If you would have told me fifteen years ago that one day, 40 states would have "shall issue" laws on the books, I would have seriously questioned your sanity.

During the 1980s, crime was a huge issue and "experts" predicted an ever-worsening situation. There was a clamor to build more and bigger prisons to hold all the violent criminals. Not surprisingly, gun control had the political momentum.

An interesting thing happened in the mid-nineties--crime dropped precipitously almost over-night and everywhere in the country at the same time. Politic careers were made (Rudy Guiliani) and perserved (Bill Clinton). Police unions patted themselves on the back..

Steven Leavitt's Freakonomics attributes the drop in crime (and related drops in abortion, teen pregancies) to Roe v Wade legalization of abortion and the disappearance of a whole dysfunctional generation.

Regardless of what you attributed it to, crime ceased to be the political issue it once was and ironically, "shall issue" laws, originally argued as an affirmative response to violent crime, has found itself increasingly adopted for its inert character--basically nothing bad happens if you let law-abiding citizens carry weapons.

David Kopel at Volokh Conspiracy does an excellent job running down the state of "Shall Issue" laws in the country, noting that yesterday, Nebraska marked the 40th state to pass a "Shall Issue" law.

The pattern in almost all the states with Shall Issue laws has gone something like this: Initial discussions follow a predictable pattern, with proponents promising reductions in the crime rate, and opponents warning of Wild West shootouts. John Lott is discussed, pro and con, in infinite detail.

Over time, the personal testimony of female Shall Issue advocates sways some legislators. Other legislators, looking at the experience of other states, conclude that Shall Issue is, at the least, harmless; the lurid and sweeping predictions of opponents have not come true anywhere. The more states that enact Shall Issue laws, the more that legislators in a hold-out states become open to the idea that Shall Issue is not dangerous. Ohio, Minnesota, and Michigan are examples of states which are not considered strongly pro-gun, and whose enactment of Shall Issue legislation was possible only because so many other states had acted previously. As the number of Shall Issue states rises, so does the possibility of enacting Shall Issue in the dwindling number of hold-outs.

Kopel considers that passage is likely in another three states. Wisconsin, Maryland and Rhode Island. After that, there is a distinct possibility that even what he calls the "Capricious Issue" states (states that delegate permit issue to law enforcement) could redeem themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Jim Zumbo enjoying the benefits of being an outdoor writer -->

A friend of mine who is an avid hunter and gun enthusiast, came over last night and said, "Did you hear about that columnist at Outdoor Life?"

I hadn't, but a quick google check showed that a heck of a lot of other people had.

Jim Zumbo is one of those lucky people who makes a living writing about hunting and fishing, which of course requires that you hunt and fish, usually all over the country. A few days ago, he wrote a piece in his blog (since taken down) that called the AR-15 and AK-47 clones "assault rifles" and "terrorist rifles" and calling for them to be banned.

The response was swift and decisive. Various forums and blogs passed the information around like a nerve impulse and generated a flood of outraged email to Outdoor Life.

Zumbo apologized, then apologized again, the again, but it was too late. Zumbo was fired from Outdoor Life. He lost his sponsors at Remington, Mossy Oak (they make camouflage hunting clothes) and he's on the verge of losing a television production deal with Cabelas.

The D.C. Circuit Court says that 2nd amendment rights are individual rights and not confined to militia activity.

I'll let the lawyers quibble about the details--here and here [Glenn Reynolds is considered a second amendment scholar...]

If the author weren't dead already, I'd like to kill whoever wrote the text of the second amendment and made it such a fruitful debate for diametrically opposed views. Those that hold that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of individual rights are opposed by a group just as insistent that what the text really means is that the right is "collective", which means essentially that the government has the rights and you don't.

Don't you just love it when some senator gets up, pounds the dias, and proclaims the fact that "the president isn't above the law..."?

The reality is of course that Senators and Representatives routinely flout the law in every possible way. Drunk driving isn't charged, bribery is defined so narrowly that most cases are in fact "legal", and Senators and their aides pack heat in a town where if you or I were caught carrying a weapon, we'd be jailed for a not inconsiderable amount of time.

Its really little wonder that millionaires and billionaires dispense substantial portions of their wealth to get elected to seemingly innocuous public positions--the pay is terrible, but you can literally do whatever the hell you want.

The criminal investigation involves a Webb aide named Phillip Thompson, who was arrested March 26 for carrying a loaded pistol into the Senate. The story seemed unremarkable at first. The gun reportedly belonged to Webb, who reportedly had given it to Thompson for safekeeping before flying to New Orleans. Thompson apparently put the gun in his briefcase, forgot he had it, drove into D.C., and was busted after walking through an X-ray machine at the entrance to the Russell Senate Office Building. He now faces prosecution, because to bring a gun into D.C. even absent-mindedly is against the law. (My guess is that the judge will end up dispensing a severe tongue-lashing and perhaps a fine; Thompson's already spent 28 hours in jail awaiting arraignment.)

Now its certainly possible to argue that D.C. handgun law is stupid, but that would be besides the point--Senator Webb undoubtedly knows the law and flouts it--because he can.

No one is going to arrest a Senator in D.C. no matter what he does, short of attempting assassination--and maybe not even then.

It is good to be king.

I only heard of the Virginia Tech murders late yesterday, having been in planning meetings most of the day. I was struck by how erratic the reporting of the incident was. It makes you wonder how much worse the reporting from Iraq is. Confederate Yankee notes that ABC's Brian Ross flat-out lied in his blotter blog.

As I noted yesterday, the ABC News blog did not get so much as a single fact in their blog entry correct.

The Ross entry states that high-capacity magazines "became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons." This is a patently false statement, containing no truth at all.

High-capacity magazines have been around for more than half a century, and the sale of high-capacity magazines was not impacted whatsoever by the 1994 Crime Bill. These magazines were freely and commercially available, both in retail stores and online, without interruption, for the 10-year life of the ban, the decades preceding it, and afterward.

Ross implies that high-capacity magazines are now for sale on Web sites as a result of the ban expiring. Again, this is a deceptive, inaccurate statement.

The fact of the matter is that high-capacity magazines were always available for purchase (as noted above) both online, and in retail stores, without interruption.

After the Democrats finally figured out that gun control was a major loser for them, they relented in their efforts to disarm Americans. On the mistaken assumption that the whole country has completely changed their opinions on everything, so-called progressives are resurrecting all their favorite issues; building a bridge back to the 1960s. It is not surprise then to find gun-control editorials popping up like dandelions in May in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting.

At this writing, we do not know if yesterday's crazed shooter had his guns legally registered to him or not. That's hardly even the point now.

The point is that more than 30 random innocents are dead and lots more are badly shot up, in one of the worst mass slaughters in the nation's history, because this guy was carrying firepower that was readily available to him.

This is insanity, and this must stop.

We agree, frankly, that if guns are outlawed, as they say, only outlaws will have guns.

There will not soon come a time when private ownership of firearms is prohibited in this country. That will not happen. Those who want guns will surely continue to find them, somewhere or another.

But we can sure make it a lot tougher for them to do that, and we can sure bring down the number of guns freely circulating in every hamlet and valley of the land. Stricter paperwork oversight alone would keep a good many folks from ever buying a gun in the first place. Add on hard-as-nails local gun laws and stern penalties for violating them. It's got to start happening.

Fine, guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people. But if people who want to shoot people don't have guns to shoot those people with, then those are people who don't get shot.

New York City has some of the strictest gun control in the world. So does Canada, Britain has practically banned all weapons outright. Somehow criminals still manage to get guns as do homicidal maniacs (not to mention explosives, which are virtually impossible to get when compared to firearms...)

Frankly, I've become convinced that what we need is not more gun control, but more guns. Only a few months ago, a young Muslim in Salt Lake City went to a nearby mall armed with a shotgun, a handgun and a backpack full of ammunition. He killed five people and wounded four others.

That's a lot of casualties, but considering that he went to the mall to kill as many people as possible, it can be reasonably stated that he failed.

He failed because someone, in this case an off-duty police officer on a date with his wife, was armed and responded to the commotion in the mall. What easily could have surpassed the Virginia Tech tragedy was quickly curtailed (by the gun fire of the officer) and then resolved (by the death of the shooter).

The simple reality of the Virginia Tech situation was that no one could respond to the shooter, so he simply continued to shoot people until finally he claimed himself as his last victim. Had someone been armed, the death toll would have been much, much smaller.

Like many campuses, even in "shall issue" states, Virginia Tech didn't allow guns on campus. That didn't deter Cho Seung-Hui, but it did deter anyone and everyone who could have responded to Cho's outrage and perhaps saved lives.

Professor Liviu Librescu died blocking the door so his students could escape out the window. Would it have been so terrible if he had been armed? How many more lives could he have saved? Could his own life have been saved?

The gun controllers have blood on their hands.

Dr. Helen has an interesting post up on the psychology of self-defense.

Have you noticed that most of the tips you get in recent years for how to survive a violent crime involve an accompanying psychological maneuver of first trying to make you feel impotent? And instead of suggesting remedies to overcome this impotence, these survival tips usually just tell you to give the criminal what they want. But what they typically don't say is that you can get killed using that approach also. Jeff Cooper has a whole different approach to surviving violence--as I recall in one of his books, he talks about the use of color codes for getting one in the psychological mindset to deal with violence:

Ironically, before I knew what had happened at Virginia Tech yesterday, I was in a discussion about the psychology of intimidation. I am a "why not?" kind of guy, and most people are "because" kind of people. They do not question the status quo. The incidence of rule followers in the general population has permitted all sorts of abuses--when was the last time someone explained a ridiculous requirement or denial of service as "its policy"? Yesterday?

Corporations, the government and all sorts of institutions hide behind policy because they know that most people simply will not challenge it. By creating the proper psychology, one side can intimidate the other into significantly mitigating their demands. This is great if you're on the "winning" side of this equation--you get the windfall every time.

It occurs to me that Democrats, and therefore liberals, are almost always "cogs" in the machine. They are the victims of this psychology of intimidation and almost always work in institutional settings were powerlessness is the norm. Note how they are always looking for "saviors" to "change the system" in their favor. They willingly yield their power to others, which of course is a great reason to be a Democrat politician--all those "powerless people" appealing to you to rescue them from tyranny. The irony is of course that with Democrats, you get more institutional tyranny, not less.

Its perfectly predictable that liberals would recommend surrender as the best strategy for deal with violence--its part of the culture.

While its true that in any individual case, compliance may be the best strategy for survival, from the larger perspective, an aggressive response works better to reduce violent crime overall. If a criminal understands that he has a strong chance of being shot engaging in certain kinds of violent behavior, he's likely, by his very nature, to look for easier prey, better opportunities.

Yesterday, I went over to a friends house to deliver an invitation. I noticed a sign in his front yard advertising a security system. I asked him if there was actually a security system in place or just a sign on the lawn. The difference of course is academic--the sign alone is probably all one needs to deter would be burglars. But why does the sign work? Well, who would want to take the chance that it isn't associated with a security system?

The liberal "roll over on your belly" strategy only works if you are willing to be dominated in perpetuity. If criminals are made to pay a price even some of the time, they will be effectively detered.

A powerful indictment of wrong-headed policy.

On Aug. 21 at about 9:20 a.m., my graduate-level class was evacuated from the Squires Student Center. We were interrupted in class and not informed of anything other than the following words: "You need to get out of the building."

Upon exiting the classroom, we were met at the doors leading outside by two armor-clad policemen with fully automatic weapons, plus their side arms. Once outside, there were several more officers with either fully automatic rifles and pump shotguns, and policemen running down the street, pistols drawn.

It was at this time that I realized that I had no viable means of protecting myself.

Please realize that I am licensed to carry a concealed handgun in the commonwealth of Virginia, and do so on a regular basis. However, because I am a Virginia Tech student, I am prohibited from carrying at school because of Virginia Tech's student policy, which makes possession of a handgun an expellable offense, but not a prosecutable crime.

I had entrusted my safety, and the safety of others to the police. In light of this, there are a few things I wish to point out.

First, I never want to have my safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police.

Second, I considered bringing my gun with me to campus, but did not due to the obvious risk of losing my graduate career, which is ridiculous because had I been shot and killed, there would have been no graduate career for me anyway.

Third, and most important, I am trained and able to carry a concealed handgun almost anywhere in Virginia and other states that have reciprocity with Virginia, but cannot carry where I spend more time than anywhere else because, somehow, I become a threat to others when I cross from the town of Blacksburg onto Virginia Tech's campus.

Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.

That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.

Its an interesting comment from so many angles. I think if people are honest, they will acknowledge that guns make them feel safer, which is why so many people have them. That is the fundamental reality of why gun control has been such a loser for Democrats and why, as the Hotline points out, the nutroots and Democrat officials have been so quiet on the issue, even as the liberal media seeks to revive it.

Meteor Blades conducts a poll on the DailyKos about the Kossacks attitudes towards firearms.

Fully 75% of the Kossacks have no firearms in their homes.

51% are teetotalers on firearms. 20% have never had one, but have considered it at some point. Another 4% got rid of their gun collections because of their personal discomfort, or the discomfort of their spouse (do they have swimming pools?).

While visiting Ontario, Canada some years ago, I was visiting with a colleague who was surprisingly, considering it was in Canada, a bit of a gun enthusiast. He had several long guns and a .44 magnum handgun.

A discussion ensued about gun laws in Canada and I found myself rather shocked at how arbitrary it all was. My friends "right" to acquire, own and use his weapons was entirely at the discretion of the local constabulary. Depending on what county or region you lived in, the police were variously liberal, stingy or obdurate in their "bequests" of firearms acquisition certificates. The police did not have to furnish any reason for deny an FAC, Canadians had to produce a convincing reason why they should have one.

Control is the hallmark of socialism--when you ask the government to take care of you like a child, you can expect to be treated like one.

Before you consider plucking the mote out of your Canadian neighbors eye, better consider first the state of gun control in our own socialist paradise.

California is one of a small number of states that still has a discretionary concealed handgun carry statute that grants nearly unlimited discretion to a sheriff or police chief whether to issue a permit or not. When this law that when first passed in 1923, it was part of a bill that was explicitly stated by supporters as part of a strategy to disarm Hispanics and Chinese:

it will have a salutary effect in checking tong wars among the Chinese and vendettas among our people who are of Latin descent.

This is not really a surprise; racism is one of the three pillars of American gun control law.

There have been problems for my entire adult life with California sheriffs issuing permits to political supporters and big campaign contributors, as my friend Jim March has documented in detail here.

The corruption is ongoing--not just history. Los Angeles County Sheriff Baca has pulled some pretty sleazy stuff in this area, as this June 15, 2007 MSNBC report discusses:

It is not the first time that Tinseltown's sheriff has been criticized for being too cozy with the Hollywood crowd. Baca plays golf with actor Michael Douglas, and has received campaign contributions or endorsements from the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Les Moonves, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman and Steven Segal. The sheriff has issued concealed-weapon permits to such actors as Ben Affleck, and in 1999, less than a year after being sworn in, he set up an “executive reserves” unit that allowed celebrities to wear a badge and carry a gun. All they had to do was take 64 hours of training and pass the department’s background check.

Critics of the program, who said it was nothing more than a sly way for Baca to pay back friends and supporters, were incensed when, less than a month after the unit was initiated, one of those reservists—Scott Zacky of the Zacky Farms chicken dynasty—was stripped of his badge for drawing a gun outside his Bel Air mansion after mistaking a couple on a date for car thieves. The unit was suspended in late 1999 after one member, a wealthy Baca supporter who owns a jewelry store, was arrested for money laundering.

Read the whole thing...

Calling a pistol a "peacemaker" is only an oxymoron if you're a liberal and don't have a clue about human nature. The munchkin wrangler explains why the right to bears arms is the foundation of a civil society.

H/T Instapundit.

Redskins safety Sean Taylor died early this morning, a victim of an armed burglar.

"According to a preliminary investigation, it appears that the victim was shot inside the home by an intruder," Miami-Dade County police said in a statement.

But police were still investigating the attack, which came just eight days after an intruder was reported at Taylor's home. Officers were dispatched about 1:45 a.m. Monday after Taylor's girlfriend called 911.

Sharpstein said Taylor's girlfriend told him the couple was awakened by loud noises, and Taylor grabbed a machete he keeps in the bedroom for protection. Someone then broke through the bedroom door and fired two shots, one missing and one hitting Taylor, Sharpstein said. Taylor's 1-year-old daughter, Jackie, was also in the house, but neither she nor Taylor's girlfriend were injured.

He kept a machete for protection? Its possible he was enjoined for possessing a gun as a result of a previous court case:

Meanwhile, Taylor endured a yearlong legal battle after he was accused in 2005 of brandishing a gun at a man during a fight over allegedly stolen all-terrain vehicles near Taylor's home. He eventually pleaded no contest to two misdemeanors and was sentenced to 18 months' probation.

Taylor's legal troubles were a matter of record, as was his plea bargain. Did a bunch of malefactors pick Taylor as an easy mark because the courts had disarmed him?

Home invasions, or burglaries that occur when occupants are present, are a minor percentage of all burglaries in the U.S.--a quarter of what they are in Canada where gun ownership is comparatively rare. In Toronto, Ontario, Canada, nearly half of all burglaries are home invasions.

Taylor's plea bargain was effectively an invitation for an armed home invasion--a tempting target known to be unarmed. I am not suggesting that the courts are at fault here--Taylor could have easily made arrangements with a security company to patrol his home or possible hired an armed guard.

I had an acquaintance, who I have not seen in decades at this point, who had a career as a rather accomplished burglar. Since his career coincided with his late adolescence, when he was finally caught, he managed to avoid the most serious consequences for his actions.

In our conversations, it became clear to me that burglars, or any criminal for that matter, become sensitized to opportunities in the same way that a deer hunter is sensitized to qualities of terrain or deer sign. The burglar doesn't see your lovely petunias, he sees obscured entry points, newspapers piled up on the drive way while you are on vacation and other indications of an easy mark.

Its clear that Taylor had some expectation of a problem, otherwise he wouldn't have had the machete, but just as clearly, he underestimated how much of an attractive target his home was. That is undoubtedly true for most of us, and underlies the nature of our vulnerabilities on September 10, 2001

Glenn Reynolds, riffing off Neal Boortz, makes a good 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.

The police reacted very quickly in Omaha--six minutes, but you can kill a lot of people in six minutes. Its notable that the similar incident in Salt Lake City earlier this year features the actions of an armed, off-duty police officer who undoubtedly saved many lives by simply pinning down Suleiman Talovic. I'm not much of a gun enthusiast, but I'm beginning to think it may a civic duty to go to the mall armed. Its simply no accident that these nuts always want to shoot fish in the barrel--you never hear of anyone driving over the SWAT headquarters for a little shootout.

Yet as important as the security issues are, I am more bothered by how a rather unremarkable 22 year old man suddenly turns into a mass murderer.

Some of my own children are in their late teens and early twenties (I'm not that old, but I started a family very young...) and in dealing with them and observing their friends, I see a worrisome trend in this entire generation.

While young women seem to do very well in general--heading off to college, graduating, getting good jobs--young men on the other hand, seem increasingly lost. Within the same family, its not at all unusual to see overachieving girls and boys that can barely tie their shoe laces.

Young men seem to find themselves caught--in large numbers, in a Weed and Warcraft limbo, living at home, subsisting on low wage jobs and hanging out with their friends and computers. They have no skills (beyond video games), no ambition, no sense of responsibility and no self-esteem.

I say this with complete awareness that being a little lost in your late teens and early twenties is pretty normal from generation to generation, but I think the depth and breath of this phenomenon in this generation is beyond anything we've seen to this point. My deep suspicion is that this is due to the advent of absolutely engrossing video game technology.

The statistics are mindboggling--the industry calculates an average of 40 hours a week spent by gamers on video games. That attracting a lot of attention, and a lot of investment to the gaming industry, but there simply have to be social implications. 40 hours a week in front of a computer means 40 hours a week not doing something else.

Societies have always struggled with what to do with aggressive, unfocused young men and they've generally come up with various rites of passage to provide them a role and self-esteem (sometimes in focused aggression...). One might argue that Weed and Warcraft serve to anesthetize this dangerous cohort, but as Hawkins demonstrates, its not an effective solution and it certainly problematic for the future.

I've had to struggle with the problem with my sons and watch my friends struggle with theirs, so I'm not writing this from the perspective of having a lot of answers, but it seems that the first step is to acknowledge that we have a serious problem.

The news stories about the shootings at an Arvada, Colorado (just west of Denver...) missionary center and the New Life church in Colorado Springs, seem to suggest that a homeless man refused shelter became angry and retaliated with gun shots. A day later, a man matching the description of the first shooter, shows up in Colorado Springs--80 miles away and opens fire on lingering church-goers.

Now we hear that the "homeless man" was wearing tactical gear and that several suspicious devices were removed from the church.

I'm always a little dubious about how these shootings get reported because there is a clear political interest in dismissing such incidents as anomalies--unhinged personalities rather than the end result of social tensions. If you foster hatred of a certain group, inevitably there will be an outburst of violence.

Less than a month ago, a Mormon church was burned in Maricopa, Arizona. Its rather chilling to read the comments to the newspaper article, realizing that the worst expressions have been removed. Contemplate how fashionable bigotry has become (except against Muslims...)

Its notable that the gunman at the New Life church was stopped by an armed, female security guard.

Shortly after 1 p.m. at a large evangelical church 70 miles away, a heavily armed man roughly matching the same description as the Arvada gunman opened fire on a van in the New Life Church parking lot.

One person, whose identity was not released Sunday night, was killed. The gunman then entered the church vestibule and began firing with a high-powered rifle before a security-team member shot and killed him. A second injured person died late Sunday.

The female security-team member, whose name was not released, "probably saved many lives today," Myers said.

Undoubtedly.

More importantly though, the administration of the New Life church should be commended for a sensible policy of having armed security personnel on site.

I should be happy that the Supreme Court has struck down the District of Columbia's draconian gun control laws, which of course haven't actually controlled the guns in criminal hands, but insured that ordinary citizens would be defenseless.

I'm not though.

The ruling effectively demonstrates that the constitution is a meaningless document as far as guaranteeing our rights. The reality that any group can make a specious argument over what rights the constitutions actually guarantees and which it doesn't means only one thing--nine justices decide what rights we have or don't have, and that we are effectively rewriting our "constitution" with every presidential election.

If Obama wins, and appoints only one justice, the gun rights will be gone--just like that.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2nd amendment ruling, the Illinois State Rifle Association filed a lawsuit in Chicago, whose ban resembles DC's. Initial reaction yesterday here. Mixed reaction from the Chicago suburbs, including mine of Wilmette, with current bans. NY Times story here.

Oh, and the Rev. Pfleger will no doubt shoot his mouth off again on this issue, creating some more heartburn for Barack, who is ducking and weaving.

UPDATE: More from The Politico on Obama's gun flip-flops and the new GOP wedge issue in key battleground states. Mike Huckabee

Did my first piece as Contributing Editor for BlogHer on the 2nd amendment empowering women:) Annie get your gun.

Wilmette Strikes Handgun Ban. Other cases around Chicago are still pending.