Nevada Senate: Behind The Headline
Nevada Democrats are continuing to wage an unsavory “hit piece” campaign against Nevada state Senators Bob Beers and Joe Heck. The race is subject of a lede editorial in Friday’s Review-Journal.
But here’s “the rest of the story.”
The campaign is marked by a virtual absence of the supposed Democratic challengers — former school district secretary Shirley Breeden and former PurchasePro PR flack Allison Copening — from the traditional “candidate forums” within the districts. Instead, Dems have targeted the two districts with at least 18 mailers apiece, plus more than a half million dollars in TV ads, in their attempt to take over the already gerrymandered state Senate.
Why these two districts? Because both show registration edges shifting slightly Democratic. That’s public knowledge. What no one is talking about, though, is the possible role played in that shift by a new philosophy which dictates federal housing moneys should no longer be spent to build “projects” — instant ghettos — but instead to “mainstream” housing aid recipients into more “normal” neighborhoods full of people who earn a living, pay their mortgages and tax bills, and maintain their properties.
Who decides where such people should be “mainstreamed”? What if the bureaucrats in charge of doling out those federal tax dollars had a political agenda?
“There seems to be a pretty good case to be made that there is a much larger amount of Section 8 housing in my district than there was four years ago,” Sen. Beers says.
That’s also bringing to such relatively affluent neighborhoods types of crime once seen only in the ’hood — drive-by shootings, stuff like that. Odd to see our cops and firemen teaming up with those responsible for such shenanigans … if individual cops and firemen really ARE represented by the “Professional Firefighters of Nevada” and the “Southern Nevada Conference of Police and Sheriffs,” which funded at least one of the code-numbered Democratic attack mailers against Sen. Beers (the one coded “NV6-9”.)
The Democratic mailers and TV ads complain, among other things, that senators Heck and Beers want to make it easier for teachers who volunteer to undergo special safety training after earning state concealed-weapon permits to carry firearms in school.
“They’re distorting both the bills and the votes,” says Sen. Heck. “It’s already legal to carry guns in the schools if you just have a note from the principal. Bob’s bill actually would have made it safer, because it would have required additional training, in addition to the CCW (state weapons permit.) … It’s specifically stated in statute that right now a teacher or a college professor can carry with a letter of permission of the principal or the college president.”
More to the point, Israeli children die of schoolhouse shootings at a far lower rate than American children, precisely because teachers and parent chaperones there are almost always armed and able to protect them.
On Jan. 25 of this year, two Palestinian terrorists, recently released from an Israeli prison, cut a hole through a fence and infiltrated the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva, south of Jerusalem.
“They entered a classroom where counselors were holding a meeting, and stabbed two of them,” the Jerusalem Post reports.
And how many students were massacred?
Pardon me. Were you not paying attention? This was in Israel.
“Two of the counselors were armed and managed to overpower and kill the terrorists, without giving them a chance to fire their pistol,” the Israeli newspaper reported.
They plugged ’em.
No reports yet of any of the students of the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva being shot by their teachers for failure to turn in their homework.
Here in America, “Hardly mentioned in the massive news coverage of the school- related shootings during the past year is how they ended,” John R. Lott, Jr., a fellow at University of Chicago School of Law, wrote in the Los Angeles Times in June of 1998. “Two of the four shootings were stopped by a citizen displaying a gun. In the October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, MS, which left two students dead, an assistant principal retrieved a gun from his car and physically immobilized the shooter while waiting for the police.”
“More recently,” Professor Lott continued, “the school-related shooting in Edinboro, PA, which left one teacher dead, was stopped only after a bystander pointed a shotgun at the shooter when he started to reload his gun. The police did not arrive for another 10 minutes. Who knows how many lives were saved by these prompt responses?”
Dr. Lott’s exhaustive studies of multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1995 reveal that “only one policy was found to reduce deaths and injuries from these shootings: allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns.
“The effect of ‘shall-issue’ concealed handgun laws, which give adults the right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness, was dramatic. Thirty-one states now have such laws. When states passed them during the 19 years we studied, the number of multiple-victim public shootings declined by 84 percent. Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average by 90 percent, injuries by 82 percent. …”
Why don’t you know about this? Because the mass media purposely fail to mention the number of times that mass shooting are stopped by other, law-abiding Americans WITH GUNS. Don’t believe me? See www.lewrockwell.com/lott/lott14.html
“People have to realize no matter how fast the police response is, there’s going to be dead children,” Sen. Heck explains. “We’re trying to make it safer” for teachers to defend their young charges here in Nevada.
And for this, these upstanding state senators are ridiculed by the Democrats for “wanting to hand out firearms to kindergarten teachers!”
Gee, and here I thought Democratic standard-bearer Barack Obama insists he “respects the Second Amendment,” that he’s “not going to take away your guns.”
Careful, my friends. I think a bit of that Democratic hoplophobia is showing.