Gun-free zones - an invitation to a shooting?

Ann Coulter points out that all the recent shootings have guns in common - along with crack cocaine, and dysfunctional people, broken dreams and misfits.

.. I guess Mixon also raped that 12-year-old girl in "self-defense." Clearly, the pimping industry has lost a good man. I wish I'd known him. I tip my green velvet fedora with the dollar signs all over it to him. Why do the good ones always die young? Pimps, I mean.

Liberals tolerate rallies on behalf of cop-killers, but they prohibit law-abiding citizens working at community centers in Binghamton, N.Y., from being armed to defend themselves from disturbed, crack-addicted America-haters like Jiverly Wong.

What public, mass shootings have in common, is they usually continue until someone brings another gun into use. There is a *reason* shooters pick shopping malls, college campuses, and private, non-gun-owner residences for their shootings. They want an easy target, and no interruptions.

-- Richard Poplawski, 23, product of a broken family, expelled from high school and dishonorably discharged from the Marines, who killed three policemen in Pittsburgh.

Poplawski was doing something other dysfunctional, distraught people have done - commit "suicide by police guns". He told an acquaintance on the phone, as the police arrived, that he was about to die. Why he actually shot at police, wore a bullet-proof vest - maybe it was hubris, maybe he was trying for the Guinness Book of World Records. Who knows. I don't care.

Three things are needed to end these shooting sprees.

1. Stop publishing them. They are local interest stories, of import to those injured, killed, and relatives and friends of those involved. Spreading the story any further - invites copycat slayings.
2. Enforce the laws on the books. Accept that you cannot legislate morality (Barry Goldwater). Rallying, using an incident to further your own political or news-team goals violates the first step, and invites copycat slayings.
3. Accept that making training and shooting opportunities once again a common and public facet of American public life results in less crime. Communities that have required every head of household to possess a firearm - have lower crime rates.

When a person uses a gun to commit a crime, from suicide to robbery to rape to murder, blame the person. Crimes are against the law - the weapons or technique are mere details. Making guns more difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain *arms* and *invites* the criminal that doesn't use legal means to obtain their weapon anyway.

Look at the Mexican Canard^tm. Mexico complained about the automatic weapons from the US that their drug cartels use. Right. Those automatic weapons were provided by the US Department of Defense to arm their police and army. Deserters from the Mexican army and police take those weapons, and sell them to the drug cartels. These are not weapons available in gun shops to law abiding US Citizens.