Republican Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon is about to sign a bill passed last week by both houses that will eliminate the last of any “gun-free zones” existing in the Cowboy State. If he doesn’t sign it within three days, the bill will automatically become law.
It’s called the “Wyoming Repeal Gun Free Zones Act,” and it allows state citizens carrying a concealed firearm to be present at “any meeting of a governmental entity … or a committee thereof,” as well as at “any public school, public college or university athletic event” and “any public elementary or secondary school facility,” including “any public college or university facility.”
The exceptions are minor, with the bill exempting athletic events where alcohol is being sold and state-licensed health and human services facilities.
Republican State Senator Brian Boner, the sponsor of the bill, said:
The bill does exactly what the title says. It would repeal the gun-free zones that we have throughout the state, the idea being that these are often targets of soft areas where if somebody wants to do something, they will be focused on going where there aren’t any firearms.
This is precisely what John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), has been preaching and teaching about for years. The latest iteration of his study of mass public shootings dating back to 1950 reveals that 94 percent of them occur in “gun-free zones.”
One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Jeremy Haroldson (R), has been pushing for the repeal of “gun-free zones” ever since he entered the house;
The day I turned 21 I went and got my concealed carry permit. And I asked the question, “Why are there so many areas in our state … where I couldn’t carry that firearm?”
Four years ago, when I first ran, one of the things I ran on was the elimination of gun-free zones.… It’s just a fundamental right.
In one of the most Second Amendment-friendly states in the country, the bill still had a tortuous path to passage, thanks to Democrats who tried to water it down.
One of them, Democratic Senator Chris Rothfuss of Laramie, claimed there was a “right” to be free of “fear of guns.” He claimed that students on campus at the University of Wyoming, located in Laramie, might be afraid of guns owned and carried by a roommate. Passing the bill, he said, would amount to “removing any right they have, any right whatsoever they have, to avoid living in a space with someone who has a weapon.”
He envisioned a student
sleeping at night with somebody that they don’t even know that has a weapon — that we assert we all trust, that they could never do anything wrong, and that’s not consistent with my own experience on the University of Wyoming campus.
But, that’s the assertion.
Rothfuss was chided by Republican Senator Lynn Hutchings:
I … wrote out a list of things that, if I’m afraid of a firearm, I also need to be afraid of: bottles, knives, forks, books, sticks, clubs, ropes, pens, pencils, box cutters, baseball bats, rulers, scissors, high-heel shoes, purses.
The list of weapons goes on and on.
There is no “right” to be free of worry in the Constitution but there is a right to keep and bear arms. And it applies to all American citizens. As Republican State Senator Tim Salazar noted, that includes 18-year-olds who are old enough to serve in the military:
Either we have Second Amendment rights for everyone or we don’t.
Eighteen-year-olds, they are responsible. We have them in the military. I stood with them for 27 years.
We give them M-16s to fight for our country. And you know what? They’re responsible. They are responsible people. They’ve proven it to our country throughout this history.
Democrats trying to derail or emasculate the bill claimed that there would be a surge in gun violence with the expected increase in the proliferation of guns legally allowed in schools and other places previously prohibited. But that surge hasn’t happened. In fact, as Lott has repeatedly shown, the more guns there are, the less crime there is.
AWR Hawkins, a journalist often published at Breitbart, claims that America doesn’t have a gun problem, or even a gun-violence problem. It has a “gun-free zone” problem.
Professor Mark Gius of Quinnipiac University studied the problem intensely and wrote his conclusions. Using data from all states from 1990 to 2014, he noted that:
School shootings are among the most horrific of crimes. Although they are a very small share of overall murders, they typically capture the attention of the entire nation.
Places such as Sandy Hook and Columbine recall terrible moments in American history.
The knee-jerk reaction to these atrocities has routinely and predictably been the passage of more gun laws, especially pushing the illogical concept of declaring schools and other public places “gun free,” usually by posting signs to that effect.
But, according to Gius, after studying the matter closely,
Gun control is one of the more commonly proposed policies in response to school shootings.
Unfortunately, as this study has shown, most gun control policies have no significant effects on school shootings. Although assault weapons bans may reduce the overall number of school shooting victims, the average reduction in fatalities may be less than 10 per year.
Given these results, it is unclear if gun control is the most appropriate policy to use to reduce the incidence and severity of school shootings.
Happily, it’s clear to the vast majority of legislators in the Cowboy State that not only do “gun-free zones” not work at reducing gun violence, but they actually invite criminal attacks, as criminals or mentally unbalanced or drug-affected individuals know their victims cannot, by law, defend themselves in such places. Hats off to those legislators for their exercise of common sense in a world gone mad.
