Right Now: PUSH COMMON SENSE

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bogie

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A _lot_ of folks out there are wondering why there wasn't someone there with a gun to stop the guy. I spent the day in a hospital with Jen, and people were openly talking about the situation. And the overall theme is "You know, it'd be common sense to have someone around who could shoot a nutcase."

Guys, the seeds are out there. As you write your congresscritters or media outlets, push this theme - COMMON SENSE.

Be nice. Be polite. But stick to the theme.

Sample:

"This morning I found out that Virginia would have allowed some of the student victims to carry a pistol for protection, but that the school wouldn't let them. This doesn't make sense to me. If someone can legally carry a pistol, isn't it common sense to encourage them to? If someone had, Cho might have been stopped."
 
Like so? (LTE I sent out yesterday)
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In the wake of the tragic killings at Virginia Tech, I keep hearing calls for more gun control, calls for “common sense” gun laws.

There's just one problem. Guns were already banned on the Virginia Tech campus. How is recreating the monumental failure of that ban on a larger scale common sense?

Virginia Tech’s no guns policy did not stop the killer from bringing his guns onto the campus. All that it did was create an unarmed victims zone. It insured that all of the killer’s victims were unarmed and helpless as they were lined up and slaughtered en masse.

You see, in Virginia, one can get a permit to carry a concealed handgun. How different would things have been if a student, professor, janitor, or security guard had been armed and able to respond to the gunfire in the classrooms of Norris Hall? No one can say for certain how many lives might have been saved, but the outcome would certainly have been different.

It might have been more like the school shooting in Pearl, Mississippi in 1997, where an assistant principle retrieved a gun from his car and stopped the shooter. Or the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Grundy, VA in 2002, where two students with law enforcement experience retrieved a gun from one of the students’ cars, and stopped the shooter. Or the Trolley Square mall shooting in Utah, in February of this year, where an off duty police officer carrying a concealed handgun was able to confront and contain the shooter until police arrived.

Common sense would seem to indicate that guns in the hands of responsible citizens on the scene of a mass shooting are effective at stopping or at least slowing down the killings. Anyone with common sense can see that banning guns would not stop gun violence any more than banning drugs stopped drug use, or for those with longer memories, any more than Prohibition stopped alcohol production and consumption. Common sense would not be to call for more gun control when there is no evidence that any of the gun control laws that already exist have had any effect on violent crime (reported by both the CDC and the National Academies of Science).

The killings at Virginia Tech were a terrible tragedy. My heart goes out to the family and friends of those whose lives were taken, and to those who are recovering from their injuries. I realize that this is a very emotional time for many people. But maybe it’s time that we follow logic instead of emotion in our search for a solution. Maybe it’s time we do something that actually makes us safer, rather than just making us feel safer. That seems like common sense to me.
 
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