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Chronology of Islam in America (2012)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
December 2012 - Page Two
NRA's bizarre press conference: Arms guards at schools to boost gun sales
Dec. 21: After a week of hiding after the school massacre in the Sandy Hook School of Newtown, Conn., the National Rifle Association broke its silence today with an extraordinary press conference in which Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said that armed guards in schools are needed to protect our children from the “genuine monsters” walking among us. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre and called on Congress for federal funds to put armed police officers in every school in the country. He also announced that the NRA is forming a “National School Shield” safety plan that he said can be used as a model by schools across the country. He blamed everybody and everything but the gun culture it has fostered for the deaths of 20 children and seven adults on December 14 at the hands of Adam Lanza. LaPierre complained that the media "demonized" gun-owners, and claimed that a ban on particular weapons such as assault rifles would do nothing to avert future tragedies.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg described the NRA press conference "a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country." He said that the NRA’s call for armed guards in schools represents a paranoid vision of America. Bloomberg pointed out that the NRA lobbyists blame "everyone but themselves" for the crisis of gun violence. He says America must rise above and demand Congress and President Barack Obama work on reasonable gun restrictions.
George Zornick of the Nation commenting on the ridiculous idea of guns at schools reminded that Columbine High School had a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school who engagedthe shooters almost immediately in 1999 and wasn’t able to stop the massacre. At Virginia Tech, there was an entire armed police force on campus that was unable to stop the worst school shooting in US history.
Sixteen US mass shootings happened in 2012, leaving at least 88 dead
According to Zornick, the Sandy Hook School massacre was at least the sixteenth mass shooting to take place in America in 2012 which claimed 88 lives:
February 22, 2012—Five people were killed in at a Korean health spa in Norcross, Georgia, when a man opened fire inside the facility in an act suspected to be related to domestic violence.
February 26, 2012—Multiple gunmen began firing into a nightclub crown in Jackson, Tennessee, killing one person and injuring 20 others.
February 27, 2012—Three students at Chardon High School in rural Ohio were killed when a classmate opened fire.
March 8, 2012—Two people were killed and seven wounded at a psychiatric hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when a gunman entered the hospital with two semiautomatic handguns and began firing.
March 31, 2012—A gunman opened fire on a crowd of mourners at a North Miami, Florida, funeral home, killing two people and injuring 12 others.
April 2, 2012—A 43-year-old former student at Oikos University in Oakland, California, walked into his former school and killed seven people, “execution-style.” Three people were wounded.
April 6, 2012—Two men went on a deadly shooting spree in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shooting black men at random in an apparently racially motivated attack. Three men died and two were wounded.
May 29, 2012—A man in Seattle, Washington, opened fire in a coffee shop and killed five people and then himself.
July 9, 2012—At a soccer tournament in Wilmington, Delaware, three people were killed, including a 16-year-old player and the event organizer, when multiple gunmen began firing shots, apparently targeting the organizer.
July 20, 2012—James Holmes enters a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and opens fire with a semi-automatic weapon; twelve people are killed and fifty-eight are wounded.
August 5, 2012—A white supremacist and former Army veteran shot six people to death inside a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before killing himself.
August 14, 2012—Three people were killed at Texas A&M University when a 35-year-old man went on a shooting rampage; one of the dead was a police officer.
September 27, 2012—A 36-year-old man who had just been laid off from Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, Minnesota, entered his former workplace and shot five people to death, and wounded three others before killing himself.
October 21, 2012—45-year-old Radcliffe Frankin Haughton shot three women to death, including his wife, Zina Haughton, and injured four others at a spa in Brookfield, Wisconsin, before killing himself.
December 11, 2012—A 22-year-old began shooting at random at a mall near Portland, Oregon, killing two people and then himself.
December 14, 2012—One man murders 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, including twenty children, before killing himself. [The Nation – December 14, 2012]
Disarming the myths promoted by the gun control lobby
With private firearm ownership at an all-time high and violent crime rates plunging, none of the scary scenarios they advanced have materialized. Abuse of responsibility by armed citizens is rare, while successful defensive interventions against assaults on their lives and property are relatively commonplace. National violent crime rates that soared for 30 years from the early 1960s began to decrease markedly since 1993. Last December the FBI reported that murder and other violent crime rates fell again by 6.4% during the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. A Gallup poll indicates that “Americans’ preference regarding gun laws is generally that the government enforce existing laws more strictly and not pass new laws.”
A widely-known study conducted by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz in the 1990s found that there were somewhere between 830,000 and 2.45 million U.S. defensive gun uses annually. A National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) which asked victims if they had used a gun in self-defense found that about 108,000 each year had done so. A big problem with the NCVS line of survey reasoning, however, is that it only includes those uses where a citizen kills a criminal, not when one is only wounded, is held by the intended victim until police arrive, or when brandishing a gun caused a criminal to flee. Whereas gun control proponents often argue that having a gun put people at risk because a criminal will take it away and use it against them, it seems the reality is more often to be the reverse situation. The Cato data contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal took a gun away from a defender, but 277 where the intended victim disarmed the bad guy, although the authors acknowledge that these event reports may be printed more frequently due to newsworthiness. Finally, on the subject of public safety, just how well have gun bans worked in other countries? Take the number of home break-ins while residents are present as an indication. In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, nearly half of all burglaries occur when residents are present. But in the U.S. where many households are armed, only about 13% happen when someone is home. [Forbes – February 21, 2012]
Alaska legislative aide quits over anti-Islam group link
Dec. 14: A legislative staffer resigned today after an ethics panel recommended that she be fired after it found she used state resources to help an anti-Islamic group. The House Subcommittee of the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics (Alaska) also recommended that Karen Sawyer never work for the Legislature again. The panel found that Sawyer allowed David Heckert with a group called Stop Islamization of America, or SIOA, to use the Wasilla legislative information office and equipment for work related to his organization. It also found that Sawyer used state equipment to help plan activities related to a 2011 group conference, and that she failed to file a timely disclosure showing she was a member of the group's board in 2011 and 2012. In 2011, Sawyer's boss at the time, Rep. Carl Gatto, proposed legislation that would have instructed courts not to uphold any foreign laws if doing would strip a person of their constitutional rights. Gatto had said the bill, HB88, would curb courts from recognizing Sharia, an Islamic law code incorporated into the legal systems of some countries. Gatto, R-Palmer, died earlier this year. The panel, in a determination of probable cause, found that Sawyer "lost sight of the purpose of HB88 and became personally and obsessively involved with SIOA and its mission." While SIOA supported the bill, the group's "main mission appeared to be promoting their organization and its mission with HB88 as a validation point," the report from the panel states. "Based on the investigation, the committee determined that Ms. Sawyer was unable to distinguish where the bright line should be drawn between promoting HB88 and activities related to SIOA's agenda to promote their organization and its mission," the report states. The panel concluded that Sawyer "did not regularly update" Gatto on activities related to the bill and SIOA, particularly Heckert's activities at the legislative office and the purpose of meetings and presentations set up by Sawyer. [Associated Press]
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