Has anyone ever wondered why people with guns who have kissed sanity good-bye never take out their uncontrollable rage on the nearest police station?
Nor do they drive off to the nearest Army base, shooting range or hunting club to vent their murderous frustration.
It should only take a moment’s thought to understand why: Those places have people who have relatively easy access to weapons themselves.
It’s one thing to be homicidal and suicidal, but it’s quite another to consider that one’s murderous intent could be brought to an untimely halt through the immediate application of superior firepower.
However, there are places that draw these people like magnets, and they, too, are easy to locate: They are the places where the possession of firearms is forbidden, and that fact is widely advertised.
Some of these places even go so far as to publicly display their vulnerability to mass murder through the posting of signs that say “No Guns Permitted” or “Gun-Free Zone.”
Virginia Tech was proud of its “gun-free” status, and boasted about how safe a place it was once it posted signs forbidding firearms on campus.
Thirty-two people died there last April as the cost of that exercise in hubris and futility.
Other places where firearms are typically banned are stores, including shopping malls, government buildings, including schools, and places of worship.
We saw in the Columbine shootings how effective gun bans are for schools.
And in Omaha last week, eight people died in a shopping mall before the shooter, cornered by police, killed himself.
In Ogden, Utah, last February, a man killed five people in a mall before an armed off-duty police officer pinned him down until help could arrive.
And just this past weekend, a disturbed youth who had posted violent diatribes against Christians on an Internet site killed two students at a Colorado missionary center.
He later showed up at a church that had an association with the missionary group carrying multiple weapons and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
But because of the earlier shootings, the church had activated its voluntary security force, composed of members who had licenses to carry concealed weapons and the training to use them.
The gunman killed two teenage girls in the church parking lot and wounded their father before he entered the church.
But once he got inside, he was confronted by one of the church’s volunteer guards, Jeanne Assam, a former police officer armed with a pistol.
As witnesses described it, she advanced on the shooter yelling “Surrender,” and when he raised his weapon, fired several shots, bringing him to the ground. Police reported that the badly wounded gunman then shot himself to death.
Assam, dubbed “Dirty Harriet” by one writer, was credited by the church’s pastor with having saved 50 to 100 lives.
It’s almost enough to make a fair-minded, thoughtful person conclude that armed, law-abiding citizens might have saved countless more lives at places like those listed above.
