Gun free? Oct 10^th

There has been a fair amount of misinformation about the Oregon College campus as a gun free zone. This misinformation is provided by The National Review and by various leading Republican candidates for the Presidency of the United States: specifically, Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and the retired former candidate, Newt Gingrich.

Donald Trump, ever on the lookout for free publicity and always finding it available on Fox News, called in to “Fox and Friends Weekend’ morning program where he gave the audience his opinion, “Everybody was sitting there and there was nothing they could do, not a thing they could do …Wouldn’t they have been better off if somebody in the room, anybody, anybody, had a gun to at least help them out. It was a terrible thing. And these gun free zones are a disaster. Everybody’s just a sitting duck.” He’s half right, no one in the room had a firearm but the school is not “gun free.” The law in Oregon cannot prevent a person with a concealed gun permit from carrying a gun on the campus of any college or university. There are no gun free zones for concealed weapon permit holders in Oregon.

Each of these Republican Presidential hopefuls is trying to be the fiercest gun hugger of them all. The result is all of them are following Donald Trump down the path asserting the improbable and following that by asserting the unbelievable. It happens that there were concealed weapon permit holders on that campus at the time of the shooting. They were in a building nearby and heard the shots, and they were about to go out after the shooter. A college official in the building with them counseled against doing that. He told them that the police had been called and a SWAT team was probably on its way. He reminded them if the SWAT team saw armed civilians running on the campus they would probably be killed before they could identify themselves as “good guys.” The result was that they stayed where they were and later claimed that they got good advice. A similar event happened when Gabby Gifford was shot in Arizona. A permit holder drew his weapon and ran up to the carnage but the man holding the gun had just taken it from the murderer and came within an instant of being shot by the permit holder.

There is no doubt that if several students in that classroom had been armed the carnage might have been reduced. There is also no doubt that if you advertise that an area is a gun free zone you might invite carnage from some psychotic with a grudge. But that is not the issue here. The issue is why these candidates for the Presidency are willing to speak out about a situation they simply don’t understand? That college was not a gun free zone in the usual meaning of the term, yet every one of these prominent politicians was willing to make comments about the situation there that was simply false to fact, comments that fit with their agenda. How can these people be trusted to be truthful about anything? They can’t!