Apr 15, 20212 min read

2A Saves Lives-Gun Free Zones Are Victim Zones

Updated: Aug 7, 2021

Cowardly Killers Select Target with a Posted “No-Guns” Notice

The murderer in Aurora, Colo., as many other cowardly killers have done, selected a target with a posted “no-guns” notice. American moviegoers would be well-advised to take precisely the opposite course.

There are few ideas in American life more naive and irrational than that of the “gun-free zone.” As ever, it is imperative to move past the euphemisms and the rhetoric that pervade the debate, and to ask the material question: “For whom?” More specifically, it is imperative to ask: “Of whose guns are we to be free?” As we have learned time and time again, the unhappy answer to this crucial question is: “The people whom we want to have the guns when something goes seriously wrong.”

The fatal flaw beneath the idea of the “gun-free zone” is that the crimes it is intended to prevent are far more serious in nature than the crime that it seeks to create. Or, put another way, the core problem with the “gun-free zone” is that if a person is intent upon murder, rape, assault, robbery or terrorism, he will have no qualms whatsoever about violating the laws relating to the gun he uses in order to carry out those actions.

The good news is that, at some level, we already understand this. Suzanna Hupp, whose parents were killed in the 1991 Luby’s massacre in Killeen, Texas, famously testified in favor of concealed-carry laws by arguing that she had wanted to keep her gun in her purse on the morning of the shooting, but had left it “one hundred feet away in [her]car” for fear of losing her chiropractor’s license if caught carrying. Hupp’s argument was sufficiently persuasive to convince Texas to pass a shall-issue concealed-carry law, and for much of the rest of the country to follow suit.