robkelk Wrote:Let's not.
Answer the question, please.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the bit of legal code he quoted, he did give you an answer. "Most of the men between 17 and 45 years old, plus various others."
But there's another question - "Is this actually more relevant to the discussion than the price of fresh strawberries on Saturn?"
As far as I can tell, there's two basic classes interpretations of the second amendment fit into. Either "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," is viewed as a modifier to "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.", or it's an explanation of it.
I, personally, favored something more like the latter, since I felt that the order of operations worked better that way. One acquires the Arms, one learns how to use them, then and only then is one qualified to join the Militia. Also it seemed to make more sense grammatically to consider the second part to stand on it's own. (Although I'm not sure why that comma is in there.)
There's also going back to the text of Madison's preemptive proposal, which evolved into the Bill of Rights.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
Which seems pretty straightforward to me.
So, moving on. We obviously want events like this to not happen. What sort of gun laws aid in this goal?
John R. Lott Jr. and William M. Landes published a paper titled Multiple Victim Public Shootings in 2000 exploring this question. This site actually lets you download and read the whole thing, and it's pretty interesting stuff. Highlights include:
Quote:Overall, we find that states without right-to-carry laws had more deaths and injuries from multiple shootings per year (both in absolute numbers and on a per capita basis) during the 1977 to 1997 period. Note also that the number of states with right-to-carry laws increased from 8 to 31 and the percentage of the U.S. population in these states rose from 8.5 to 50 percent in this period. Yet, states without right-to-carry laws still account for the large majority (often around 90 percent) of deaths and injuries.
Quote:The other gun related law variables generally produce no consistent significant impact on mass shootings. One exception is the impact of laws limiting a purchaser to no more than one-gun-a month. All the estimates imply that limitations on purchases increase multiple shootings, though the statistical significance of this variable is driven solely by its impact on the number of injuries. The point estimates on the waiting period variables are not consistent. In some equations, a longer waiting period increases the risk of mass public shootings, in others it decreases the risk, and in only one equation is the variable statistically significant. A safe storage law has no significant effect in any equation. The imposition of additional penalties for using a gun in a crime significantly reduces the number of murders, but the impact on injuries and the number of attacks is statistically insignificant. Nor were any of the joint F-tests on the gun control variables statistically significant. In sum, there is no evidence that these laws systematically reduce multiple shootings.
Quote:The new regressions shown in Section B clearly show that the states with the fewest gun free zones have the greatest reductions killings, injuries, and attacks. Each one point increase in the index is associated with about a two percent further reduction in these crimes and all the estimates are statistically significant at least at the one percent level. All the other variables are very similar to what is reported in Section A.
Quote:While the recent rash of public school shootings during the 1997-99 school largely took place after the period of our study, these incidents raise questions about the unintentional consequences of laws. All the public school shootings took place after a 1995 federal law banned guns (including permitted concealed handguns) within a thousand feet of a school. The possibility exists that attempts to outlaw guns from schools, no matter how well meaning, may have produced perverse effects. It is interesting to note that during the 1977 to 1995 period, 15 shootings took place in schools in states without right-to-carry laws and only one took place in a state with this type of law. There were 19 deaths and 97 injuries in states without the law, while there was one death and two injuries in states with the law.
The National Review spoke with Lott recently, who noted some things about more recent incidents.
Quote:He noted that the Aurora shooter, who killed twelve people earlier this year, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a 20-minute drive of his home. The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals. All of the other theaters allowed the approximately 4 percent of Colorado adults who have a concealed-handgun permit to enter with their weapons.
And then there's this.
Quote:Lott offers a final damning statistic: "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns."
The conclusion is pretty simple. Take guns away from the law-abiding, you create convenient victims. This suggests a couple obvious courses of action. One, stop doing the things that make the problem worse. Like Oklahoma, where a bill is going to be introduced that would allow teachers and administrators to carry arms. That may still leave Oklahoma as one of the most heavily restricted states in terms of gun-free zones, but it's a start.
Other, take the things that work and do more of them. Gun permit applications have soared in the Twin Cities area. And that's a start. But we need more states to pass right-to-carry laws. More guns in the hands of the law-abiding means a higher chance of someone being in the position to stop an attack.
(There's an interesting footnote in that paper about two school shootings that happened in 1997. The shooters in both were stopped by armed civilians nearby long before police arrived, but almost no news coverage mentioned that they had a gun when they did so...)
-Morgan.