As our nation continues to contemplate the horror of the Fort Hood shootings, one revelation about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan caught my eye. In 1996, after completing his official “NRA Personal Protection Course,” he was issued a permit in Virginia to carry a concealed weapon. Virginia is one of the many states where the gun lobby achieved passage of a so-called “shall-issue” concealed carry law limiting the discretion of police to deny concealed carry permits. Because Hasan had no criminal record, he was issued a permit. The Virginia court order granting his application stated that Virginia law “does not permit a judge to inquire into the necessity for, or appropriateness of, granting such permission.”

I was reminded of a letter to the editor of the Washington Post by Chris Cox, Chief Lobbyist of the National Rifle Association, written in August after the NRA-backed Thune Amendment on concealed carry had failed in the Senate. The Amendment would have allowed anyone with a concealed carry license from any state to carry concealed in any other state, even in defiance of that state’s law. After noting that permit holders had already passed a background check, Cox asserted, “They are good people in their home states, and they will remain virtuous and responsible when they are in other states.”

You see, according to the NRA, the world is neatly divided into “good people” and “bad people.” The good people have always been good and always will be. And we know who they are. If they can pass a background check, we should give them a license to carry a concealed weapon. Then they can shoot the bad people when they start victimizing the good people. As NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre once put it, “Good people make good decisions. That’s why they’re good people.”

It is a worldview almost childlike in its simplicity. It does not, however, account for the people who we thought were good – until they pulled the trigger and inflicted mayhem on others. In the NRA’s world, Hasan was among the “good people,” until he committed mass murder. So were concealed carry permit holders George Sodini, Richard Poplawski and Michael McLendon, all of whom committed multiple killings this year. It seems that sometimes the “good people” make very bad decisions indeed.

The point, of course, is that it is dangerous folly to issue concealed carry licenses to virtually anyone who can pass a criminal background check. It is one thing to allow individuals to have guns in the home as long as they can pass a background check. It is quite another to rely on such checks to determine who can carry a gun concealed outside the home. Inside the home, the risk of gun possession largely is borne by those who live there. On the streets, the risk from an individual’s decision to carry a concealed gun in public is borne almost entirely by people who had no say in the decision, no knowledge of it, and no practical way to minimize the risk to themselves. And the risks are considerable. The evidence is overwhelming that “shall issue” states routinely issue licenses to dangerous people, who then commit dangerous acts – either intentionally, recklessly, or accidentally — with their guns.

Of course, the drumbeat has begun that lives could have been saved at Fort Hood if the military had lifted its restrictions on carrying guns on base, allowing more military personnel to be in a position to return fire from an attacker like Hasan. This idea amounts to introducing enormous additional daily risk into the lives of those who live and work on military bases on the off chance that the “good people” will be armed at the right time in the right place to respond to the most unlikely of events – a mass shooting in progress by one of the “bad people”.

Once we emerge from the make-believe world of “good people” vs. “bad people,” we cannot escape the chilling reality that Hasan himself was one of those our concealed carry laws had “deputized” to protect us all from potential attackers. How many more need to die at the hands of these “good people” before we insist that gun policy be grounded in reality, not make-believe?

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s new book, Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy.

By Doug Pennington
Assistant Director, Communications

After the shooting massacre at Fort Hood, commanding Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone was asked whether personnel in the Soldier Readiness Center on base would have been armed during the attack.

Gen. Cone  answered:

No.  We would not.  As a matter of practice, we do not carry weapons. This is our home.  So, we do have security guards that are here, the M.P.s and the Department of the Army civilian police.  But soldiers on Fort Hood do not carry weapons.

I will say that we are, as a matter of assurance to the local community, we are going to increase our security presence here in the coming days.  But the fact is that soldiers do not carry weapons routinely unless they‘re in a training event, et cetera, or something of this nature.

So, even as the National Rifle Association tries to arm America to the teeth, soldiers — America’s professional gun users — do not carry weapons on base “as a matter of practice.”

Why?  Because it’s their home.

You just knew that had to hit the gun zealots where it hurts most.

Sure enough, Jacob Sullum of Reason came out yesterday to show he knows better than a commanding General how to run America’s largest Army base.

What is Sullum’s brilliant answer to the Fort Hood massacre?

“More guns,” of course.

…If someone else at the processing center had a gun when Hasan started shooting, it seems likely that fewer people would have been killed or injured….

“It seems likely“?  And if wishes were horses, Reason editors would ride….

Here we see the counterfactual — the last refuge of gun advocates without facts, desperately trying to force guns into every aspect of American life.

Conveniently, they never openly consider the opposite possibility: that even more people would be dead.

(An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn?  The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport.  Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with.  After all, they have the guns, right?)

Sullum also cited what he called the “breathtaking inanity” of the Brady Campaign’s belief that more guns aren’t the answer to gun violence.

Okay, fine.  Let’s step back for a moment.

Enough reporting of the Fort Hood massacre has been done to reach some tentative conclusions about the accused shooter and the shooting itself.

• The shooter was issued a Virginia concealed carry permit in 1996.  (See his permit application here. ) This means, according to people like Jacob Sullum and John Lott/”Mary Rosh,” the alleged Fort Hood murderer was, by definition, a “law-abiding citizen”… right up to the point he massacred 13 people and wounded another 30.  This also means that Sullum’s “more guns” policy would help put guns in the next “law-abiding” mass murderer’s hands, and make it legal for him to carry them virtually anywhere he chooses.

• The shooter used a firearm — the FN FiveSeveN — that shouldn’t be available to the general public in the first place, a weapon dubbed by law enforcement as a “cop-killer” and “an assault rifle that fits in your pocket.”  The ammunition type that the Fort Hood killer used has not yet been reported.  However, the FN FiveSeveN can fire ammunition that — according to FN’s own marketing — will penetrate body armor and Kevlar helmets.  (See this cached page at GunBroker.com selling the weapon, with FN’s marketing language.  Also, watch a Brady Campaign demonstration of the FN firing armor-piercing ammunition, as compared to other weapons.)  Sullum says that pointing out this fact after a mass murderer uses the same model weapon is “bizarre.”

• The Fort Hood shooter fired over 100 rounds in about 7 minutes.

• The shooter apparently purchased “several high-capacity gun magazines” when he bought the FN FiveSeveN pistol at a Killeen, Texas gun store appropriately named “Guns Galore.”  The 20-round magazine comes standard with the FiveSeveN.  Had President Bush and the U.S. Congress not been so weak to allow the Federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, those magazines would not have been legally sold from Guns Galore.  A shooter limited to using only 10-round magazines is forced to reload twice as often as one who uses 20-round magazines, creating more opportunities to attack him when he isn’t shooting, thus possibly saving lives.  Sullum breezily dismisses this as “matter[ing] little.”

• While the shooter apparently contacted a radical cleric with “unmistakable connections to past terrorist plots,” investigators reportedly decided not to delve further into the future killer’s life.  FBI reportedly concluded that the shooter “was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning.”  Either way, even if the Fort Hood killer had been placed on the Terrorist Watch List — while he would have been denied entry onto a passenger aircraft — he still would have been allowed to buy his “cop-killer” pistol from Guns Galore.  Why?  Because, thanks to the National Rifle Association,  law enforcement is prohibited from blocking gun purchases by someone on the Terrorist Watch List if  the buyer doesn’t have another disqualifying reason (such as a felony conviction or domestic violence restraining order).

All these warning signs.  All these holes in the ability of law enforcement to do their job, shot through by lobbying from the NRA.

The ease with which America’s weak gun laws permitted a deranged killer to arm himself and massacre so many of our servicemen and -women should be a national tragedy.

Yet the only answer Sullum can manage is the “breathtaking inanity” to play the gun lobby’s broken record of “more guns… more guns…more guns….”

Of course, his conclusion can only follow from an equally inane assumption that mass shootings beset us like natural disasters,  as if nothing can be done to prevent them.

Taking his assumption to its logical extension, Sullum’s libertarian dystopia would deregulate gun ownership and gun-carrying entirely, so as to give everyone a gun who wants one; always assume some number of them are mass murderers; and then either duck or engage in the crossfire when bullets start to fly.  (Thomas Hobbes would call this a “state of nature.”)

In fact, Sullum’s answer is the equivalent of waving the white flag of surrender. Surrender to a permanent armed insanity in America — a culture of shooting deaths and injuries that cripple our efforts to build a stronger, more peaceful society in the belief that building such a society is futile.

What Sullum ignores is the inconvenient truth that shootings are not natural disasters.  They are man-made massacres aided and abetted by America’s almost non-existent gun laws — designed by the gun lobby — which take a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to putting firearms in the hands of killers.

Give in to that violent futility? No, thank you.

That would be breathtakingly inane.

___

UPDATE: For readers referred from Joe Huffman, guns are not speech.

___

By Doug Pennington
Assistant Director, Communications

On the heels of this piece about a Congressional Research Service report on the Secret Service being “under strain” from increased threats to officials including the President, the Newark Star-Ledger reports:

The 55-year-old Newark airport security guard arrested on charges of threatening to shoot President Obama could have realistically carried out those threats, a judge said today during the man’s arraignment.

“We really have to take these matters seriously,” said Municipal Court Judge Amilkar Velez-Lopez, speaking in Superior Court in Newark, where John Brek was formally charged via video conference from Essex County Jail. “It was not just an idle threat.”

Brek, a longtime Linden resident, was arrested Tuesday night after two airport employees alerted police to comments he made hours earlier about cutting a hole in a fence so he could shoot the president, who stopped at Newark’s airport Wednesday afternoon to campaign for Gov. Jon Corzine.

A subsequent search of Brek’s Linden home found a stash of 43 guns, including one that was stolen….

…During a Tuesday afternoon conversation at a coffee cart in Newark airport, Brek allegedly told another employee that he had cut a hole in an airport fence, which he would use to shoot the president.

Obama’s arrival would have been a short distance from the fence Brek is alleged to have discussed with the employee, Dow said. After describing the cut fence, Brek “simulated holding a rifle in the direction of where the president would be,” she said. The employee notified police, according to the prosecutor’s office, and authorities are questioning another person who may have overheard the conversation….

…An elderly couple who have rented out an apartment to Brek for 11 years described him as deeply patriotic, a longtime member of the National Rifle Association, and someone who enjoys weekend hunting trips. “It might just have been a figure of speech,” said one of the landlords, who both insisted their names not be published. “He’s not violent, and I can’t even remember him being disrespectful.”….

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I noticed a recent article in the Washington Times (which is to print what Fox News is to TV) that had me thinking, “Here we go again.”

The article, headlined “U.S., after long ban, quietly begins to study gun safety,” reported, with barely-concealed alarm, that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is studying the risks to teenagers from carrying guns. Can you imagine that? A government agency believing that teens with guns should be considered an issue of public health?

Pro-gun Members of Congress sent NIH an intimidating letter questioning the gun-related research. A spokesperson for the Gun Owners of America added ominously, “This kind of research does concern us, and we’re going to be watching it closely.”

Yes, it’s “déjà vu all over again,” the repetition of a longtime gun lobby theme. I call it the “fear of facts.” Or, “the less we know about gun violence, the better off we are.” This principle dictates a recurring gun lobby tactic: when new information starts to look threatening to the pro-gun agenda, make sure it never sees the light of day.

We saw this tactic at work in the 1990s, when the Centers for Disease Control began to fund firearm surveillance systems at state health departments to allow the collection of basic data about firearm deaths and injuries – the same kind of information that has long been collected about auto deaths and injuries. Gun lobby intimidation led Congress to cut $2.6 million from CDC’s budget – exactly the amount that was being spent on gun-related research.

To this day, the CDC is subject to a legislative restriction barring it from funding research used “in whole or in part to advocate or promote gun control.” In other words, if there is a chance research would support the need for stronger gun laws, CDC can’t fund it. There is no such restriction on research that could be used to oppose stronger gun laws. Can you imagine if CDC were barred from funding research that could be used “in whole or in part to advocate or promote” the regulation of tobacco products?

In recent years, we have seen the “ignorance is bliss” approach of the gun lobby surface on other issues. It is the basis for the infamous Tiahrt Amendments barring public disclosure of the crime gun trace data that for many years had been routinely disclosed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. When researchers used the data to show that state gun laws impede the flow of guns into the illegal market, that assault weapons are disproportionately traced to crime, and that certain gun dealers are feeding large numbers of guns into the criminal market, the gun lobby felt sufficiently threatened to get Congress to suppress the information.

We see the same effort to hide the truth about state concealed weapon laws. The National Rifle Association has been shockingly successful in bullying state legislatures into passing laws that have exponentially increased the number of people with licenses to carry concealed weapons, even in the face of strong public opposition. It turns out that, in state after state with these laws, lots of very dangerous people have been given licenses to carry hidden handguns in public, and they have committed lots of very serious crimes.

For example, in 2007, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that 1,400 individuals who had pled guilty or no-contest to felony charges had been issued concealed carry licenses and that license holders had committed crimes ranging from aggravated stalking to manslaughter. The Sun-Sentinel obtained the names of the license holders just before the Florida legislature, at the behest of the NRA, passed legislation to block further public disclosure. The same pattern has been repeated in other states: after the press discloses the dangerous individuals granted concealed carry licenses and their crimes, the NRA immediately seeks legislation to seal the names.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? The gun lobby insists that “the people should be trusted to have guns.” But it is unwilling to trust the people with the truth about guns.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s new book, Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy.

We’ve seen the investigations in Texas, with more than 3,400 dangerous people given concealed carry permits by the state, including permit-holders convicted of homicide, rape and robbery.

We’ve seen the investigations in Florida, with more than 1,400 dangerous people given concealed carry permits by the state (10 times the number previously admitted), including permit-holders sentenced for manslaughter, child abuse and sexual battery.

We’ve seen the seemingly endless parade of individual news reports across America of criminal or stupid acts by concealed carry permit-holders, many of which we have posted here and compiled here.

Now, the Indianapolis Star has reported on Indiana’s broken concealed carry system:

One Indiana man pressed the barrel of a loaded handgun into the chest of a woman holding her 1-year-old son.

Another’s handgun was confiscated by police three times — twice for shooting in public. A third man was arrested for allegedly dealing crack cocaine and later was accused of beating his girlfriend.

But it’s not merely those actions that concern law enforcement officials and others on both sides of the polarizing handgun debate. It’s what happened next.

In each of these three cases, the person later applied for a permit to carry a handgun in public. And in all of these cases — and hundreds of other questionable ones uncovered by The Indianapolis Star — the Indiana State Police granted that request, often over the objections of the local police department and even though, in some cases, it appears the State Police had a legal obligation to deny the permit.

Even worse, many of those people committed subsequent crimes, some with the guns they were legally permitted to carry….

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Examining just two counties in the Hoosier State, the Star found 456 examples of people with concealed carry permits granted by the state whose applications were actually recommended for disapproval by local Indiana police.

The report found permit-holders with convictions for battery, resisting law enforcement, felony DWI, criminal trespass, and other crimes.

After receiving their permits, some went on to hold their families hostage at gunpoint, threaten police officers during a domestic disturbance, be convicted for selling cocaine, and be convicted for felony criminal confinement and battery, among other incidents.

As one Indianapolis police officer said, “You can have an extensive criminal history and still have (a permit).  At some point you should say enough is enough.”

That point should be when the individual stops being a “law-abiding citizen.”

Every week across the country, concealed carry permit-holders disprove the gun lobby mantra that all permit-holders are “law-abiding citizens” who we can trust to carry their loaded, concealed handguns in public to “protect us” from the “bad guys.”

All too often, they are the bad guys.