When I was admitted to the practice of law, Indiana’s self-defense statute permitted the use of force to defend one’s property, one’s home, and one’s self. The statute permitted the use of force for the defense of “others” only when such “others” were immediate family to their defender. The statute was asinine, and I knew then that the Indiana General Assembly lacked the competence to limit a man’s natural right to defend himself and others. To its credit, the General Assembly subsequently amended the self-defense statute (IC 35-41-3-2) to permit the use of force for the defense of “others” outside the defender’s immediate family. Still, the General Assembly is not my primary authority in discerning the particulars of my right to self-defense.
On another day I may write about the wisdom and necessity of the right to keep and bear arms. Today’s Article is about the natural right of self-defense in the context of mass shootings across the nation. If you work, shop, worship in church, or go to school, then you will be in some of the soft-target public environs favored by mass shooters. Here is an incomplete listing of incidents from recent years:
Location/Death Toll
Roseburg, Oregon/Umpaqua Community College/8 + shooter
Charleston, South Carolina/A.M.E. Church/9
Isla Vista, California/6 + shooter
Fort Hood, Texas (twice)/16
Washington, DC/Navy Yard/12 + shooter
Newtown, Connecticut/Sandy Hook School/26 + shooter
Minneapolis, Minnesota/workplace/6 + shooter
Oak Creek, Wisconsin/Sikh Temple/6 + shooter
Aurora, Colorado/movie theater/12
Oakland, California/Oikos University/7
Seal Beach, California/hair salon/8
Tuscon, Arizona/political rally/6
Manchester, Connecticut/workplace/8 + shooter
Binghampton, New York/Immigration Center/13
DeKalb, Illinois/Northern Illinois University/5 + shooter
Omaha, Nebraska/shopping mall/8 + shooter
Blacksburg, Virginia/Virginia Tech/32 + shooter
The death toll is staggering, and I have no official count of the number of lives forever changed by serious injury or grief. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, I would have surrendered my own Second Amendment rights if that sacrifice would put an end to the carnage.
The list of mass shootings includes several university incidents. For comparison purposes, consider the 2002 school shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia. A troubled immigrant former student fatally shot an administrator, a professor, and a student before being taken down by several armed men, including two students.
Then there is the 1997 incident at the Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. A 16-year-old began his day by fatally stabbing and bludgeoning his mother. Then the lad took a rifle, a trench coat, and his mother’s car to the high school where he fatally shot two students and wounded seven others before he was detained by an armed administrator.
These examples of armed citizen intervention are among sixteen described online in the Illinois Tactical Blog. An irony is that armed citizen intervention tends to suppress the body count and (thereby) the publicity.
The Umpaqua Community College shooter entered a lecture hall and began shooting students, first asking some about their religious faith. The College was a self-declared “gun-free zone.” Not even the security guards carried a firearm. And it may be that the College was a gun-free zone until it wasn’t. That’s the trouble with gun-free zones, especially those allowing unrestricted access. The best possible outcome of the Umpaqua shooting would have been the shooter falling to return fire before the body count rose. It turns out that the shooter did die by gunfire, but by his own hand after he had exchanged gunfire with late-arriving armed police officers.
An article by John Lott, Jr. posted October 17, 2015 in www.philly.com (commenting on the Umpaqua Shooting) offers the observation that “virtually all” mass public shootings take place in gun-free zones. While my list of incidents above is more anecdotal than statistical, it seems consistent with my list that a clear majority of mass shooting locations would be gun-free or gun-restricted zones. The same article describes how the Charleston A.M.E. Church shooter decided against an attack on a local college by reason of armed guards. And it is reported that the Aurora theater shooter decided against an airport attack due to armed security and selected a theater that banned otherwise permitted concealed handguns.
In science or mathematics the most elegant solution is the simplest, the most effective, and the most easily demonstrated. So long as there are sociopaths, psychopaths, and soft targets, there will be mass shootings. The most elegant solution to the carnage of mass shooting is death by return fire.
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