Holding Those That Designate Gun Free Zones Responsible
Over at Instapundit.com Glen Reynolds makes an interesting point.
I HEARD NEAL BOORTZ holding forth on the Omaha mall shooting this morning on the way to work, and I realized I haven’t posted on it. I don’t really have anything to say that I haven’t said before. But it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free. There’s even an academic literature on mass shootings and concealed-gun carriage.
I would probably support this kind of legislation. Darwin might like it to because it sets up incentives to influence behavior.
December 7th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Interesting that he has anecdotal cases of mass-shootings taking place in gun-free zones; the statistic I’d actually care about is average number of TOTAL shootings (per decade, let’s say) in comparable gun-free VS gun-allowed areas. Certainly these mass shootings are the ones that make the news and stick in our memory, but I care more about total deaths overall.
December 8th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
dumb argument. You aren’t forced to enter the gun-free zones, so once you go into one, you agree to whatever level of protection they provide. If people didn’t feel safe in these areas, they shouldn’t go to them. Then people would notice that people felt safer in concealed-gun areas, and the invisible hand would do it’s work.
December 8th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Nice counter.