and nation.
Gun owners, however, said they are being unfairly targeted by the new law and were dismayed by the quick passage of it by lawmakers. The bill was adopted hours after it was printed.
Rallies that took place in other State capitols, today....
---
Pictures from the 2nd Amendment rally at New York State Capitol
Bill Max sent me this:
http://tinyurl.com/as4k2rg
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Update: Pictures from around the country http://tinyurl.com/agz4mol
And here's a report from Boston. http://tinyurl.com/b4b8bux
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17. Fox News poll: Twice as many favor more guns over banning guns to reduce crime
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Jack Doyle emailed me this:
--
From FOX News: http://tinyurl.com/b88o87h
By Dana Blanton
January 18, 2013
Nearly twice as many voters say there would be less violent crime if more law-abiding Americans owned guns, than if guns were banned.
In addition, while American voters generally favor strengthening gun laws, 71 percent do not think tougher laws can stop shootings like the one last month in Newtown, Connecticut. Some 22 percent say new laws can prevent the next Sandy Hook.
These are just some of the findings from a Fox News poll released Friday.
Click here for full poll results.
Majorities of gun owners (81 percent), non-gun owners (58 percent), Democrats (58 percent), independents (72 percent) and Republicans (85 percent) say the people who do these kinds of things "will always find the guns" to commit violent acts.
The Fox News poll asked a similar question after previous shootings and the one-in-five believing that tougher laws could make a difference has mostly held steady.
After the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, 19 percent of voters felt stricter laws could help. That went to 21 percent after the Tucson shooting involving Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (2011) and 22 percent in the new poll.
Twenty children and six adults were killed in the December mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown. Police identified two of the guns the shooter used as semiautomatic weapons, including one commercial model of the military M-16 rifle.
On Wednesday President Obama announced several gun-control proposals. Among them: requiring background checks for all gun buyers and banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The poll asked about these as well as other possible ways to reduce gun violence. (A portion of the interviews were conducted before Obama's formal announcement.)
The most popular suggestions are requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers (with 91 percent favoring this proposal), providing services for mentally ill people who "show violent tendencies" (89 percent) and improving enforcement of existing laws (86 percent)
Large majorities also favor mandating mental-health checks on gun buyers (83 percent) and requiring criminal background checks on anyone buying ammunition (80 percent).
Smaller majorities favor putting armed guards in schools (60 percent), banning high-capacity clips (56 percent), banning assault weapons (54 percent), and reducing "access to violent movies and video games" (52 percent).
The least popular suggestion tested -- and the only one a majority opposes -- is allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns on school grounds (42 percent favor, 52 percent oppose).
While large majorities of all demographic groups favor universal background checks, there are wide differences on other proposals. For example, on the bid to ban assault weapons, women favor it by a margin of 26 percentage points, while men oppose it by 4 points.
Democrats favor banning assault weapons by a 49-point margin, while Republicans oppose it by a 32-point margin. Gun owners oppose banning assault weapons by a 14-point margin, while non-gun owners favor it by 44 points. It is worth noting Republicans (65 percent) are much more likely than Democrats (38 percent) to be gun owners.
Most voters believe action will be taken on gun laws this year. They think gun legislation is much more likely to get passed (77 percent) than, for instance, immigration reform (48 percent), which is something Obama has said is a second-term priority.
Overall, voters are about twice as likely to say there would be less violent crime in the U.S. if more law-abiding people had guns, than if guns were banned (58 percent to 28 percent).
And by an 11 percentage-point margin, voters consider protecting the constitutional right to own a gun more important than protecting citizens from gun violence (51-40 percent).
Meanwhile, by an extremely wide 50-point margin, voters think gun permit holders have the right to keep that information private. A New York newspaper, not far from where the Newtown shooting took place, published the names and addresses of individuals with gun permits in its area. Voters have mixed feelings over who was more at risk after the information was published -- those living in homes listed as having a gun (35 percent) or those not having a gun (45 percent). Another 12 percent said both were equally at risk.
In response to the post-Newtown push for new gun restrictions, the National Rifle Association suggested putting armed guards in schools and rejected most other proposals.
A 56-percent majority of voters have a favorable opinion of the NRA, up significantly from 43 percent in March 2000. The number having a positive opinion of the group roughly matches the number of voters who have a gun in their home.
The NRA's favorable rating among gun-owning households is 71 percent, while among non-gun households it is 38 percent.
Finally, the 52 percent of voters saying someone in their household owns a gun is up from 45 percent in January 2011, and is the highest level of stated gun ownership in a Fox poll. Interviews conducted from 1999 through 2011 found between 42 and 50 percent of voters reported having a gun in their home.
If guns were outlawed, nearly two-thirds of gun-owners say they would defy the government and keep their guns (65 percent).
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cell phone interviews with 1,008 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from January 15 to January 17. The full poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
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18. "Active shooter" training
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Roy Scherer emailed me this:
--
The Chesterfield County police presented a training/awareness seminar in Chesterfild the other day, about what to do if you suddenly find that you're confronted with a maniac trying to kill people. They say, "Run. Hide. Attack."
This is notable, I think, because most of the time the last option is not even mentioned in these "citizen training" presentations. Chesterfield at least mentions it.
A few words of wisdom which we don't hear all that often in these sorts of training situations are:
'One's last option is to "fight," according to the video. One should "act with aggression" and "commit" to whatever violent course of action one's decided to do to eliminate the shooter.'
And...
"Do the best with what you got."
From Progress-Index.com: http://tinyurl.com/adu4o2o
By Shelton Bumgarner
January 23, 2013
CHESTERFIELD - It is the nightmare scenario that has played out too often in our nation and has been most recently seen at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. What do you if you are in a public place and someone starts shooting?
About 90 volunteers from various local organizations recently took a closer look at what to do in a situation where fractions of a second can mean the difference between life and death when there is an "active shooter" in a public place.
Organized by the Chesterfield Emergency Planning Committee in cooperation with the Chesterfield County Police Department and Chesterfield County Emergency Management, the video presentation was shown to members of Chesterfield Neighborhood Watch, Community Response Team and the Citizen Corps.
The video and presentation were given by Chesterfield police Cpl. Catron, a crime prevention specialist. The short video titled "Run. Hide. Fight." is a product of the Department of Homeland Security and available both on YouTube and the Chesterfield County government website, Catron said.
"Once you have an individual in a confined space, things have gotten about as bad as they can get," he said, speaking of an "active shooter" who was on the rampage.
According to the video, the first thing to attempt to do in the event of an "active shooter" situation is simply to run. Additionally, the video said, encourage others to leave "but don't let them slow you down with their indecision."
If you find yourself in an "active shooter" situation and can't run, your next option is to "hide," the video said. "Turn out lights and lock doors," the narrator said.
One's last option is to "fight," according to the video. One should "act with aggression" and "commit" to whatever violent course of action one's decided to do to eliminate the shooter.
"Kind of scary stuff," Catron said once the video ended.
According to Catron, the usual "active shooter" situation lasts between 10 about 15 minutes. "That 10 to 15 minutes will seem like an eternity to the victims," Catron said.
Catron said once an "active shooter" event has begun, one should quickly decide which of the three options described in the video is the best solution. He did note, however, that even the most basic aspects of an "active shooter" event may elude the normal citizen. "Do you know what gunshots sound like?" he asked rhetorically.
Be sure to know where the shots are coming from, Catron said. "You don't want to run into the situation."
If your best option is to hide, Catron said, get behind something or get into a closet.
"An active shooter is moving systematically from room to room," he said. "You should find as much protection as you can possibly can get."
Catron noted that one should always be aware of one's environment and be "running scenarios" in your head as to what you'd do in the event of an "active shooter" incident. "Train your brain," he said. He told the audience that one should ask themselves, "'If I heard someone firing a gun, where would I go?'"
If you are hiding, you need to remember to turn off your cellphone, Catron said. "If your cellphone goes off, you just got exposed," he said.
Only as a last resort should someone confronted by an "active shooter" fight the individual, Catron said.
"Limit yourself to one thing," he said. "Do the best with what you got."
Once the police arrive, be sure to follow their commands and not do anything that could make them perceive you as a threat. No matter what, he said, remain calm.
"There's a gun in your face, remain calm," Catron said with a chuckle. "Most people will not be able to remain calm."
Catron said some basic things for interacting with the police are "don't rush towards them" when they get there and "don't ask the officer questions."
He stressed that if you're a witness to an "active shooter" incident, do not leave the scene until the police tell you can do so. "It may seem funny. It's not."
Catron also said if you call 911 for any reason, "Never ever ever hang up, whatever you do."
Catron said that the police department had refurbished phones available that only had the ability to call 911.
"If you can keep your cool and your composure," Catron said in conclusion, "you're most likely to survive."
Audience members appreciated what they heard.
"It was phenomenal," said Pamela McCartt of Chesterfield. "It was very informative. It was very basic. I feel much more informed. I will go home and tell my family and friends about this."
Enid Virago of Chesterfield County echoed those sentiments.
"I think this is really helpful," she said. "I liked how it was very specific about what actions you can take."
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19. Senator Feinstein declares war on pistol grips
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From Examiner.com: http://tinyurl.com/bewg9ur
By Mike Stollenwerk
January 25, 2013
[SNIP]
Yesterday in a dramatic ceremony on Capitol Hill, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D - California), amidst a backdrop of normal garden variety one-shot-per-trigger-pull firearms, declared war on pistol grips. Feinstein stated that because "[o]ur weak gun laws allow . . . mass killings to be carried out again, and again, and again in our country . . . the bill she and her colleagues are introducing would bar the sale, transfer, manufacture and importation" of . . . rifles [with] pistol grip[s]."
Senator Feinstein's office did not return phone calls from the examiner.com. But the Christian Science Monitor reported that Feinstein's' bill would not affect "[t]rue military rifles, such as the M16A2, [which] are automatic, capable of firing multiple bullets with one pull of the trigger [which have been] been tightly controlled in the US since the 1930s."
Senator Ted Cruz (R - Texas) declared that Feinstein's proposal would have done "nothing" to prevent the Newtown tragedy and vowed to fight to defeat the bill. OpenCarry.org co-founder John Pierce agrees with Senator Cruz, but went further, calling Feinstein's legislation "ludicrous and laughable" considering that "nobody has ever been killed by a pistol grip."
Philip Van Cleave, President of Virginia's largest gun rights group, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said that Feinstein's approach to public safety "is cosmetic, just a gimmick. If a pistol grip on a rifle is a threat to public safety, then why should we allow pistol grips on pistols?," asked Van Cleave.
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20. Holder begins gun-control push
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From The Hill: http://tinyurl.com/alcf32c
By Megan R. Wilson
January 25, 2013
The Justice Department is taking the first steps toward carrying out President Obama's executive actions on gun control.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday released three proposals to strengthen the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which was one of the 23 actions ordered by Obama last week to tackle gun violence.
The proposed regulations would give local law-enforcement agencies access to the gun-sale database that is maintained by the FBI. The rules would also preserve records of denied weapons sales indefinitely.
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act already requires federal background checks for gun purchases, but not every firearm sale is covered under the law.
Currently, law enforcement agencies cannot perform a NICS check when transferring, returning or selling weapons that have been confiscated, seized or recovered. The new rules would change that, allowing officials to perform a background check on people who receive those weapons to ensure that they are permitted to own a gun.
Obama ordered the rule change in a Jan. 16 memo that called for "rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun."
Holder is also proposing that the NICS hold on to records of denied weapon sales that are more than 10 years old. When the NICS was established, the Justice Department ordered that the records be moved to a storage facility after 10 years, which Holder says is no longer necessary.
"The FBI has therefore determined that for NICS' own internal business operations, litigation and prosecution purposes, and proper administration of the system, NICS shall retain denied transaction records on site," Holder wrote in a notice to be published in Monday's Federal Register. "The retention of denied transaction information ... will enhance the efficiency and operational capability of the NICS."
The proposed rules would also give Native American tribes access to NICS. Currently, only federal, state, or local agencies can perform the checks, which leaves out "domestic dependent nations" recognized by the United States.
The Justice Department isn't the only part of the administration that has been asked to take action in response to last month's school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The president has also ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to get involved.
One of Obama's directives was to ensure coverage of mental health treatment in Medicaid and under the healthcare reform law. He also ordered increased training of school staff to help them recognize signs of mental illness.
The CDC, meanwhile, was directed to study the causes of gun violence. The president urged Congress to approve $10 million for the agency to examine whether there are links between shooting sprees and violent entertainment.
Comments on the Justice Department proposals are due by March 28.
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21. The stale claim that 40 percent of gun sales lack background checks
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John Sabol emailed me this:
--
From The Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/bfvb83s
By Glenn Kessler
January 21, 2013
"The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that's kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it's hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check."
--President Obama, remarks on gun violence, Jan. 16, 2013
"Studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement."
--"Now Is the Time: The president's plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence," released Jan. 16
"That's why we need, and I've recommended to the president, universal background checks. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the people -- and there's no -- let me be honest with you again, which I'll get to in a moment. Because of the lack of the ability of federal agencies to be able to even keep records, we can't say with absolute certainty what I'm about to say is correct. But the consensus is about 40 percent of the people who buy guns today do so outside the NICS [National Instant Criminal Background Check] system, outside the background check system."
--Vice President Biden, remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Jan. 17
Regular readers of this column know that we are often suspicious when politicians inject the phrase "up to" before citing a statistic. That's because it often suggests the politician is picking the upper value in a range of possibilities.
A reader expressed deep skepticism of this 40-percent figure when Obama used it. We were further struck by Biden's admission he could not say with "absolute certainty" that it was correct. So let's investigate.
The Facts
The White House says the figure comes from a 1997 Institute of Justice report, written by Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago. This study is based on data collected from a survey in 1994, just the Brady law requirements for background checks was coming into effect. (In fact, the questions concerned purchases in 1993 and 1994, while Brady law went into effect in early 1994.) In other words, this is a really old figure.
The data is available for researchers to explore at the Interuniversity consortium on political and social research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Digging deeper, we find that the survey sample was just 251 people. (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.) With this sample size, the 95 percent confidence interval will be plus or minus 6 percentage points.
Moreover, when asked if he or she bought from a licensed firearms dealer, the possible answers included "probably was/think so" and "probably not," leaving open the possibility the purchaser was mistaken. (The "probably not" answers were counted as "no.")
When all of the "yes" and "probably was" answers were added together, that left 35.7 percent of respondents indicating they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, though as we noted the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.
Moreover, when gifts, inheritances and prizes are added in, then the number shrinks to 26.4 percent. (The survey showed that nearly 23.8 percent of the people surveyed obtained their gun either as a gift or inherited it, and about half of them believed a licensed firearms dealer was the source.)
Cook and Ludwig, in a lengthier 1996 study of the data for the Police Foundation, acknowledge the ambiguity in the answers, but gave their best estimate as a range of 30 to 40 percent for transactions in the "off-the-books" secondary market. (The shorter 1997 study cited by the White House does not give a range, but instead says "approximately 60 percent of gun acquisitions" involved a licensed dealer.)
Interestingly, while people often speak of the "gun show loophole," the data in this 1994 survey shows that only 3.9 percent of firearm purchases were made at gun shows.
Ludwig acknowledged that "our estimate is clearly not perfect." He said that a larger sample size would have provided a more precise estimate of off-the-books transactions, but he and Cook were not involved in the design stage of the survey. He added that one reason why the data is so old is because the federal government has generally stopped funding such research.
"While there is no perfect estimate in social science, we'd have a better estimate for this proportion had the federal government not decided to get out of the business of supporting research on guns and gun violence several years ago," he said.
Ludwig and Cook were among the social scientists who signed a letter to Biden earlier this month calling on ending barriers to firearms research. The letter includes an interesting figure, comparing how many National Institute of Health awards have been given for firearms research versus infectious diseases.
Major NIH research awards and cumulative morbidity for select conditions in the US, 1973-2012
Condition Total cases NIH research awards
Cholera 400 212
Diphtheria 1337 56
Polio 266 129
Rabies 65 89
Total of four diseases 2068 486
Firearm injuries >4,000,000 3
One of the executive orders signed by Obama on Jan. 16 directed the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence, based on a legal analysis that congressional restrictions on spending money to advocate for gun control does not apply to such inquiries.
There is a bit of irony here. While the 40-percent figure appears overstated and out of date, it remains the most cited statistic on the secondary market because foes of gun control have thwarted extensive research on guns. Advocates of gun controls thus continue to rely on a flawed statistic nearly two decades old.
Cook and Ludwig, in a paper that released this month at a gun-violence conference hosted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that there appears to be little or no impact from the Brady law in reducing the homicide rate, even though government officials (such as Obama) routinely tout the number of people prevented from buying guns because of background checks.
"One explanation is that the type of person who is disqualified from legally buying a gun but shops at FFL [dealer with a federal firearms license] anyway tends to be at relatively low risk for misusing a gun," Cook and Ludwig write in "The Limited Impact of the Brady Act: Evaluation and Implications."
So is there any other, recent data that might provide some insight into the impact of the off-the-books gun market?
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, will report data from a 2004 survey of inmates in state prisons in a chapter in a book titled "Reducing Gun Violence in America," to be published Jan. 28 by Johns Hopkins Press.
The offenders were incarcerated from crimes committed with handguns, and this is how they reported how they obtained the guns:
Licensed gun dealer: 11 percent
Friends or family: 39.5 percent
"The street:" 37.5 percent
Stolen gun: 9.9 percent
Gun show/Flea market: 1.7 percent
In other words, only a relatively small percentage was purchased from licensed dealers. Obama's proposal on universal background checks, however, allows for "limited, common-sense exceptions for cases like certain transfers between family members and temporary transfers for hunting and sporting purposes."
The Pinocchio Test
We are faced with a conundrum here. We generally believe politicians should use the most up-to-date and relevant information available, but congressional foes of gun control have made it difficult to improve on obviously stale information.
The small sample size is also a serious problem, but again, roadblocks have made it difficult to do a more comprehensive survey.
At the same time, President Obama and the White House gun-violence plan act as if the information is fresh and relevant; it has also been repeated as current information by the news media. The Obama gun-violence plan cites "studies," but in fact these all are merely riffs on the same, relatively small survey taken nearly two decades ago. Generally, we would rule such claims are deserving of a
Pinocchio or two.
Vice President Biden, meanwhile, deserves kudos for acknowledging that the information is suspect and may not be entirely accurate. He at least frames it with some caveats, which is proper.
So, we are going to take a wait-and-see approach with this statistic. Going forward, gun-control advocates should be much more upfront about its problems, especially the fact that it is old information. The 30-to-40 percent range that Cook and Ludwig first deduced should be the norm, not the "up to 40 percent" claim. Moreover, advocates should routinely acknowledge this is stale information-which they are certainly free to blame on gun-industry lobbying.
We will be watching, and urge readers to keep track as well.
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22. RTD LTE: Provide trained teachers the option to carry
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Clayton Rhoades emailed me this:
--
From Richmond Times-Dispatch: http://tinyurl.com/aecd2ss
January 24, 2013
Provide trained teachers the option to carry
Editor, Times-Dispatch:
Adam Lanza shot 26 people in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut. James Holmes is charged with shooting 70 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 34 people at Columbine High School. Jared Loughner shot 19 people including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. And Seung-Hui Cho shot 49 people at Virginia Tech.
During 2012, there were more than 2,600 shootings in Chicago (where handguns are mostly banned). It is safe to say that most, if not all, of these killers did not attend gun-safety courses or were otherwise trained professionals. Yet, they all successfully shot lots of people.
Nevertheless, a common argument from those opposed to arming teachers or letting the general public carry firearms is that they are not trained and may miss their target during a defensive shooting.
How is it that thugs, gang members, individuals high on drugs and those with mental illnesses all manage to shoot their victims but responsible gun-owners who undergo criminal background checks, attend gun-safety courses, obtain concealed handgun permits, and commonly practice at shooting ranges are expected to have a zero-accuracy rate? Why are those who take seriously their own self-defense treated as if they are incapable of actually hitting a target while lunatics have no problem shooting their victims?
We must recognize that murderers are targeting victims where guns are banned. During the Sandy Hook Elementary murders, it took police 20 minutes to arrive at the school after the first calls for help. It is time we provide the option for those individuals holding a Virginia concealed handgun permit (employees and visitors) to carry firearms onto school grounds to help defend themselves and our children. To do otherwise is unconscionable.
Clayton W. Rhoades. Midlothian.
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23. Why young women want AR-15's
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James Durso emailed me this:
--
From National Review: http://tinyurl.com/b3bsayb
By Celia Bigelow & Aubrey Blankenship
January 23, 2013
Sorry, President Obama. As young women, we prefer an AR-15 "assault" rifle with a 30-round magazine for self-defense.
In fact, we wouldn't want to be stuck at home without one. In the wake of mass murders like Sandy Hook and the horrific rapes and murders of thousands of women each year, pepper spray, mace, or five-round handheld pistols aren't going to cut it.
So what's a girl to do? When choosing our tool for home defense, we want the best - in accuracy, handling, and aesthetics. The best choice by all three criteria is - hands down - the AR-15.
AR-15s are the most popular rifle in the U.S.; more than 3 million Americans own one. And its popularity isn't with criminals - assault rifles account for only 0.6 percent of murders every year. Rather, the semi-automatic AR-15 is the gun of choice for many hunters, target shooters, and home defenders.
Critics pin the allure of AR-15 on Hollywood (think Angelina Jolie's "Wait, why do I get the girl gun?" in Mr. and Mrs. Smith), video games, and the military, but women especially haven't chosen this weapon on a whim.
Our goal when defending against a home invader is simple: to hit where we aim. One shouldn't underestimate the value of target practice, but using an accurate weapon is the key to hitting a target with ease and confidence.
The AR-15 is lightweight and practical. As light as five pounds, it produces low levels of recoil, and it's easy to shoot. It also looks intimidating, which is what you want when facing an assailant or intruder. But don't let its appearance intimidate you. Assault rifles such as the AR-15 aren't more "dangerous," as liberals claim. They don't fire faster than other rifles, and don't normally contain more powerful ammunition.
Accuracy? Check. Ease in handling? Check. Intimidation factor? Check. An AR-15 might be a woman's best friend.
We are rational women who, as law-abiding citizens, understand the need - and the right - to defend ourselves. We don't want to be caught underprepared in the kind of desperate situation that happens too frequently to people across America.
This past week in Georgia, an intruder entered the home of a mother and two children. The mother grabbed her two children and her gun, and proceeded to hide in a crawlspace in the attic. When the intruder entered the attic, the mother fired and hit him with five out of six shots (he still lived).
Imagining ourselves in a high-stress, violent situation, we want a gun with enough ammo, and more, to get the job done. Sometimes, you only get one shot. At other times, you may need more. When you don't have time to reload in the heat of a home invasion, the AR-15's 30-round magazine gives you the flexibility and security a handgun will not.
High-capacity magazines serve as a life-saving insurance mechanism, a self-defense back-up if something doesn't go according to plan. Yet you would never think of these guns in this sense by listening to anti-gun zealots and their allies in media.
Assault rifles and high-capacity magazines have been under fire from our nation's legislators since the Newtown massacre. It only took Senator Dianne Feinstein two days to announce her intention to reinstate the Clinton-era assault-weapons ban to get "these dangerous weapons of war off our streets." New York governor Andrew Cuomo took it upon himself to make his state the first to tighten gun laws post-Newtown, proudly outlawing magazines over seven rounds because "no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer."
Senator Feinstein and Governor Cuomo: We may not need ten bullets to kill a deer, but we sure need them in our own defense. Criminals rarely use assault rifles. Nearly ten times as many murders are committed with hammers and clubs, and 35 times as many with knives. Does that mean we need to ban those too, Senator Feinstein? Banning assault weapons will only take weapons away from my house - not from criminals on the street.
Criminals with the intent to harm or kill will always find ways to do so. If they want to kill with an assault rifle or using high-capacity magazines, they will also find a way to do so, regardless of the law. As young, responsible women, we want the ability to defend ourselves against these criminals, and we should be able to do so with weapons of equal or greater power.
Violence is always going to exist. As women, we should possess the right to best defend ourselves against it, whether with a handgun or our much preferred AR-15. So, Mr. President, use the First Amendment as much as you like to rail against our AR-15s, but hands off our Second Amendment right to use them.
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24. Gender gap on most gun issues is massive, polls suggest
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From GOPUSA.com: http://tinyurl.com/bf5jd9b
By The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
January 21, 2013
When Wisconsinites were polled last year about a new state law allowing possession of concealed weapons, most men supported it.
But women were overwhelmingly opposed.
In fact, no other issue in Marquette Law School's broad and frequent polling of Wisconsin voters last year so divided the sexes -- not Medicare, "Obamacare," gay marriage, taxes, school funding, collective bargaining, recalls, mining, military spending, abortion or immigration.
In one January 2012 poll, the gender gap on "concealed carry" was a massive 27 points -- 59% approval among men, 32% among women.
This is a look at two key fault lines in public opinion about guns. Gender is one. Partisanship is the other.
Democrats and Republicans have drifted far apart on guns, as they have on so many issues. That poses a huge obstacle to getting legislation passed in a period of divided government, because there is so little common ground between the parties.
The gender gap on guns also has big political implications. Just as the Democratic Party may have been hurt with male voters in the past by supporting gun control, the Republican Party risks compounding its problems with female voters in taking a hard line against gun restrictions.
Overall, national polls point to a public shift in favor of stricter gun laws since the school massacre last month in Newtown, Conn.
But while there's broad support for some changes in the gun laws, the public is divided over others -- by region, age, type of community (urban, suburban, rural), and especially gender and party.
Gender gap on guns
As a simple yardstick of opinion on the issue, the nonpartisan Pew poll asks whether it's more important to "protect the right of Americans to own guns" or to "control gun ownership."
Pew has consistently found big differences between men and women on this question over the past 20 years.
In Pew's latest national poll (Jan. 9-13), 51% of men but only 38% of women said it was more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns; 57% of women but only 44% of men said it was more important to control gun ownership.
The gender gap was modest among the most partisan voters. But it was massive among political independents.
Among independents, 58% of men said it was more important to protect gun rights, compared with 36% of women; 60% of women said it was more important to control gun ownership, compared with 38% of men.
The gender gap is much bigger on some gun issues than on others, polls indicate.
There are huge differences between men and women on banning semiautomatic weapons, a step favored by 67% of women but only 48% of men in Pew's most recent national survey.
There's also a big gender gap over arming teachers and school officials, an idea backed by 47% of men but only 32% of women.
The gender gap is smaller on two proposals seen as having a better chance at passage: banning high-capacity ammunition clips, supported by 57% of women and 50% of men, and background checks for private gun sales and gun shows, backed by 88% of women and 83% of men.
The "concealed carry" issue cited is not part of the national post-Newtown gun debate. But it does illustrate how divided men and women can be on gun issues in a swing state with lots of gun owners -- about half the voters in Wisconsin on Nov. 6 said they had a gun in their household, according to the exit poll done here.
Marquette Law School polled on the legalization of concealed weapons three times last year, and each time there was a huge difference -- 23, 25 and 27 points -- in the percentage of men and women who supported the law. No other issue Marquette polled on during the year produced such a large gender gap.
"You're seeing the potential for women reacting to an issue quite differently than men," says political scientist Charles Franklin, who conducted the Marquette polls. "And it has a partisan impact, reinforcing women's support for Democrats and reinforcing men's support for Republicans."
Partisan gap on guns
The partisan gap on guns is bigger than the gender gap and has been growing over time.
On Pew's basic yardstick of gun rights vs. gun control, there is a chasm between the parties: 70% of Republicans say it's more important to protect gun rights compared with 22% of Democrats; 73% of Democrats say it's more important to control gun ownership compared with 27% of Republicans. Independents were almost evenly divided on the question.
Other polls indicate a similar pattern. In a survey this month by Gallup, 64% of Democrats wanted stricter gun laws, but only 18% of Republicans did.
Gap has grown over years
These differences are much bigger today than they were 10 or 20 years ago, according to Pew's polling.
In 1993, 45% of Republicans and 25% of Democrats said protecting gun rights was more important than controlling gun ownership.
In 2007, 50% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said protecting gun rights was more important.
But during Barack Obama's presidency, that gap has grown much wider -- not because Democratic attitudes have changed, but because Republicans have become that much more in favor of gun rights.
"This issue has become a much more partisan issue, even (more) than it was a decade ago," says Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center. "The Republican Party has more clearly become an anti-gun control party and the Democratic Party, while it still may have a fair amount of diversity on the issue, has become more pro-gun control."
Because the distance between the parties is even bigger among members of Congress than it is among voters, the partisan gap over guns is now a huge obstacle to legislative action on the issue.
The shift in public opinion toward gun restrictions since the Newtown school shooting could prompt Congress to act on the most popular and least divisive proposals, such as expanding background checks.
But polls also say that overall public support for stricter gun laws, while rising since Newtown, is still lower than it was during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
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25. Ending gun violence requires commitment, not all of it voluntary
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From Human Events: http://tinyurl.com/a5nwqvc
By Ann Coulter
January 23, 2013
The good news is: Obama and the Senate Democrats have no intention of passing more idiotic gun legislation in response to the Newtown massacre. The bad news is that they also have no intention of passing any legislation about the mentally ill, which would actually do something to reduce these mass shootings.
Instead, the Democrats will jawbone about "assault weapons" and other meaningless gun laws for the sole purpose of scaring soccer moms into hating the National Rifle Association. Expect to hear a lot about Republicans preferring "the gun lobby" to "children." (Which is evidently not at all like preferring the teachers lobby to children.)
Democrats are hoping to pick up another dozen congressional seats in 2014, so they need terrified women.
Just don't expect a vote. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid cannot afford a vote on any of these nonsense gun laws because he needs to protect the seats of Democrats who have to get re-elected in districts where voters know something about guns.
Even the stupidest politician has to know how utterly meaningless "assault weapon" bans are. (In fairness, New York's Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and Gov. Andrew Cuomo may not know.) But Democrats need to gin up the most easily fooled voters.
"Assault weapons" are defined as "whatever politicians say they are." The guns that are banned and the ones that aren't are functionally identical. They're all semi-automatics.
Semi-automatics shoot one bullet per trigger pull - that's the definition. Any handgun manufactured since the Civil War is a "semi-automatic." The most basic self-defense revolver for women is a "semi-automatic."
An example of a gun that is not a semi-automatic is a musket. Also those guns where a "BANG!" flag pops out when the clown pulls the trigger.
An automatic firearm - what militaries and drug cartels have - continuously fires when the trigger is pulled. They have been subject to a near-total federal ban in this country since the 1930s, so they're irrelevant to the discussion.
The only differences in the semi-automatics the Democrats want to ban and the ones they don't are purely cosmetic details, such as bayonet mounts or pistol grips.
When is the last time anyone was killed with a bayonet in this country? Bayonets were rarely used even during the Civil War. Obama mocked the idea of bayonets during one of his debates with Romney. Now he's terrified of them!
Semi-automatics with bayonets are some of the guns Democrats call "assault weapons." It would be like defining 12-inch hunting knives with camouflage-colored handles - but not those with black handles - as "assault knives." Assault weapons are the semi-automatics that look scary to soccer moms.
An example of the intentional obfuscation about semi-automatics (or "guns") is the "Violence Policy Center" webpage, which states: "Semiautomatic assault weapons are civilian versions of automatic military assault rifles (like the AK-47 and the M-16) and automatic military assault pistols (like the UZI)."
This would be like saying: "Little girls' pink bedrooms are civilian versions of military prisons (like Guantanamo) and terrorist rendition prisons (like CIA Black Sites)."
Yes, exactly alike, except the "prison" part.
Since not all Democrats get to run for office in New York, congressional Democrats can't risk taking votes on such silly laws. Your guns will be safe, but your children won't, because we'll still have the mentally ill showing up at movie theaters, subway stations, shopping malls and schools.
If soccer moms want to worry about something, they should worry more about schizophrenics than guns.
In the late 1980s, New York City Mayor Ed Koch tried to institutionalize Joyce Brown, a mentally ill heroin addict living on the street who went by the name "Billie Boggs" (after local television host Bill Boggs). Brown was defecating on herself, removing all her clothes, burning money, running into traffic and shouting obscenities at passers-by. In other words, she was a prototype for Occupy Wall Street.
Brown's family desperately wanted to have Brown committed to Bellevue Hospital. A Columbia psychiatrist argued for her institutionalization. The neighbors supported her commitment.
But the New York Civil Liberties Union wanted Brown back on the street. Her NYCLU attorney, Robert Levy, boasted that "Billie Boggs" was as sane as "a member of the board of the Civil Liberties Union."
A New York judge, Robert Lippman, agreed -- but not the way I do. Instead of ordering the entire NYCLU board institutionalized, he ordered the release of this poor, mentally disturbed woman. She promptly spoke at Harvard. (Princeton already had Peter Singer.) Then she was back on the street, taking heroin and getting into fights with other homeless people.
Schizophrenics are generally incapable of knowing they need help. Without involuntary commitment, they are abandoned to the streets, getting beaten up, sexually abused, stolen from and set on fire. They also sometimes push people onto subway tracks, murder grandmothers, slaughter firemen and enter "gun-free zones" to commit mass murder.
But the Democrats won't do anything about it. Even if you do not hear voices that tell you to kill strangers, liberals say: "Either we are all mad or none of us is mad." Then they get mouthy about banning guns with bayonets. On which they will not vote. Montana's Sen. Max Baucus has to get re-elected.