No shots were fired
by R. Lee Wrights
Here’s a news story you’ll rarely read in your local newspaper:
YOUR HOMETOWN (Today) - A masked man armed with a rifle entered a local school today, but left quickly when one of the teachers produced a revolver and ordered him to leave.
No one was injured and no shots were fired in the incident. The gunman is still at large.
Most newspapers, radio and TV stations still operate on the hard-and-fast journalistic rule, “if it bleeds, it leads.” You really can’t blame the news media for this. Most people like stories about conflict and action. That’s why the sports pages are so well read, and we have cable channels dedicated to every competitive activity and sport conceivable — even golf.
But there are hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of incidents where a firearm was used by a private citizen to prevent a crime or defend against a crime which are never reported to the police and never covered by the news. In a white paper “Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens,” the Cato Institute looked at thousands of news reports over an eight year period. Their study found that the overwhelming number of self-defense cases involve situations where the gun is never fired.
These are some of the law-abiding gun owners who were able to save a life, or prevent a rape, burglary or other crime, and no shots were fired:
- An 80-year-old pharmacist on duty in Missoula, Montana who confronted a masked man demanding painkillers. The pharmacist pulled out a pistol and told the criminal to leave. The masked man screamed and left the store.
A common trope of many Second Amendment advocates is to urge more vigorous enforcement of existing federal gun control laws, as the alternative to enacting additional laws. Rhetorically, that’s very effective. But as a policy matter, it is not always a good idea. Consider legislation recently considered by the Senate:
Thursday’s revelation that the Washington State court system has been hacked and the records of hundreds of thousands of citizens may have been accessed clearly demonstrates why gun owners are adamantly opposed to background check records keeping, and want the state’s pistol registry destroyed, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.
The world stopped to commemorate the passing of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, on April 8. Many mourned and some celebrated. Numerous observers recollected an ostensible collaboration, arising out of a stochastic synchrony with Ronald Reagan that brought down the Soviet Union.
Just a couple of notes on the nature of government I’ve been thinking about for a while…
The federal government, in their zeal for campaign finance reform, have given Libertarians a great gift. Quite simply, they have created the framework for a decentralized way of campaigning, a system perfectly suited to our way of doing politics.
Most of us probably know by now that obesity can lead to all sorts of nasty problems like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and the need to replace our entire spring wardrobe. Obesity itself, of course, is not a disease. The Infoplease online dictionary defines “obese” simply as “very fat or overweight; corpulent.” But U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher would like to rewrite the dictionary. Rewrite it with the ever magical bureaucratic pen.