This is an excellent piece demonstrating the Left’s propensity to simply redefine a problem rather than attempt to fix it.
Anti-gun activists continue to re-define gun-free zones to fit their real agenda of denying our Second Amendment rights. Groups like Moms Demand Action are seeking to change the conversation to prove gun rights advocates have had it wrong all the time.
Meg Kelly, an editor with “The Fact Checker,” published in the Washington Post using the Moms Demand Action (MDA) definition of “gun-free zone” writes the meaning of the term itself is open to interpretation making its true meaning virtually indiscernible.
MDA’s definition of “Gun Free Zone” is:
Areas where civilians are prohibited from carrying firearms and there is not a regular armed law enforcement presence.
Based on that definition, we would have to eliminate places like Parkland, FL and Sandy Hook, CT in measuring the number of deaths that occurred in areas where citizens are prohibited from defending themselves with a firearm. By MAD’s logic, if a security guard or law enforcement was somewhere in the vicinity, neither was a gun-free one.
This certainly begs the question in the case of the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where Scot Peterson, the Sheriff’s Deputy stationed there, ran and hid at the base of a stairwell as students were being shot and massacred. By MAD’s logic, a 500,000 square foot school with one armed security guard would not be considered a gun-free zone even though every staff member, teacher, and lawful gun-owner could not carry a weapon there.
The reason groups like MAD and other anti-gun groups don’t want Parkland to be called a gun-free zone is because they support such zones and don’t want the truth of their ineffectiveness to sway public opinion against their agenda. Rather than acknowledge they support, what could be called “killing zones,” the left wants to change the definitions so the data can’t be measured.
Kelly even admitted in her Washington Post article, “Without a commonly accepted and uniform definition of “mass shooting” or agreement on what constitutes a “gun-free zone,” it’s difficult to settle this debate.”
Amy Sherman latched on to this left-friendly interpretation of a gun-free zone when she wrote for Politifact, “Fort Hood and Washington Navy Yard, military sites attacked by gunmen [have been characterized] as gun-free despite the presence of armed security … How can a place be a gun-free zone if guns are present?”
Following the most recent killing spree at a Naval Air training facility in Pensacola, FL the Department of Defense has finally recognized how ignorant leftists like Sherman are of reality. The commander of the Pensacola Air Station explained why local sheriff’s deputies were required to stop the killer by saying rather pathetically, “… no sailors, nor Marines, other than MPs on duty, may possess weapons on-base.”
As John Farnam of Ammoland writes, “Our military bases are all gigantic ‘gun-free zones,’ where our defenseless ‘unarmed forces,’ wait around to be murdered by armed terrorists, and where professing ‘commanders’ are petrified by the thought of deploying competently-armed warriors during an “in- extremis” incident.
Thankfully, some states have woken up to the idiocy of most gun-free zones. Idaho and Oregon had passed laws that public colleges and universities cannot ban weapons on campuses.
Such moves offer hope that common sense is not dead everywhere.