The Bleeding Obvious

Kick ass or whup ass? Your choice.

File this under Least Surprising News Story of the Week. A new study finds:

The purpose of the present study is to determine the effects of state-level assault weapons bans and concealed weapons laws on state-level murder rates. Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The results of this study are consistent with some prior research in this area, most notably Lott and Mustard (1997).

That would be our own John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, a book that to the Left is utterly counter-intuitive, given their upside-down worldview, but which makes perfect sense to what we used to call Real Americans. For, as president Obama likes to say, make no mistake: the push for “gun control” in this country has almost nothing to do with safety (something every responsible gun owner is entirely in favor of) and everything to do with the Left’s innately fascist impulses. Restrict it! Ban it! Outlaw it! These people never stop, they never sleep, they never quit, even in the face of all the evidence.

Mass shootings like the ones that have occurred in recent years in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have tripled in recent years, according to a study set to be published next week for the FBI.

Researchers looked at active shootings in public settings where the primary motive appeared to be mass murder and at least one victim was unrelated to the shooter, according to Yahoo News, which obtained the report.

The study, to be published next week in the “FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin,” a training publication for those in the criminal justice profession, was written by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University.

An argument for more “gun control,” right? Not at all:

Almost half of the active shootings are over before additional help can arrive, the study said, and potential victims actually stopped the attacker in 17 such cases.

“This tells us that citizens and bystanders have a very real and active role in stopping these events,” Terry Nichols, a former police officer and an assistance director at ALERRT, told Yahoo News. “If we can properly prepare and educate civilians, maybe we can get to where 90 percent are stopped by civilians long before the police arrive.”

When victims fight back — especially if they’re armed — the attacker instantly loses interest in killing helpless innocents and immediately begins thinking of ways to protect himself; even when he eventually takes the coward’s way out, which so many of them do, their first instinct upon taking return fire is to flee. But the push for more restrictions on firearms is also a sign of how fundamentally unmanly the Left is, in the traditional sense. And despite the central tenet of “critical theory” — that everything old must be questioned and, if possible, destroyed — most everything about the American Experiment is indeed worth celebrating and saving. A country founded upon self-reliance and self-defense has allowed itself to be poisoned by dime-store, defeatist Marxism, which perverts every noble impulse it proclaims into a form of self-abnegating servility at the feet of a particularly nasty master. Yes, this guy, lovingly described by Saul Alinsky as “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

And it seemed like such a good idea at the time.

The restoration of the Second Amendment to its proper place in the American arsenal has been one of the few good-news stories of the past couple of decades. Because a society that will not allow you to protect yourself, and that demands that you become a victim, is not one worth fighting for. As Satan notes in Paradise Lost: