Category Archives: Constitution

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, July 19, 2019: 

Vincent Smith’s petition urging Virginia Beach’s city council to repeal its “gun free zone” ruling is gaining even more momentum. As noted here last month (see Sources below), Smith, a city engineer, saw a gap in the security measures allegedly protecting city employees. He said, “The gap was not allowing employees to carry a firearm … instead, people were forced – like I am every day – to choose between earning a living and saving my life.”

The first time he tried, his effort fizzled. His petition received only 260 signatures. But following the ghastly shooting at Virginia Beach’s Municipal Center (where Smith works, but was absent on the day of the shooting) that resulted in the murder of 12 of his co-workers before police could intervene, he tried again. When this writer checked on June 27, there were 3,179 signatures (his initial goal was 2,500). As this is being written (July 18), Smith’s petition now has 5,366 signatures, and Smith has raised his goal to 7,500.

Said Smith: “I want a real consideration by council and a real discussion about changing the HR policy … what happened [on May 31] could have been minimized.” Once his petition reaches 7,500 signatures, the Virginia Beach city council will have that opportunity.

And so will the House of Representatives if Rep. Thomas Massie’s bill continues to gain traction. His Safe Students Act, which would repeal the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, just received a massive boost by the 650,000-member Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA). Its chairman, Alan Gottlieb, said on Wednesday that the federal ban on guns in “gun-free” zones has been an unmitigated disaster:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, May 8, 2019:

The shooting by two students at the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) high school in Highlands Ranch (a suburb of Denver) that left one student dead and eight others wounded, some seriously, predictably elicited calls for more gun control from a number of progressive Democrats. The fact that the school was located just seven miles away from Columbine High School, and that the shooting took place just three weeks after the 20th anniversary of the Columbine shooting, was just gravy on that red meat.

In their tweets and other public statements, the Democrats said nothing about the

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, May 6, 2019: 

John Lott never intended to be a lightning rod in the war over the Second Amendment. He studied to be an economist, hoping to hide out in a think tank somewhere and crank out scholarly articles on economics, heavily laden with statistics. But in 1997, curious about how gun laws might be impacting violent crime, he co-authored an article with a fellow academic at the University of Chicago that concluded that the increasing presence of privately owned firearms was having a favorable impact on gun violence.

He published More Guns, Less Crime in 1998, which altered his professional life direction dramatically. Using his statistician’s mind, he proved that as more and more Americans took advantage of their right to keep and bear arms, gun violence began its decades-long decline.

Critics attacked his analysis, so Lott revised his study, republishing More Guns, Less Crime in 2010. Since then, he has written The Bias Against Guns and founded his Crime Prevention Research Center. Unwittingly, Lott has become what Newsweek called “The Gun Crowd’s Guru.”

And he’s done it again. Anti-gunners have protested that the presence of firearms on school campuses would lead to more violence: teachers should teach and not pack; students could snatch guns away from unsuspecting teachers; accidents could happen; etc., etc. With Texas and Florida proposing to expand the freedom of school teachers to carry concealed on campus, Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group Moms Demand Action warned that this “would make school a much more dangerous place for our children.”

The same tune was sung by the Giffords Law Center (GLC), which this writer took to task last month here, calling its study of how teachers were mishandling their firearms “laughable.” (See Sources below)

We wrote at the time:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, May 6, 2019:

John Lott couldn’t find a single instance of a shooting on a school campus where teachers and staff were permitted to carry concealed, going all the way back to 2000.

John Lott’s latest study refutes claims by anti-gunners that the presence of firearms on school campuses increases the chances of gun violence. President of his Crime Prevention Research Center, Lott’s study answered two questions raised by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Giffords Law Center and others: 1) Does letting teachers carry a firearm on campus and in the classroom increase the chances of gun violence?; and 2) Does the presence of those teachers carrying legally deter mass shooters?

The study, released last month, found: “We don’t need to guess how the policy would work. There has yet to be a single case of someone being wounded or killed from a shooting, let alone a mass public shooting, between 6 AM and midnight at a school that lets teachers carry guns” since at least January 2000. Fears that a student might grab a firearm from a teacher and use it to commit gun violence are groundless as well, said Lott’s study: “Students obtaining teachers guns have not occurred at all.” Appropriately, Lott entitled his study: “Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns are Extremely Safe.”

On the other hand, shootings on campuses where teachers and staff are prohibited from carrying concealed have “increased significantly — doubling [in number] between 2001 and 2008 versus 2009 and 2018.”

The study concluded: