Cato the Elder would approve.
There cannot possibly be a person out there who truly believes that a simple declaration of a space as a gun free zone prevents people from bringing guns into it. If you do, you are living in a dream world. If you do and you are a politician, you need to be directed to the nearest political exit and never be allowed to hold public office again.
We have yet to see a situation in which an armed citizen, armed only for his or her defense, has suddenly gone mad and started mowing people down. Indeed, we’ve seen plenty of cases where armed citizens have stopped a criminal act cold. Sadly, local media rarely cover the latter, or downplay the armed citizen’s involvement, because “white-hat” armed citizens don’t fit their progressive narrative.
But we’ve seen plenty of cases where lone gunmen — typically, initially blamed on the right wing (usually the NRA), but almost invariably turning out to be somehow associated with the left, or the radical Islamic terror network (but I repeat myself) — have opened fire in gun-free zones where no law-abiding citizen was able to carry a weapon.
This madness must stop. The 2nd Amendment exists for a reason. But the gun-grabbers of the world do not want American citizens (or any citizens, for that matter) to be able to protect ourselves, because they are a wholly-owned subsidiary of those who believe that we must submit to the dubious protection of our government. “Government knows best and will protect you from these bad people,” is their cry.
Yet, government cannot tie its own shoes, button its own pants, or balance its own budget, or get much of anything else right. Indeed, sometimes it even acts maliciously for its own purposes (Animas River, anyone?) It doesn’t even seem to have the will to protect our interests in the world outside our borders (let alone inside them). And it clearly cannot prevent San Bernardinos or Orlandos even when it’s aware of damning facts about the eventual shooters. Why, then, should we subject our personal safety and that of our families to it? The Founders and the Framers did not believe that we should. Nothing that has happened in the past 200+ years suggests they were wrong.
I call on governments everywhere, local, state, and national, to outlaw gun-free zones. It is the Constitutional right of every American to carry a weapon for his or her personal defense, and this right has been upheld countless times by the courts, regardless of what politicians believe makes good law. (Or for that matter, what the Ninth Circus, always an outlier and the most overturned circuit in the nation, has to say.)
Want to stop the madness? Stop disarming citizens. After September 11, 2001, as soon as terrorists realized that Americans would fight back on airplanes, attempted hijackings and attempted bombings of American airliners stopped, regardless of what TSA wants you to think or anything they claim to have done. The same could be true of our self-inflicted free-fire zones, otherwise known as “gun-free” zones.