Commentary: Disarming the populace is no way to protect against mass shootings

The fallout from the most recent "no-guns" zone massacre at Red Lake High in Minnesota continues to reverberate. On April 2, the New Hampshire Union Leader featured guest commentary from Gun Week magazine's Dave Workman:

Seven dead at a church service in Wisconsin. Three dead in an Atlanta courthouse shooting, plus one more killed later by the same man. Ten dead, including the shooter, at or near a high school in northern Minnesota.

Recent headlines have brought the usual demands from gun control extremists for more laws and more restrictions on the private ownership of firearms. What the gun banners, and their media cheerleaders, have rather carefully ignored is that all of these brutal acts occurred in so-called “gun-free” zones.

After Columbine, state legislatures passed a flurry of “gun free school zone” laws that have hardly been a panacea to campus violence. When I went to high school in Tacoma, Washington, we had a rifle team, and kids brought their guns to school all the time. Nobody suffered so much as a scratch.

But at Red Lake High School, a seriously warped teenager who had been sending all kinds of warning signals about his mental state, came in and started shooting. This was after he killed his policeman grandfather, took his service pistol and a shotgun, and drove to the school in the dead man’s vehicle. Sure, there were security guards and a metal detector at the school. The guards were unarmed, and one of them was the first person shot. The metal detector stopped nothing.

Click here to read the entire column from the New Hampshire Union Leader.

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