Will Washington Ever Cut Spending?

By Deroy Murdock

Monday, December 24, 2012

 

Raul Castro is right.

 

The powerful brother of dictator Fidel Castro is almost always wrong. But he was perfectly right when he told comrades in Camaguey, Cuba: “No country has the luxury of spending more than it has.”

 

Even now, as America slouches toward the fiscal cliff, House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and leading Republicans seem ho-hum about limiting federal expenditures and restraining a government gone crazy. Obama and top Democrats are downright allergic to these concepts. Too bad this Cuban tyrant’s rare words of wisdom escape Washington’s spendaholics.

 

There are billions of ways to shrink the $3.8 trillion federal budget. Let’s start with these:

 

First, the Mack Penny Plan, created by outgoing Congressman Connie Mack (R., Fla.), would cut a penny from each dollar that Uncle Sam spends each year, for eight years. In 2013, Congress would spend 99 cents per dollar disbursed today; in 2014, 98 cents, etc. Rather than consume 24.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product today, federal spending in 2020 would be capped at 18 percent, just below the 18.2 percent at which Bill Clinton left it.

 

Such steady reductions, spanning nearly a decade, finally would lasso the spending monster. Washington policymakers should be able to prioritize and reallocate funding within a predictable, slowly decreasing budget.

 

Second, Washington should terminate antiquated and extraneous programs.

 

  FDR launched the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935 to bring power to Appalachia. It morphed into the Rural Utilities Service and now spends taxpayer dollars to bring wind turbines and broadband Internet to the countryside, including an $81.6 million gift to VTel Wireless. Now that Appalachia has been electrified since at least 1960, let’s declare, “Mission accomplished,” thank the staff, retire them, and sell their offices.

 

  Except for food-safety inspections, the Agriculture Department creates little value. Americans can thrive without agrocrats dictating sugar prices and paying farmers some $1.8 billion annually not to farm. Food growers and eaters can manage without Washington’s relentless interference.

 

  Washington expands affordable housing, so millions of Americans can buy homes, and simultaneously supports housing prices, so millions of Americans can enjoy precious nest eggs. Which is it? Washington should close the Department of Housing and Urban Development and exit the housing sector, which it nearly demolished in 2008.

 

   Launched in 1970, the Public Broadcasting Service challenged the three original broadcast networks, back when many TVs received just 13 channels. Today, anyone unhappy with ABC, CBS, or NBC can watch C-SPAN, the History Channel, National Geographic, Turner Classic Movies, and literally hundreds of other culturally enriching cable channels. Thousands of DVD titles offer tremendous educational and artistic value. And don’t forget books. PBS and Jim Lehrer will survive once they fully depart the federal dole and let donations and other non-government money finance 100 percent of their budget rather than a mere 85 percent, as they do today.

 

 

Third, between December 2008 and December 2011, Washington-based executive-branch civilian employees grew from 345,326 to 368,706. This 6.8 percent expansion across Obama’s first three years is ripe for reduction, especially when we consider these feds’ paychecks. According to Bureau of Economic Analysis data analyzed by Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, federal civilian employees in 2011 averaged $128,226 in total compensation ($84,671 in wages and $43,555 in benefits). Private-sector workers, meanwhile, earned half that: $64,560 ($53,463 in wages and $11,099 in benefits).

 

This federal-wage advantage can be obscene. Despite taxpayer bailouts of $170 billion and counting, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives get paid as if the housing bubble they helped create still were expanding. Based on median-cash-compensation figures in a December 10 report by the inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, 825 directors at Fannie and Freddie last year made at least $205,300. Among the agencies’ vice presidents, 166 received a minimum of $388,000. Thirty-one senior vice presidents saw at least $723,500. And eleven executive vice-presidents scored $1,718,200 or more. And this is what these 1,033 feds took home after wrecking the housing sector!

 

“The federal workforce has become an elite island of secure and high-paid workers, separated from the ocean of average American workers competing in the global economy,” Edwards commented. “Federal wages should be frozen or cut, overly generous federal benefits should be overhauled, and the federal workforce downsized through program terminations and privatization.”

 

Fourth, rather than grant Obama’s wish to borrow whatever sum he desires, former Reagan Treasury official and Forbes columnist David Malpass would impose a hard ceiling to curtail spending. Today’s debt limit is no such barrier. Instead, it resembles an elevator’s digital indicator that cheerfully chirps past each floor as it zooms skyward.

 

“The current law doesn’t work because it threatens defaults and government shutdowns, but not spending cuts,” says Malpass, an economist at Encima Global in Manhattan. “Better would be a permanent debt-to-GDP limit that forces Washington to do what it is paid for — make true spending choices.”

 

Malpass explains further: “A new law would give the president extra authority to cut spending (e.g., impoundment authority or a fast-track process for entitlement reform), but then shove him in that direction. When the debt ceiling has been breached, this law would require that the president give monthly spending updates to the public — in person. It would prohibit all raises for government employees making over $100,000 annually and require lobbyists to file weekly disclosures of their contacts. It would defund congressional travel while over the debt ceiling. The idea is to make Washington wear a hair shirt that is so uncomfortable that federal officials actually cut spending.”

 

If Washington will not stop hiking spending, spending hikes will stop Washington. How sad that nearly every Democrat and too many Republicans cannot grasp a concept self-evident even to a Cuban Communist.

It's Time for Media Control

By Derek Hunter

Sunday, December 23, 2012

 

Was there anything about the Sandy Hook massacre the media got right on the day it happened? In their rush to be first, they ignored their obligation to be right. Nearly every detail they disseminated Friday was wrong, even down to the name of the killer. Their desire to sensationalize had them shoving microphones in the faces of children who couldn’t possibly comprehend the events of the day. This was just the latest example of how out of control and dangerous the media has become, and it’s time government did something to protect us.

 

You’re probably asking yourself, “What about the First Amendment? Freedom of the press means we can’t regulate them, right?” Technically, yes. But since they, en masse, want to ignore the Second Amendment, to claim since it was written in a time of muskets, it is outdated and doesn’t apply to new guns, let’s apply the same to the First.

 

The First Amendment was written in a time of movable type printing presses and quills, not 24-hour cable news channels and the Internet. Using the media’s logic, the First Amendment doesn’t apply.

 

I’m not suggesting we should simply outlaw any media outside of print, but if we can limit the Second Amendment however we like, we can do the same to the First.

 

Congress should impose massive fines on those who get facts wrong. Not newspaper reporters – that’s dealt with a different way. But TV. As liberals love to remind us, broadcasters make their living over “public airwaves.” Conveying false information over them is a violation of the trust placed in those institutions by the public and should be punished.

 

The media would like to punish innocent gun owners for the actions of a tiny amount of guilty ones, so all media should be regulated because of the actions of a few bad ones.

 

NBC News, which I’m told was once a respected news organization, deliberately edited the 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case to make George Zimmerman sound racist when he was simply answering the dispatcher’s question. In the same case, the New York Times created a new race of humans – the “white Hispanic” – specifically to sensationalize that case into a racial issue. Although The Times is in print and thus protected, it also published that story on the Internet, which is not. Let’s punish The Times.

 

Zimmerman is suing NBC News and should win easily. But government could impose a minimum fine of, say, $1 billion for each offense. Doing so would bring about the end of the race to be first and restore the drive to be right. It also would ruin NBC News.

 

Media regulation could also be used to stop networks from conferring the fame on these the monsters they so desperately seek. They’re dead, but their name lives on in infamy, which is exactly what they want. Mentioning their name could be outlawed too.

 

All of this, of course, is absurd. The American people never would stand for it. We all exercise our free speech rights on a daily basis, and we’d never sit by and watch government outlaw speech. But many do exactly that with other parts of the First Amendment, particularly the religious freedom clause, and the Second.

 

No one would tolerate the creation of some sort of “special circumstances” where the Fifth Amendment wouldn’t apply and someone could be forced to testify in a criminal case against themselves – but somehow the Second is fair game.

 

How many laws did the Sandy Hook monster break in committing these murders? Why did he not respect the gun ban in the school? Because he was crazy. (That’s not to say he was stupid. Stupid and crazy, often used interchangeably, are two entirely different things.) Why aren’t we looking to see what warning signs were ignored by those around him and alert people to be on the lookout for those in others rather than the knee-jerk response of infringing on the rights of innocent Americans?

 

Liberals have a tradition of vilifying innocent people with the guilt of others. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Democrat FDR had Japanese Americans rounded up and essentially imprisoned for the sin of being Japanese. At its core, that’s what’s happening here.

 

Rather than focus on why this madman committed this heinous crime so we can prevent similar acts by equally ill people in the future, elected Democrats are ready yet again to impose government into areas the document they swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend expressly forbids. And the media, draped in the protections of that document, stands ready to be their willing accomplice in infringing upon others.

 

The American people cannot allow any of their rights – even if they choose not to exercise some of them – to be stripped away to appease an emotional mob being manipulated by politicians and fellow travelers in the media simply because unbalanced people abuse theirs. If we do, we might as well just surrender all of them now.

The Roots of Mass Murder

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, December 20, 2012

 

Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon, and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause, with its corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

 

Let’s be serious:

 

The Weapon

Within hours of last week’s Newtown, Conn., massacre, the focus was the weapon and the demand was for new gun laws. Several prominent pro-gun Democrats remorsefully professed new openness to gun control. Senator Dianne Feinstein is introducing a new assault-weapons ban. And the president emphasized guns and ammo above all else in announcing the creation of a new task force.

 

I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault-weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry, and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

 

Feinstein’s law, for example, would exempt 900 weapons. And that’s the least of the loopholes. Even the guns that are banned can be made legal with simple, minor modifications.

 

Most fatal, however, is the grandfathering of existing weapons and magazines. That’s one of the reasons the 1994 law failed. At the time, there were 1.5 million assault weapons in circulation and 25 million large-capacity (i.e., more than ten bullets) magazines. A reservoir that immense can take 100 years to draw down.

 

The Killer

Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

 

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

 

A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away — and (forcibly) treated.

 

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil-commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

 

The Culture

We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence. And we profess shock when a small cadre of unstable, deeply deranged, dangerously isolated young men go out and enact the overlearned narrative.

 

If we’re serious about curtailing future Columbines and Newtowns, everything — guns, commitment, culture — must be on the table. It’s not hard for President Obama to call out the NRA. But will he call out the ACLU? And will he call out his Hollywood friends?

 

The irony is that over the last 30 years, the U.S. homicide rate has declined by 50 percent. Gun murders as well. We’re living not through an epidemic of gun violence but through a historic decline.

 

Except for these unfathomable mass murders. But these are infinitely more difficult to prevent. While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them, and discourage “entertainment” that can intensify already murderous impulses.

 

But there’s a cost. Gun control impinges upon the Second Amendment; involuntary commitment impinges upon the liberty clause of the Fifth Amendment; curbing “entertainment” violence impinges upon First Amendment–protected free speech.

 

That’s a lot of impingement, a lot of amendments. But there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.

 

We made that trade after 9/11. We make it every time the TSA invades your body at an airport. How much are we prepared to trade away after Newtown?

The Tired Race Card

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 21, 2012

 

When will liberals stop living in the past? Specifically, when will they accept that they aren’t all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow?

 

I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil-rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to “go back” to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation.

 

It’s bizarre. I spend most of my time talking or listening to fellow conservatives, and I never hear anybody talk about wanting anything of the sort. But to listen to liberals, that’s all we care about.

 

Toward the end of the presidential campaign, various liberal pundits — a great many of them born after the signing of the Civil Rights Act — thought it a brilliant and damning indictment to note that Mitt Romney ran strong in states that once constituted the Confederacy. When Barack Obama won, Jon Stewart conceded that at least Romney won “most of the Confederacy.”

 

These states committed the obvious sin of voting Republican while the president was black.

 

Just this week, in an essay for the New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — the first female Indian-American governor in America — for appointing Representative Tim Scott to retiring senator Jim DeMint’s seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite.

 

So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.

 

“Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment,” Reed writes, “so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests.”

 

That’s it exactly. Indeed, that’s what the Tea Party was always about: undermining black interests.

 

When Herman Cain — another inconveniently black man — was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in the New York Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.

 

You know you’ve been pounding a square peg into a round hole for too long when you find yourself insinuating that a black man from Georgia represents the KKK tradition in contemporary politics.

 

More recently, liberal writers apparently convinced themselves that Republican opposition to Susan Rice becoming the next secretary of state was payback for the Emancipation or something.

 

“Angry over the reelection of the nation’s first black president,” vented a writer for The American Prospect, “a handful of old white senators — one of whom hails from the cradle of the Confederacy — launch hysterical and dishonest attacks on . . . a well-qualified African American woman.”

 

The Washington Post editorial board connected the dots, too, finding it important to note that of the Republican legislators expressing their reservations about Rice, “nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.”

 

Of course, the same racist representatives of Dixie also thought it fine to confirm Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for the same job.

 

It’s like a metastasizing cancer of delusion. Jim Sleeper, a lecturer at Yale and once a relatively sober-minded liberal writer, insists that opposition to gun control has something to do with the segregationist mind-set. Or something.

 

To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

 

Sure, there are racists in the Republican party. (There are some in the Democratic party, too.) And if you define racism as disagreeing with the Congressional Black Caucus or Barack Obama, the GOP is racist to the bone.

 

But the inconvenient truth is that conservatives are not only not racist, they aren’t a fraction as obsessed with race as liberals are.

 

Of course, that lack of obsession is no doubt itself proof of conservative racism. And why shouldn’t it be? Everything else is.

Jews in the Judean Desert?

By Cliff May

Thursday, December 20, 2012

 

More than 40,000 people have been slaughtered during the rebellion in Syria, and the death toll rises daily. The European Union does not appear to be particularly concerned. North Korea’s rulers have launched a three-stage rocket, moving closer to their goal of developing a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and they’re sharing nuclear-weapons technology with the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism in Iran. The EU does not seem to be worrying about that either. Israel is considering building homes on barren hills adjacent to Jerusalem. The EU’s 27 foreign ministers said they were “deeply dismayed” and warned Israel of unspecified consequences if the plan is carried out.

 

The European Union — recent winner, I should note, of the Nobel Peace Prize — has its priorities. So let’s talk about what the Israelis are doing to so distress them.

 

The area in which Israel may build covers 4.6 square miles. For the sake of comparison, Denver International Airport is 53 square miles. Known as E1, this area lies within a territory that has a much older name: the Judean Desert. Might Jews think they have a legitimate historical claim to the Judean Desert? This question is rarely asked.

 

For Israeli military planners, E1’s strategic value is more germane than its history. Developing it would help in the defense of Jerusalem, and would connect Jerusalem to Maaleh Adumim, an Israeli town with a population of 40,000. Media reports note that both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital. Media reports often fail to note that right now both Jews and Arabs live in Jerusalem — for the most part peacefully, with both populations growing — while Hamas vows to forcibly expel every Jew from Jerusalem. Such threats of ethnic cleansing also do not trouble the EU much.

 

It has been widely reported that if Israel should build in E1, the possibility of a two-state solution would be shattered. The New York Times was among those reporting this but, to the paper’s credit, it later published a correction, stating that building in E1 actually “would not divide the West Bank in two,” nor would it cut off the West Bank cities Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Anyone looking at a map would see that. People forget, or perhaps choose not to remember, that Israelis always have been willing to give up land for peace, including land acquired in defensive wars. Historically, that has not been a common practice, for a very sound reason: Aggression can be deterred only if it carries substantial risk. Nevertheless, Israelis gave up Gaza and the Sinai, and have offered to give up more land — at least 97 percent of the West Bank, retaining only those areas absolutely necessary for national security.

 

Israelis do want something in exchange: an end to the long conflict they have been fighting against those who insist that the Jewish people, uniquely, has no right to self-determination, no right to independence, no right to self-rule within their ancient and ancestral homeland.

 

What Israelis have received instead: missile and terrorist attacks and, last week, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a rally in Gaza proclaiming that “jihad,” armed struggle, will continue until Israel is defeated, conquered, and replaced — every square mile — by an Islamist theocracy. “Since Palestine is ours, and it is the land of the Arabs and Islam,” he said, “it is unthinkable that we would recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of it. . . . Let me emphasize that we adhere to this fundamental principle: We do not recognize Israel . . . The Palestinian resistance will crush it and sweep it away, be it Allah’s will.” He added: “We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

 

Within the EU there was a debate about whether to comment on that. Eventually, pressure from Germany and the Czech Republic led the EU to issue a mild rebuke to Hamas — a single paragraph in a three-page statement focusing on Israel’s “dismaying” behavior. Mahmoud Abbas, regarded as a moderate Palestinian leader, could not bring himself to call Mashaal’s latest threats wrong — or even unhelpful. Instead, Azzam Alahmed, a senior official in Abbas’s Fatah organization, described Mashaal’s speech as “very positive,” because it stressed the need for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. Such reconciliation would be achieved not by Hamas softening its positions, but by Fatah more explicitly agreeing that Israel’s extermination — rather than a two-state solution — remains the Palestinian goal, the final solution, if you will.

 

Just after the conclusion of the truce halting the most recent Hamas/Israel battle, Abbas went to the U.N. General Assembly to request that Palestine be recognized as a “non-member state.” The outcome was never in doubt — the UNGA, which cannot with a straight face be described as a deliberative body, has a reflexively anti-Israeli majority. Abbas’s action was a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords, under which any change in the Palestinians’ status is to come about only through negotiations with Israel.

 

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman laments that “the Europeans in general, and the European left in particular, have so little influence” in Israel. He is puzzled as to why that is. He insists that “it’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace.” Only by so doing, he adds, can Israel “have the moral high ground in a permanent struggle.” If “creative” Israelis were to find such a partner, would Friedman be able to arrange a life-insurance policy for him? And between those threatening their neighbors with genocide — which is, indisputably, what Hamas is doing — and those offering to negotiate peace with their neighbors — which is what Israel is doing — can there really be ambiguity about who holds the moral high ground?

 

Evidently, there can — at least for Friedman and the EU and, I’m afraid, lots of other folks around the world. Israelis, and their few friends, may just have to learn to live with that as best they can.

We Know How to Stop School Shootings

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

 

In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman's mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the nation's attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre.

 

Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.

 

Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.

 

None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)

 

Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

 

Their study controlled for age, sex, race, unemployment, retirement, poverty rates, state population, murder arrest rates, violent crime rates, and on and on.

 

The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.

 

Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.

 

You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in "gun-free zones" -- even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.

 

Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they're not stupid.

 

If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that's because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.

 

It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn't noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn't shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.)

 

In a nonsense "study" going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun."

 

This will come as a shock to people who know something about the subject.

 

The magazine reaches its conclusion by simply excluding all cases where an armed civilian stopped the shooter: They looked only at public shootings where four or more people were killed, i.e., the ones where the shooter wasn't stopped.

 

If we care about reducing the number of people killed in mass shootings, shouldn't we pay particular attention to the cases where the aspiring mass murderer was prevented from getting off more than a couple rounds?

 

It would be like testing the effectiveness of weed killers, but refusing to consider any cases where the weeds died.

 

In addition to the Portland mall case, here are a few more examples excluded by the Mother Jones' methodology:

 

-- Mayan Palace Theater, San Antonio, Texas, this week: Jesus Manuel Garcia shoots at a movie theater, a police car and bystanders from the nearby China Garden restaurant; as he enters the movie theater, guns blazing, an armed off-duty cop shoots Garcia four times, stopping the attack. Total dead: Zero.

 

-- Winnemucca, Nev., 2008: Ernesto Villagomez opens fire in a crowded restaurant; concealed carry permit-holder shoots him dead. Total dead: Two. (I'm excluding the shooters' deaths in these examples.)

 

-- Appalachian School of Law, 2002: Crazed immigrant shoots the dean and a professor, then begins shooting students; as he goes for more ammunition, two armed students point their guns at him, allowing a third to tackle him. Total dead: Three.

 

-- Santee, Calif., 2001: Student begins shooting his classmates -- as well as the "trained campus supervisor"; an off-duty cop who happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day points his gun at the shooter, holding him until more police arrive. Total dead: Two.

 

-- Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997: After shooting several people at his high school, student heads for the junior high school; assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieves a .45 pistol from his car and points it at the gunman's head, ending the murder spree. Total dead: Two.

 

-- Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A student shoots up a junior high school dance being held at a restaurant; restaurant owner pulls out his shotgun and stops the gunman. Total dead: One.

 

By contrast, the shootings in gun-free zones invariably result in far higher casualty figures -- Sikh temple, Oak Creek, Wis. (six dead); Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (32 dead); Columbine High School, Columbine, Colo. (12 dead); Amish school, Lancaster County, Pa. (five little girls killed); public school, Craighead County, Ark. (five killed, including four little girls).

 

All these took place in gun-free zones, resulting in lots of people getting killed -- and thereby warranting inclusion in the Mother Jones study.

 

If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.