Proven Solutions to ENDING School Shootings:

JPFO: What kind of advice could you give the USA to combat the recent school massacres that seemingly have become quite common upon our soil?

SCHILLER: Now for Jonesboro and the US gun control laws in regard to schools: Way back in 1973 - '74 I lived in a Kibbutz in Northern Israel, called Ramat Yochanan. During Passover week in '74 we in Galilee experienced the first of a number of specific PLO attacks targeting specifically schools and children houses, kindergartens, school buses and the like. It started with an infiltration in Quiriat Schmoneh on the Passover weekend, where the perpetrators found the school empty and locked (of course during the holidays!) and took over a nearby residential building, shooting people and in the end blowing themselves up. A few weeks later the worst of this series of incidents took place in Maalot on May 15th: Three PLO gunmen, after making their way through the border fence, first shot up a van load full of workers returning from a tobacco factory (incidentally these people happened to be Galilee Arabs, not Jews), then they entered the school compound of Maalot. First they murdered the housekeeper, his wife and one of their kids, then they took a whole group of nearly 100 kids and their teachers hostage. These were staying overnight at the school, as they were on a hiking trip. In the end, the deadline ran out, and the army's special unit assaulted the building. During the rescue attempt, the gunmen blew their explosive charges and sprayed the kids with machine-gun fire. 25 people died, 66 wounded.

After this a controversial debate erupted in Israel in regards to guns, self defense etc. We heard of course the same dumb arguments by some good people, you always hear on these occasions like " We do not live in the Wild West here!" Or: "Guns don't solve problems!" or similar silly things.

JPFO: Were there any gun laws in Israel in those days?

SCHILLER: Now, one has to remember, that Israel still had and has most of the old and very strict gun laws dating back to the days of the British Mandatory (1918-1948) on the books, and we in the promised land have meanwhile grown our share of idiotic bureaucrats and dumb politicians, too. But with the help of some smart people, not the least the then Commander-in-Chief, Northern Command Paratroop General Raful Eytan, all the reservists on the settlements were issued their personal weapons, and whoever had a clean track record could get a concealed weapons permit. I for instance had and still have one.

JPFO: What happened then?

SCHILLER: Teachers and kindergarten nurses now started to carry guns, schools were protected by parents (and often grandpas) guarding them in voluntary shifts. No school group went on a hike or trip without armed guards. The Police involved the citizens in a voluntary civil guard project "Mishmar Esrachi", which even had its own sniper teams. The Army's Youth Group program, "Gadna", trained 15 - 16 year old kids in gun safety and guard procedures and the older high school boys got involved with the Mishmar Esrachi. During one noted incident, the "Herzliyah Bus massacre" (March '78, hijacking of a bus, 37 dead, 76 wounded), these youngsters were involved in the overall security measures in which the whole area between North Tel Aviv and the resort town of Herzlyiah was blocked off, manning roadblocks with the police, guarding schools kindergartens etc.

No problems with gun safety there, as most kids in Israel grow up used to seeing guns on the street (in the hands of army personnel on leave -- every soldier takes his/her gun home when on leave!). When the message got around to the PLO groups and a couple infiltration attempts failed, the attacks against schools ceased. Too much of a risk here: Terrorists and other evildoers don't like risks.

See also JPFO's Moral Vacuum + Gun Control = & Destruction In Oregon.

When I heard this guy (Saul Cornell) interviewed about his new book (A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America) on NPR, I thought:  another Bellesiles.  I hope Clayton Cramer nails him.

Heh heh.

From the discussion forum at Northeastshooters.com.  Excerpt:

33. We should ban "Saturday Night Specials" and other inexpensive guns because it's not fair that poor people have access to guns too.

34. Police officers have some special Jedi-like mastery over hand guns that private citizens can never hope to obtain.

35. Private citizens don't need a gun for self-protection because the police are there to protect them even though the Supreme Court says the police are not responsible for their protection.

36. Citizens don't need to carry a gun for personal protection but police chiefs, who are desk-bound administrators who work in a building filled with cops, need a gun.

37. "Assault weapons" have no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people. The police need assault weapons. You do not.

Here's an opinion piece from Wendy Cukier, president of Coalition for Gun Control (Canada) and creator of Canada's gun registry program.

In a country where gun control prevents people from being able to defend themselves when a lunatic comes after them, she says the gun registry is clearly working.  And if you repeat a lie enough times, eventually someone will believe it's the truth.

Other Canadians are not so easily fooled, like Ian Robinson:

When questioned in the aftermath of this event, Cukier told CBC that: "The argument for gun control has never been based on individual cases. (It) has always been based on the general principle that if you have adequate control on all guns, you reduce the chances that dangerous people will gain access to them. You don't eliminate them."

Her statement is disingenuous to say the least.

"Disingenuous" is a fancy word for "lie."

The entire gun control and registry debate in this country is, and always has been, based on an individual case, that of the slaughter of 14 female students at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 by another loser with a grudge.

And it has been a debate that has demonstrated a barely concealed hostility toward men in general and male firearms owners in particular.

In Canada, gun control wasn't a public policy issue, it became -- thanks to the 1989 massacre with a male perpetrator and female victims -- part of the nation's ongoing gender wars and was framed in precisely those terms.

Anyone who objected to the content of the legislation -- citing practicality, lack of efficacy, civil rights -- was written off as some kind of psychopathic redneck whose idea of formal wear was to try to iron a crease in his army surplus fatigue pants before plunking himself down in front of Ted Nugent's hunting show on the Outdoor network while chowing down on a big ol' bag of deep-fried pork rinds with his arm around his sister.

That was a lie, too.

There is but a single lesson to be learned from this event.

The people who told you government regulation would protect you against monster losers with grudges were lying.

And when they tell us in the coming days that just a little bit more paperwork, just a few more tweaks to the legislation, that will make us safer, they're still lying.

And this editorial from the Toronto Sun:

When Parliament returns from its summer recess tomorrow, we expect the first item of business will be another hysterical debate about “saving” Canada’s discredited gun registry.

It will happen solely because of last week’s tragic shootings in Montreal as the Liberals, Bloc and NDP combine forces in a bid to revive the registry.

That would be the same, ineffective and poorly managed registry into which up to $2 billion of tax money has already been dumped, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper rightly wants to scrap in favour of better ways to combat gun crime.

The irony is that the gun registry was never meant to stop the kind of spontaneous, random atrocity Kimveer Gill committed at Dawson College, before killing himself.

All of his guns were registered. What good did it do? And if, like most criminals, he hadn’t registered them, so what?

Gun registries, permits, licences and strict storage and transportation rules are meaningless to people like Gill.

How many more defenseless innocents need to die, Wendy?  How many more, before you come to your senses.

(Rhetorical question--I don't actually expect her to ever see what she has really done).

Last two links tnx to The War On Guns.

When it's aimed at gun owners:

In a recent article, More Guns, More Problems, the author considers getting a concealed carry permit in her new home state, and consults some “anti-gunners” to help her decide.

This idea is just wrong, said Joshua Horwitz, the executive director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Horwitz was quick to point out that Naveed Afzal Haq, the man who shot up a Jewish community center in Seattle last month, had a concealed carry permit.

“I think the idea that these people [legal concealed carriers] don’t do any damage is wrong,” said Horwitz. “More guns equal less crime is just false.”

Again, anti-gun “experts” make broad claims with no supporting data. But something darker lurks behind Horwitz’s words. Change one word in his comment and we have a neo-Nazi: “I think the idea that Jewish people don’t do any damage is wrong.” How quickly would the Anti-Defamation League initiate a–completely justified–campaign to demand an apology from Mr. Horwitz? But with gun owners, it’s okay to smear with a broad brush.

He goes on to show evidence that Haq did not, in fact, have any kind of concealed carry or gun permit, contrary to what the MSM has been repeating since it happened.

Of Arms and the Law posts an opinion piece in response to the recent U.N. anti-self defense diatribe, said response having been printed in the Bangkok Times of Thailand.

It reminded me of a site I came across recently called thailandoutdoor.com.  Check out this page.

Of course, since I don't have the proper character set installed to display his language correctly, most it is gibberish.  And let's face it, it wouldn't matter if I did have the proper character set installed, because I wouldn't be able to read Thai anyway.  However, I think the pictures speak for themselves.  Spoiler:  he's a Ruger fan.

---

UPDATE:  More news from Thailand, via NRA-ILA.

Teachers have one of the deadliest jobs in southern Thailand, with 44 killed by the bombs and bullets of an Islamic insurgency since 2004.

So the teachers are learning how to shoot back.

The Chulabhorn naval base, on the Gulf of Thailand in Narathiwat province, recently opened its heavily guarded gates to a training course for 100 public school teachers, mostly Buddhist men and women who say bringing a gun to school has become essential.

"You'd never see a teacher anywhere else in Thailand carrying a gun," said Sanguan Jintarat, head of the Teachers' Association that oversees the 15,000 teachers in the villages and towns of the restive south. "But we need them, or we'll die."

Emphasis mine.

Especially when it reminds a lot of people of why they hate you.

The story begins back in late 2003, which I made this post about in January 2004.  (Different blog name, different service, nobody read it but me).

Once again, in Illinois:

The following was released today by the Illinois State Rifle Association Political Victory Fund (ISRA-PVF):

A career criminal who was the focal point of a controversial Gov. Blagojevich veto has been arrested once again for burglarizing a Wilmette home.

Morio Billings was arrested by Chicago Police just 11 days after serving less than half of a 7-year sentence for a 2003 burglary that touched off a national firestorm over the right of self defense.

In that 2003 case, Billings broke into another Wilmette home and made off with personal items and the resident's luxury SUV. The next night, when Billings returned to the home for a second helping, he was confronted by the homeowner -- who was armed at the time. The homeowner shot and wounded Billings. Interestingly enough, the heroic homeowner was arrested for possessing the handgun that probably saved the lives of himself and his family. Wilmette is one of a handful of Chicago suburbs that forbid residents from owning handguns.

The homeowner's arrest sparked widespread outrage over the fact that a husband and father could be arrested for protecting his family.

In response, the Illinois State Rifle Association drafted legislation to protect homeowners from shortsighted local ordinances such as the one on the books in Wilmette. Despite near-unanimous approval by the Illinois General Assembly, Blagojevich vetoed the bill. Good sense ruled in the end when the legislature overrode the veto.

Blagojevich is  up for re-election.  Here's hoping there's enough people there with the good sense to throw him out.  Although I'd be surprised if he loses.

Can Gun Control Reduce Violence? at The War On Guns.

This currently appears nowhere else on the Internet, and I am grateful to Professor Covey for allowing me to present it here. How rarely do we see an academic speaking plainly to legislators about the folly of "gun control"? This is good stuff--much of which even an ornery absolutist like me can agree with--and deserves to be disseminated far and wide. I hope you will agree and help to do so by sharing the url to this post. This is one smart man, and his perspectives make us think.

The whole thing is at War On Guns.

The Gun Nut, a.k.a. David E. Petzal of Field & Stream magazine, has just posted a warning about the American Hunters & Shooters Association on his blog.  The AHSA--if you don't already know about for some reason--is a gun control group attempting to masquerade as a Second Amendment advocacy group.

This news has been buzzing around the gunblogger nichosphere^© for quite some time now.

I'm glad that awareness of this bogus group is not limited to gunbloggers, but seems to be seeping out into the world at large.  It's also good that these posts keep popping up so 1) we don't forget, and 2) newer readers will read about them even if they may have come in a little late.

To give credit where credit is due, I first heard of them from Triggerfinger in August of 2005.

That same month, I noted that the url to the AHSA website, "www.huntersandshooters.com" is suspiciously similar to the url of a real pro-RKBA website, "www.huntershooter.com," which is named Hunter's Shooting Association.  Triggerfinger noticed this, as well.  The War On Guns has also posted on them several times.

So if you've never heard of them before, follow all the links and read up.

Pro-Gun Progressive blows away the smoke and breaks all the mirrors in this study (*.pdf) of assualt weapons used in crime, published by CeaseFireMD (Maryland).

We see in this table that nationwide, rifles make up less than 5% of all firearm murders for 2001 (and years prior as far back as you care to look). They didn’t break it down by state, but there’s no reason to think that MD deviates from the norm very much. There were only 389 total rifle deaths that year, nationwide. Since Ceasefire is claiming about 180 rifle crimes a year in MD, it’s pretty clear that they can’t all be murders.

So what kinds of crimes are they including? Robberies? Shootings that aren’t fatal? Brandishing? Simple possession? We don’t have any way of knowing as they didn’t bother to tell us. But the rate of people who survive handgun shootings is much higher than those who survive shotgun and rifle shootings, for obvious reasons. The ratio of people killed by handgun vs. rifle vs. shotgun should give a fairly accurate rendition of how often each type of weapon is used–if anything, handgun use is underrepresented in the murder figures, as people are more likely to survive being shot by handguns.

But we can look at the FBI figures and see that rifles kill fewer people that shotguns. Rifles kill fewer people than hands, fists, feet, etc.

If anything, assault weapons are under-represented in violent crime.

Tnx to SayUncle.

Via The War On Guns is this link to a proposed replacement for the National Instant Check System.

BIDS:  Blind Identification Database System.

This is a long article, so make sure you have time to read and study it.  Anyone who is a gun owner, Second Amendment supporter, or privacy or freedom advocate should read it.

I'm posting about it here just in case someone reads this blog who doesn't already read The War On Guns.  It seems to me that BIDS would be a big step forward from NICS.

This editorial points to a new website from a pro-crime, anti-human rights group that should be checked out.  I'm sure this site will receive numerous smackdowns in the coming weeks from those who are better at writing such smackdowns than I.

What?  You didn't know self defense is a human right?  Yes, that's why the site is anti-human right.  I won't link to them.  Follow the link above if you want.

The editorial itself is pro-self defense, by the way.

UPDATE:  The site appears to be a production of the notorious Freedom States Alliance and our old friends, the Gun Guys.

UPDATE 2:  Thanks to ScottG for letting me know the link was wrong.  Apparently since I posted it this morning, they moved it from their "news" subdirectory to their "opinion" subdirectory.  That's why the link had gone bad.

NewsBusters has a Rebuttal to James Alan Fox by Howard Nemerov that's a good read:

Professor Fox’s maundering is based upon the unproven assumption that more gun control will lead to less violence. He believes that being a university professor entitles him to dictate public policy, and our request for supporting statistics is irrelevant because we are not part of his Ivory Tower clique. He uses his command of the English language to create subtle innuendos to label us gun-fetishists and paranoids, and to imply that we have taken the government hostage like so many terrorists.

The original article which is being rebutted is linked to from this page, but it has been archived and I can't find it.

It isn't a very long rebuttal, but it's full of good information and has a long list of endnotes to back it up.