There has been jubilation on the internet at the massacre of peaceful people who were killed because they were gay and they were Americans. That made them a “twofer” for the so‐called Islamic State, or ISIS.
It’s time to fight back. No more gun‐free designated massacre zones. If there had been armed people with concealed carry permits inside the Pulse nightclub, the zealot who had pledged allegiance to ISIS could have been stopped. Dozens of lives could have been saved.
I say that as a gay man who has himself carried a weapon for protection.
Let’s get one thing very clear. Gun control advocates disarmed the victims at that night club. Florida law states unequivocally that even a concealed carry permit “does not authorize any person to openly carry a handgun or carry a concealed weapon or firearm into any portion of an establishment licensed to dispense alcoholic beverages for consumption on the premises, which portion of the establishment is primarily devoted to such purpose.”
That made those people sitting ducks. Legally designated gun‐free zones are invitations to killers. They get to rack up kills among defenseless victims without any effective opposition. There is a reason that they seek out such places: Everyone has been disarmed and rendered defenseless by the gun‐control movement.
Advocates of gun control think it’s a good idea to disarm victims and to advertise where you can find completely defenseless people because there’s one primitive magical superstition they share with the murderer Omar Mateen: chanting things makes them true. If you chant the right words, in this case “Guns are forbidden,” no one will have guns. And if no one has guns, there will be no murders.
Sorry, friends, but it doesn’t work that way. Believing it doesn’t make it true, any more than Mateen’s belief that he would end up in paradise attended to by houris as a reward for murder will make that true.
Moveon.org has already started the chant: “We must act now for common sense gun laws and to ban assault rifles,” which they predict will “stop these mass shootings from tearing apart our communities.” Translation: Gun control doesn’t work, so let’s have more gun control.
Maybe we should have the kinds of gun control they have in France and Belgium, which worked so well there. Killers pledged to ISIS murdered 89 people at the Bataclan theatre in Paris. There were no firearms available for victims to defend themselves, not even for the eight off‐duty police officers, who were also disarmed.
Jesse Hughes, the lead singer of the band that was performing that night, said on French TV after the attack, “Did your French gun control stop a single [expletive] person from dying at the Bataclan? If anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so.”
I’ve carried a gun and I used it to fend off a gang of gay‐bashers who had told me and a friend that they were going to kill us.
“They’ll never find your bodies,” they said. We’re alive because I was armed and ready and willing to use my firearm. I’m happy I only had to brandish it, but I would have discharged it if it were the only way for my friend and me to survive. I’ve been trained in firearms use and, had I been armed and in that club, I could have taken action, rather than just being a victim.
ISIS has been killing gay people in Syria and Iraq in the most gruesome of ways. Now they’ve targeted America, and gay people are high on their list of people to slaughter. If they’re coming for us, I, for one, want to be ready. They say that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. That’s too long for me to wait. It’s time to stop inviting killers to legally mandated gun‐free murder zones.