There were more disturbing — in fact, downright evil — mass shootings this summer, which of course brought more predictable knee-jerk calls for yet more gun control.<\/p>\n
\u201cAK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities,\u201d said Barack Obama. (Actually, while the Second Amendment certainly does guarantee my right as a civilian to own a fully automatic, select-fire AK-47 — something Mr. Obama may have missed while going to school in Indonesia — they\u2019re currently banned; nothing but semi-automatic look-alikes can be legally imported or sold to us civilians.)<\/p>\n
Six Senate Democrats proposed in July to again ban full-sized magazines holding more than 10 bullets. Ironically, as our friend John Lott pointed out in a July 30 piece for Fox News, \u201cThe guns in several recent mass shootings (including the one in Aurora and last year in Tucson) have jammed because of the large magazines that were used\u201d — the smaller magazines favored by the senators probably would have allowed the shooters to keep firing longer.<\/p>\n
(By the way, Mr. Lott, a former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission and the author of the book \u201cMore Guns, Less Crime,\u201d also points out that, as a state senator in Illinois in 1998, Barack Obama supported a ban on all semi-automatic weapons. In case you were still confused about how to vote, this fall.)<\/p>\n
Since the 10-year so-called \u201cAssault Weapons Ban\u201d expired in 2004, America\u2019s murder rate has actually fallen, from 5.7 per 100,000, to 4.7 per 100,000, Mr. Lott points out.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take a deep breath and acknowledge any shooting death of an innocent person is upsetting, multiple shooting more so, and that there are types of Americans — compile your own list — who are good-hearted, but whose first response to events like these is emotional.<\/p>\n
The War on Drugs may kill 12 young black men in Detroit or Washington D.C. on any given weekend; they don\u2019t notice. But a dozen deaths in a suburban movie theater and they freak out — it could have been them.<\/p>\n
Thus, one of the first responses to the mass shooting of 70 everyday folks attending a premiere of the new Batman movie in Aurora, Colo. on July 20 (12 died), apparently by neuroscience doctoral student James Holmes (Yes, the depraved jihadist charged with killing 13 at Fort Hood in Texas three years ago was an Army psychiatrist; is there a pattern?) was that women all over the country promptly found their purses being searched when they entered their local movie theaters.<\/p>\n
That makes sense, given that the number of mass murderers in recent U.S. history who were women carrying guns in their purses turns out to be … um … zero?<\/p>\n
As I said, don\u2019t look for logic. The Usual Suspects on Capitol Hill immediately called for bringing back the so-called assault weapons ban, as though any of these shooters (the next outrage came on Aug. 5, when a white supremacist and notable drunk named Wade Michael Page killed six harmless worshipers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin) would have been stymied if their weapons had had \u201cthumbhole stocks\u201d instead of pistol grips — the development of the \u201cthumbhole stock\u201d being the main accomplishment of that absurd 1994-2004 legislation.<\/p>\n
\u2018AN ANACHRONISTIC OBSCENITY\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Other countries, where private gun ownership is more severely restricted, have lower murder rates, we\u2019re often told.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how comforting those statistics would be if your kid was one of the 77 people killed (69 by gunfire) in the 2011 Norwegian summer camp massacre by anti-immigration zealot Anders Behring Breivik, 32. Besides, Europe\u2019s \u201clow murder rate\u201d is a lie.<\/p>\n Germany has made it difficult for any civilian of moderate means to legally own a handgun for almost 90 years. And what\u2019s their murder rate?<\/p>\n Not counting men in uniform killed in combat, the number of civilian citizens of \u201cGross Deutschland\u201d (including Germany\u2019s conquered territories) murdered by their own government between 1934 and 1945 exceeded 12 million. Jews, Slavs, Romany (\u201cGypsies\u201d), homosexuals, cripples, Communists, other political dissidents … the list went on and on.<\/p>\n If there wasn\u2019t a single additional German murder since 1945, that would still work out to a murder rate of 133,000 per year over the past 90 years — ten times ours.<\/p>\n Though of course the murders have NOT ended. \u201cGermany, a country with some of the strictest gun control in the world — it requires not only extensive psychological screening but also a year\u2019s wait to get a gun — has been the site of three of the worst five multiple-victim K-12 public school shootings in the world, all in the past decade,\u201d Mr. Lott reports for Fox News.<\/p>\n No, the murders in Hitler\u2019s concentration camps weren\u2019t primarily \u201cgun deaths.\u201d They were civilian deaths caused precisely by the disarming of the public.<\/p>\n Disarmed Europe doesn\u2019t have \u201clow murder rates.\u201d It\u2019s just between genocides.<\/p>\n Yet a letter-writer to my own newspaper wrote on July 23: \u201cIt is time to jettison the Wild West mentality of our nation and challenge the archaic laws of our nation. The second amendment of the US Constitution … is an anachronistic obscenity and must be repealed. We already have well-regulated militias; we call them law enforcement agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n Just as Hitler called his the SS.<\/p>\n Anyway, Aurora, Colo. already HAS gun control.<\/p>\n