Free Republic

The trend will be your friend if you are the NRA, Hollywood,or video game manufacturers trying to deflect blame for rising gun violence in America. Per both mass killing expert Alan Fox, there is no particular evidece suggesting we are in the grip of a rising wave of mass shootings. A Mother Jones team has put together their own database of mass shootings since 1980 (timeline) and their chart suggests a similar conclusion. And for the factually oriented, this paper by criminologist Duwe from 2006 (hat tip to Jesse Walker of Reason) is fascinating. The media loves a narrative, which...

At the police station, dispatchers began to take calls from inside the school. Authorities say the first emergency call about the shooting came in at "approximately" 9:30 a.m. "Sandy Hook school. Caller is indicating she thinks someone is shooting in the building," a dispatcher told fire and medical personnel, according to 911 tapes. Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls. Police report that no law enforcement officers discharged their weapons at any point. The gunman took his own life, police said. He took out a handgun and shot himself in a classroom...

Reposted from Tom Givens: In the wake of the tragic, horrific slaughter of innocent school children in Connecticut, there has been a renewed cry for more gun control laws. This stems from the natural need to “do something” when a tragedy of this proportion occurs. I agree we need to do something, but the “something” I want is a bit different. The “Gun Free Schools Act of 1994” made it a federal crime to possess a firearm on any school property. Many states enacted similar legislation at the state level, as the federal act required them to do so or...

In the best published study of mass shootings, it was found that 99 had occurred between 1980 and 2010. We know that a number of mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. All but one of the “successful” mass shootings occurred in areas where armed citizens are banned. A comparison of mass shootings stopped by 911 response vs mass shootings stopped by citizens indicates that when citizens are able to stop the killing, they prevent 84 percent of the deaths. Mass shooting study link Mass shootings Stopped by Armed Citizens Civilians stopped shooting average 2.3 deaths, 911 response average,...

(March 1) -- When it comes to mass public shootings, the decade doesn't seem to be starting out too well. Just two months in and already there was a shooting rampage in rural Virginia (which claimed eight lives), one at the University of Alabama (three dead) and other in Denver, near Columbine High School, in which two middle school students were injured. But the fact is that, while mass public shootings always tend to galvanize massive media coverage, they are becoming increasingly less common, falling sharply in the last decade compared with the previous two. And understanding this decline is...

This shooting is yet another tragic example of the failed, grotesque insistence on helpless victim zones where any crazed gunman can be assured of a large number of disarmed, undefended, helpless victims, all crammed into one place, where he can kill many children before an armed defender arrives from elsewhere. It is disturbing and sick that the federal government so hates the right of the American people to bear arms, and so hates their natural right to self defense, that the government insists on making them helpless, disarmed victims for anyone who cares to kill them. And in this case,...

Backers of laws that let pretty much all law-abiding carry concealed guns in public places often argue that these laws will sometimes enable people to stop mass shootings. Opponents occasionally ask: If that’s so, what examples can one give of civilians armed with guns stopping such shootings? Sometimes, I hear people asking if even one such example can be found, or saying that they haven’t heard even one such example. Naturally, such examples will be rare, partly because mass shootings are rare, partly because many mass shootings happen in supposedly “gun-free” zones (such as schools, universities, or private property posted...

Imagine that you ran a school district, and some rich foundation, worried about school shootings, gave you the following offer: We’ll hire armed security guards for you, who could try to do something about the school shooter. These aren’t going to be highly trained police officers, just typical security guards, given some modest training and subjected to basic background checks. It’s not like they’re highly skilled; security guards rarely are. But they have a basic understanding of how to shoot, and when to shoot. They wouldn’t deal with ordinary trespassing, vandalism, and the like, nor would they be at all...

America now has its second worst mass shooting. And it, as usual, accompanied by calls for gun control. It’s no coincidence that we have had quite a few spree killings in such a short time. The lavish coverage of every shooting by the media encourages every shooter to think that he will be famous if he goes out and kills. And that is exactly what happens. Our shooters are creatures of the media, not the NRA. A media that turns killers into celebrities and then warns that the only way to stop more shootings is by cracking down on firearms....

As we all know about the tragedy in Connecticut by now the White House is declaring that this isn't the time to talk about gun control. Many liberals beg to differ.First and foremost we should pray for the victims and their families, but because liberalism is increasingly losing its nerve with each passing year we must also not cede the debate in the name of taking the high ground...unfortunately...

<p>State police are responding to a report of a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dickinson Drive, school officials said.</p> <p>Police are reporting a number of injured parties. The nature of their injuries is not clear.</p> <p>There are unconfirmed reports of two shooters — one dead, one still at large.</p>

Firearm prohibitionists love to use tragedy to leverage their agenda. So, it’s important for gun rights advocates to stand their ground and fire back (proverbially) whenever this happens. Last week I posted a graphic on Facebook claiming the average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 18.25, and the average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by civilians is 2.2. I based it on 10 shootings I found listed on some timeline somewhere. I honestly don’t even remember where. I presented the case studies in a blog post on the Silver...

An open letter to America's news media From: Alan Korwin, The Uninvited Ombudsman Re: The Batman Movie Massacre Our Forgotten Waiting Periods The Need for Gun-Control... Counseling Banning the Glock Really Small Bullets Copycat Heroes Media Culpability for Massacres Dear Media Colleagues, Guns can't seem to keep themselves out of the limelight. Urban shootings, outside the ghettos where most shootings take place, are now becoming national news. What changed? Why aren't we talking about waiting periods anymore? The media and the gun-control movement have abandoned waiting periods, but they used to be the holy grail. Why is that? It turned...

Fareed Zakaria has tried to make “The Case for Gun Control” in Time. The results are not pretty. Virtually every argument he makes misrepresents the underlying data. After a lead that cites the Sikh-temple shooting, the Aurora massacre, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, Zakaria trots out the usual international comparisons: “The gun-homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia, 10 times that of India and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would ask, Does America have some potential cause for this...

DHS-funded video gives tips to survive a shooter. http://www.federalnewsradio.com/473/2966001/DHS-funded-video-gives-tips-to-su... After last week's shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., the city of Houston has released a how-to video on surviving a shooter event. The video was created with funds from the Homeland Security Department. "I can't imagine the horror and grief. If it is at all possible for any good to come out of it, perhaps it can be letting people know the options to consider if it happens again," said Mayor Annise Parker in a statement. Entitled "Run, Hide, Fight," the video depicts a fictional shooting incident at...

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- Jared Lee Loughner pleaded guilty Tuesday to going on a shooting rampage at a political gathering, killing six people and wounding his intended target, then-Congresswoman Gabriele Giffords, and 12 others. Loughner's plea spares him the death penalty and came soon after a federal judge found that months of forcibly medicating him to treat his schizophrenia had made the 23-year-old college dropout competent to understand the gravity of the charges and assist in his defense.

The horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado on July 20 and another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on August 5 are the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at least 58 mass murders* carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. We've mapped them below, including details on the shooters' identities, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed. Of the 134 guns possessed by the killers,...

Wade Michael Page, the tattooed white supremacist and former Army soldier police say gunned down six Sikhs in a Milwaukee-area temple before a police officer killed him, spread his message of hate through several rock bands for more than a decade before mounting his bloody rampage Sunday.

Anyone remember a fourth-century-BC Greek named Herostratus? He's the guy whose name history has recorded solely on account of his having burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, in 356 BCE -- so that history would record his name. In a 1993 paper called "Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage in the Mass Media, published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Clayton Cramer explored a variation on the question my colleague Robert Wright is rightly asking now, following Roger Ebert's New York Times op-ed on Friday: Given that intense media...

In a day when our culture too readily dismisses words like "valor" and "chivalry," it's worth pointing out the heroism of three men who died protecting the women they had escorted to see the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in Aurora, Colorado. In a cynical age where the very concept of "heroism" is too often dismissed as hopelessly naive, even the famous "women and children first" part of the Titanic story has been denigrated -- with the naysayers arguing that it happened only because the ship's captain threatened to shoot any men who climbed into lifeboats ahead of children...