Vin Suprynowicz

A version of the following column appears in the Feb. 10 edition of “Firearms News” (formerly “Shotgun News,” on newsstands now.)

On Nov. 28, a Muslim Somali “refugee” named Abdul Razak Ali Artan rammed a car into a group of unarmed pedestrians at Ohio State University in Columbus, exited the vehicle and began slashing the defenseless students with a butcher knife.

“By Allah, we will not let you sleep unless you give peace to the Muslims. You will not celebrate or enjoy any holiday,” the grateful refugee and adherent of the Religion of Peace wrote on his Facebook page before going on his rampage.

University and Obama administration Officials could of course find no link between the attack and the religion of the 18-year-old Somali, who also praised Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born radical al-Qaida cleric, describing him as a “hero.”

Artan was also quoted in the campus newspaper, The Lantern, several months ago complaining about the school’s lack of Islamic prayer rooms.

“I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media,” he stated. “I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be.”

Actually, Abdul, you turned out to be EXACTLY “what the media portrays you to be” (well, the honest media, anyway) . . . didn’t you?

Columbus is home to the second largest community of Somali refugees after Minneapolis. The Clinton-Bush-Obama U.S. State Department has been at it for 26 years and continues to bring in between 5,000 and 10,000 Somalis per year, according to the agency’s Refugee Processing Center.

In all, the U.S. government has imported more than 132,000 Somali Muslim refugees and distributed them into at least 300 U.S. cities and towns. More than 40 Somalis living in America have left the country since 2007 to fight for terrorist organizations, according to FBI reports. Dozens of others have been tried and convicted of providing material support to overseas terrorist organizations.

The Nov. 28 attack on the OSU campus is the second such knife attack in Columbus last year by a Muslim immigrant.

In February, 2016, four people were wounded, one critically, while dining at the city’s Nazareth Mediterranean Restaurant, which is owned by an Arab Christian from Israel. The attacker in that case was Mohamed Barry, an immigrant from the West African country of Guinea who slashed diners with a machete before he was killed by police while shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”

(Motivated by his religion? Why would you think that?)

In September, 2016, a Somali refugee living in Minnesota went on a stabbing spree at a mall in St. Cloud, injuring 10 people before he was shot and killed by an alert off-duty cop. He asked shoppers if they were Muslim and if they said no, he attacked them with his knife.

World Net Daily last August reported an alarming surge of knife attacks by Muslims around the world, yet the media typically cover these attacks as isolated incidents without connecting the single common denominator -– Islam.

( http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/media-silent-on-surge-in-islam-inspired-knife-attacks/ .)

Fortunately, because Ohio State Police Officer Alan Horujko was armed, the Nov. 28 attack ended after about a minute. Officer Horujko shot this particular demented clown, thus demonstrating once again that “guns can indeed solve many problems.”

Eleven victims were hospitalized, two requiring major surgery. Those who have seen such wounds know some may be disfigured or partially disabled for life.

The good news? The Buckeye Firearms Association reported that on Dec. 8 the Ohio House passed “campus carry” by a vote of 68-25. A 3:15 the next morning the Ohio Senate also OK’d the measure, 22-8.

This means Ohio colleges and universities can now allow students with concealed carry permits to carry guns for self-defense. It also means concealed carry permit holders can keep guns in their cars in a high school or elementary school parking lot, as they already could at colleges and universities. And the legislation removes the mandatory gun-free designation for “day-care facilities, private aircraft, and public areas of airport terminals.”

The measure was last reported headed to Gov. John Kasich’s desk for a signature.

SWING-AND-A-MISS IN NEVADA

More good news: Three weeks later, on Dec. 28, Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt ruled Nevada’s new “universal” background check law, enacted by a tiny electoral majority Nov. 8, is “unenforceable”; no Nevadan need bother trying to comply.

The law — rejected in every county but Clark County/Las Vegas, but nonetheless enacted statewide by a huge Clark County Democratic majority which includes thousands of Spanish-speaking hotel maids and other casino employees bused to early voting locations (where they need not show any ID or proof of citizenship to vote) by the Culinary Union — would have made it a felony for a departing serviceman to loan his fiancée a handgun for self-defense while he deployed overseas, or for one hunter to loan a buddy with a broken rifle his own rifle in the field . . . unless of course all parties involved in these “firearms transfers” first drove as much as 100 miles to a federally licensed gun store during business hours to pay for a “background check” . . . twice.

(The second check would have been required when the borrowed firearm was returned.)

“This is what happens when you allow uninformed, out-of-state lobbying groups that prey on people’s emotions to write your laws,” commented the National Rifle Association, reminding us that “Not a single sheriff supported Bloomberg’s Question One.” (Clark County/Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo declared himself “neutral.”)

The measure was funded by billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who spent an incredible $35.30 per vote) and organized locally by former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones Blackhurst (still remembered for her ruthless eminent-domain property seizures while in office to benefit her pals the downtown casino moguls) . . . who now works for Caesars Palace.

The initiative was written in such a way that all private-transfer background checks had to be conducted via the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, as opposed to Nevada’s “Point of Contact” system, the state attorney general noted.

“Initiative supporters avoided utilizing the state system because had they done so, Question One would have required the filing of a fiscal note, explaining to voters how much the new background checks would cost the state,” the NRA explains.

The FBI recently sent a letter to the Nevada Department of Public Safety stating the FBI would not conduct background checks on private firearms transfers as called for in the new law, because Nevada “. . . cannot dictate how federal resources are applied.”

‘MORE THAN 900 DEATHS’!

Meantime, the New York Times seems determined to distance itself ever further from the freedom-loving American mainstream.

After five people were killed and six wounded in a shooting in another gun-free zone at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in early January, The Times editorialized Jan. 12:

“In a delusional postscript to the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting last week, . . . Republican legislators in Florida are proposing to allow the public to go freely armed into the unsecured parts of airports — all the better, the sponsors argue, to intercept the next random shooter in self-defense. . . .

“Having citizens armed in more and more of the nation’s public places, from schools to barrooms, has been a high priority of the gun lobby,” said the Times, which for some reason never identifies itself as a member of “the victim disarmament lobby” or “the rape enablers’ lobby.”

“The lobbyists have been pushing the vigilante fantasy of good shooters gunning down bad shooters, and that view has been embraced by President-elect Donald Trump, who ran with strong support from National Rifle Association. . . .”

And who . . . won? (The Times still isn’t sure. One day earlier they absurdly insisted “unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes” — all of which have been thoroughly debunked — still “cast a shadow over the new administration,” with consequences that “have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day.” Cue the shark music from “Jaws.”)

“The grim truth is that concealed-carry permit holders are rarely involved in stopping crime,” the New York Times editorial writers continue.

“But people with permits have been responsible for more than 900 deaths that did not involve self-defense over the last decade, according to the Violence Policy Center,” the Timesmen conclude.

Ah, the “Violence Policy Center,” which in turn depends on a very interesting Web site called “Concealed Carry Killers.”

In fact, firearms permit holders stop lots of crimes. Look up the mass shootings that were either cut short or prevented entirely at Pearl High School, Mississippi; the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia; the New Life Church in Colorado . . .

See http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/15/opinion/la-oe-kopel-guns-resistance-nra-20130115 . . . or try . . . http://www.nowandfutures.com/d2/GunsStopCrime_GunsSaveLivesfact_sheet.pdf . . .

. . . or https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm or, heck, OK . . . https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=18 .

Firearms permit holders cause fewer wrongful deaths, per capita, than police officers. Yet the Times doesn’t seem to feel criminals being stopped by “good shooters” is a “fantasy” — so long as the “good shooters” wear government uniforms. And the Violence Policy Center’s “death” statistics include suicides, of course.

Writing for Fox News back on June 23, 2010, economist and Fox News columnist John Lott reported: “The gun control groups don’t point to actual court cases. They look at news stories and selectively report what is reported in those stories.” In Florida, back in 2010, there were “11 pending cases. The gun control groups assume that anyone involved in a shooting will be convicted.” But in fact, in 7 of those 11 cases no one was even charged with a crime. Another three of the cases were suicides.

“When a permit holder uses a gun defensively and kills an attacker in a public place, the police often arrest them,” Lott explained. “Typically, he will later be released, but the police must first investigate what happened. The police can’t just take the shooter’s word for it that they used the gun defensively.”

More recently. In April of 2014, Crimeresearch.org took another look at the statistics of this same Violence Policy Center.

“In the Michigan state reports on concealed handgun permit holders that are cited by the VPC, 185 people died of suicides during the four reports from 2007 through 2012. That is 29 percent of the purported 636 deaths for the entire United States that the Violence Policy Center attributes to permitted concealed handguns. . . .

And 28 of those suicides “do not list a cause of death. The report merely notes that permit holders committed suicide. We don’t know if they committed suicide with a gun and (if it was a gun) that it was the gun that they carried concealed. Given that the overwhelming majority of these suicides were presumably at home, like most suicides, it isn’t even clear why a concealed handgun permit is relevant. . . .”

The Violence Policy Center also includes cases of permit holders who were convicted of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated and causing a death, without citing any evidence those permit holders were carrying a concealed handgun at the time of the motor vehicle accident. (Even if they were, this would be like blaming those deaths on cigarettes because the drunk driver had a pack of Chesterfields in his pocket.)

‘RARELY INVOLVED IN STOPPING CRIME’

But let’s return to our “Fake News” pals at the New York Times. Remember, it was on Jan. 12 that the editorial writers there ridiculed suggestions that armed citizens can stop mass shootings, simpering “The grim truth is that concealed-carry permit holders are rarely involved in stopping crime.”

First, the Timesmen ignore the fact that simply knowing a growing percentage of Americans walk around armed prevents thugs from attempting here the kind of gang rape assaults now common in disarmed Europe.

But what a coincidence that Jan. 12 date turns out to be. On that same day, Jan. 12, “about 50 miles west of downtown Phoenix,” at about 4:30 in the morning, KTAR television news reports an Arizona trooper had stopped to investigate a rollover accident along Interstate 10 when someone shot him in the shoulder. The shooter then began to beat the officer.

A citizen and his family were driving by. They saw the trooper in distress. The citizen stopped his car, ran toward the officer and asked if he needed assistance. When the officer said “yes,” the citizen ran back to his car, grabbed the . . .

Wait for it. . . .

. . . grabbed the handgun which the folks at the New York Times say he would never have any legitimate reason to carry around with him, ran back and “demanded the attacker stop.”

The attacker refused to stop. So the unnamed citizen shot him, multiple times, killing him.

Arizona Department of Public Safety Director Col. Frank Milstead said, “I don’t know that my trooper would be alive without (that) assistance. I would just say thank you.”

Yet by that time the trucks had already delivered that day’s New York Times, declaring “The grim truth is that concealed-carry permit holders are rarely involved in stopping crime.”

Hadn’t they?

Vin Suprynowicz is an award-winning former columnist and editorial writer for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal. He blogs at www.vinsuprynowicz.com .