The shooting last week at Westroads Mall in Omaha joins a list of shootings with a common denominator.
It is a long and tragic list:
- Kansas City, MO – Two killed in the Ward Parkway Mall
- Fort Gibson, Oklahoma – Seth Trickey shot 15 rounds into the Fort Gibson Middle School, injuring four.
- Bailey, CO – A 53 year old man holds six high school girls hostage and sexually assaults them
- San Diego, CA – Jason Hoffman injured two teachers and three students with a shotgun and a handgun
- Littleton, CO – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold massacre 13 people at Columbine High School
- Red Lake, MN – Jeffrey Weise murdered seven people, including an unarmed security guard
- Golita, CA – Jennifer San Marco shot and killed seven people in a post office
- Salt Lake City, Utah – Sulejman Talović, five dead at the Trolley Street Mall
- Blacksburg, VA – Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech
The common denominator is all these shootings took place in a gun free zone. The shooters made the safe assumption that their evil plans had a probability of succeeding because the majority, if not all of the citizens there, would be unarmed. They were sitting ducks.
Let’s switch gears for a second and consider the ketchup bottle. For years, the ketchup bottle would sit on the shelf and gravity would draw all the ketchup to the bottom of the bottle. Then, when a person needed some of the condiment, they had to work to get it out of the bottle. Finally, someone said, “Why don’t we just flip it over and put the lid on the bottom?” Now, the ketchup is there when you need it. Why didn’t they think of this before? They were trained in a particular way of thinking, and they had to move themselves away from it.
That is called a paradigm shift. A paradigm is “a particular mental set of particulars.” It is a powerful set of beliefs. The paradigm ketchup bottle designers fought against was that lids go on top. It made sense at one time, before silicon seals that prevented leakage. But now, there is a powerful shift in thinking that has changed the way people buy ketchup.
What does this have to do with gun-free zones? I am looking for a paradigm shift. The current paradigm is that guns are bad, they kill people and they should not be allowed in certain places like schools and malls. I not only want gun-free zones abolished, but I want gun ownership and concealed carry encouraged. Heck, let’s pass legislation that requires people to carry a weapon. Your mind swimming yet? Well, consider this: it’s already happened.
In March 1982, responding to the passage of a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Illinois, and the fawning media coverage that accompanied it, the city council of Kennesaw, Georgia, decided to make a statement of its own. With exceptions duly made for convicted felons, the disabled, and those with religious objections, the council passed (unanimously) an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun.
The usual claims of Wild West style shootouts were made. Some expected causal disagreements to devolve into gun battles. The actual results of that move are far more interesting:
The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.
Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.
Kennesaw’s crime rate plummeted. In fact, the number of some crimes declined amid soaring population growth. For example, in figures the city provided to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, Kennesaw had 54 burglaries in 1981 – the year before the gun ordinance – with a population of 5,242. In 1999, with a population of 19,000, only 36 burglaries were reported.
The rate of violent crime is approximately four times lower than the state and national rates, Kennesaw’s Crime Statistics Report said. “Violent crime is almost nonexistent in residential neighborhoods,” Graydon told UPI. The detective, who has been with the police department since 1986, said the isolated exceptions take place in motels or in commercial areas.
Kennesaw turned the ketchup bottle upside down and crime has dropped. There are no shootouts. People are safer.
Can you see the paradigm shift needed? If not, ask yourself these questions: Why are there no armed robberies at an NRA convention? Why are school shootings or shootings in other gun free zones so attractive? Why are hot burglaries rare in America, but not in Great Britain, where people are not allowed guns? What would have happened on 9/11 if everyone on those planes had a gun?
The Trolley Street shooting was ended because an off-duty police officer ignored the gun free zone rule and stopped the shooter. This isn’t as uncommon as you think. Every thirteen seconds, an American uses a gun to prevent a crime. Every thirteen seconds an American protects himself and others from having their property, their rights or possibly their lives taken from them. That adds up to over 2.5 million gun defense uses per year.
Instead of limiting people’s ability to protect themselves from heavily armed psycho mass murderer, or posting signs that say “Sitting Ducks Here,” we should be telling those criminals that we are armed, dangerous and we are not going to be hung out to dry by some gun grabbing liberal nit wit. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson, who understood the importance of an armed citizen:
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
It’s time flip the ketchup bottle and shift from the paradigm of limiting our ability to protect ourselves to the paradigm of making the criminal afraid. It isn’t the law abiding gun owner we need to fear, but a world where only the criminal has the gun. The gun gives the woman the ability to defend herself again a man twice her size, the elderly the ability to stop the young and the individual the ability to dispel the gang. It’s time to start encouraging gun ownership. In our hands, it is the great equalizer.
