Enough is enough.

The slaughter of innocent children, and of the heroic teachers and school administrators, who threw their bodies in between the children and the madman who brought high firepower into what the law dumbly calls a “gun-free school zone,” must never happen again.

Gun bans don’t work at stopping massacres. They didn’t despite strict gun-control laws in Dunblane, Scotland or at a summer children’s camp in Norway, nor in multiple gun-free zones in schools, movie theaters, trains, and malls.

We all say that insanity is defined by doing the same thing and expecting different results. Let’s act on this understanding and end the utopian fantasy that legal bans of weapons magically dispose of the weapons.

I am not going to argue the Second Amendment here. I am arguing practical common sense.

If there are to be taxpayer funded schools and taxpayer funded institutions of higher education, those who teach and administer these institutions must have the means to protect their students and the legal liability for failing to do so once granted the means. They must have what even police in this country do not have: a duty to protect.

I propose not a freedom but a responsibility.

Every public-school and public institution of higher learning must make it a requirement that every teacher and school administrator take training in handguns equivalent to the standards that police officers and pilots must qualify, renew this qualification every six months, and openly carry sidearms while on duty.

Either this, or stop pretending that government exists to protect the people and be done with this epic failure of political solutions to social problems.

The day before the shootings at a movie theater in Colorado I took issue with a screenwriter who uses his scripts as a platform for his campaign to disarm the American people of defensive firearms. My title was Aaron Sorkin, You Magnificent Bastard!

This time I’m just writing about vicious and stupid bastards.

The 24-year-old creep who bought a ticket for a first showing of the new Batman movie at a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado a couple of nights ago — and after propping open an exit door re-entered the theater protected by body armor and shot up the place with a high body-count of women and children — was not the Joker.

The Joker is an iconic comic-book character created by Bob Kane, first appearing Spring 1940 in Batman Issue No. 1 and portrayed on screen in TV and movies by actors including Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, and Heath Ledger.

You can’t blame people who write comic books, or make movies, or wear costumes of characters in their favorite comic books and movies, for what happened in a darkened movie theater.

James Holmes was not only not the Joker but he also was neither Sherlock Holmes nor John Holmes. He wasn’t a brilliant mind or a movie actor with an enormous prick.

He was just a cowardly little prick with delusions of grandeur who bought a ticket to a children’s movie and used what the theater management had declared to be a gun-free zone to shoot and kill unarmed civilians. He had potential but wasted his life. He is nothing special.

Massacres of the unarmed are not infrequent events on this planet, and every time they happen there are jokers with no ability to learn from history who use these killing fields to call for further victim disarmament. What the Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas; Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado; the Long Island Railroad; the campuses of the University of Iowa or Virginia Tech; Dunblane, Scotland; and the United States Army Base at Fort Hood, Texas all had in common is that it was illegal for the victims to carry firearms in case some demented joker who didn’t abide by gun laws decided it was their day to die.

I’ve written on guns and criminology. A lot. My first Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, published January 1, 1992, was titled “A Massacre We Didn’t Hear About.” It was about a mass shooting in a coffee shop that was prevented by a civilian carrying a concealed handgun. I interviewed that gentleman, Thomas Glenn Terry, plus on other occasions other gun-carriers who also stopped shooting attacks.

“Buy a gun. Learn to use it safely and appropriately. Carry it with you at all times. Be prepared to defend yourself, your loved ones, and your neighborhoods.”

-J. Neil Schulman on ABC TV World News Tonight, May 2, 1992, during the Los Angeles Riots

After the Spring 1992 Los Angeles riots I applied for and received a California license to carry a concealed firearm — which I carried in California until 2007 — and as training I took California’s PC-832 course, and passed the California POST exam. My Powers of Arrest and Communications and Tactics instructor, Jim Saharek, was a retired U.S. Secret Service agent; my Firearms instructor, Barry Dineen, was an LAPD officer. I got a perfect 4.0 grade in all three modules, as well as on the final POST exam.

POST Certificate

James Holmes apparently wanted to survive his attack so he wore body armor and a gas mask and incapacitated his victims before shooting them by throwing tear gas cannisters into the theater. He was armed with a handgun, a shotgun, and a rifle.

A family member who lives in Colorado, and has a license to carry a concealed handgun, tells me every Cinemark movie theater she’s gone to has the same sign the Cinemark Century 16 Theater displayed to its customers: Firearms Prohibited. This sign informed James Holmes that the management was guaranteeing nobody would be shooting back.

Colorado Cinemark Sign
Photo by Ray Hickman

Nonetheless, Holmes was concerned enough about the possibility of an off-duty police officer deciding to take his kid to the movies that he armored up.

I’ve heard over the last day or so a lot of uninformed chatter about how nobody with a gun could have stopped James Holmes because he was wearing body armor. It’s crap. Body armor is designed to save the wearer’s life but it doesn’t stop the shock and pain of being shot. A handgun round to the center of body mass would have knocked the wind out of James Holmes and the shock might have caused him to faint. In any event, the pain of being shot would have distracted him. Further, defensive handgun courses teach head shots, and a round would have easily penetrated the plastic gas mask, making a kill shot to the head possible.

As demonstrators have learned, wrapping a shirt around your mouth and nose can slow the effects of tear gas, and by shooting at Holmes’ muzzle flash in a darkened theater, Holmes would have been stopped from randomly shooting children, and created some cover for theater patrons to escape.

James Holmes did not have to be killed with a round through his body armor to stop his shooting rampage. He just needed not to be the only one firing a gun.

Yes, some innocent person might have been shot by “friendly fire.” But the outcome would have been a lot fewer shooting victims than the dozen deaths and 58 other shooting victims that happened with no one shooting back.

Once again, the media focuses on the psychology of the shooter rather than the practical question of how to defend against these unpredictable shootings.

Here are the actual facts on Defensive Gun Use that Fox News or CNN won’t tell you in their endless moaning about how tragic and unpreventable this latest shooting gallery was.

According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the rate of Defensive Gun Uses can be projected nationwide to approximately 2.5 million per year — one Defensive Gun Use every 13 seconds.

Among 15.7% of gun defenders interviewed nationwide during The National Self Defense Survey, the defender believed that someone “almost certainly” would have died had the gun not been used for protection — a life saved by a privately held gun about once every 1.3 minutes. (In another 14.2% cases, the defender believed someone “probably” would have died if the gun hadn’t been used in defense.)

In 83.5% of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first — disproving the myth that having a gun available for defense wouldn’t make any difference.

In 91.7% of these incidents the defensive use of a gun did not wound or kill the criminal attacker (and the gun defense wouldn’t be called “newsworthy” by newspaper or TV news editors). In 64.2% of these gun-defense cases, the police learned of the defense, which means that the media could also find out and report on them if they chose to.

In 73.4% of these gun-defense incidents, the attacker was a stranger to the intended victim. (Defenses against a family member or intimate were rare — well under 10%.) This disproves the myth that a gun kept for defense will most likely be used against a family member or someone you love.

In over half of these gun defense incidents, the defender was facing two or more attackers — and three or more attackers in over a quarter of these cases. (No means of defense other than a firearm — martial arts, pepper spray, or stun guns — gives a potential victim a decent chance of getting away uninjured when facing multiple attackers.)

In 79.7% of these gun defenses, the defender used a concealable handgun. A quarter of the gun defenses occured in places away from the defender’s home.

Source: “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun,” by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995

More gun-control could not have stopped James Holmes. The strictest gun control in Dunblane, Scotland — or even mass killings using a knife in Akihabara and Osaka, Japan — have never stopped these kinds of unprovoked massacres.

A public with a critical mass of individuals carrying handguns, ready at all times to shoot back at sudden attackers, has worked to minimize casualties from terrorist attacks in Israel. See The Israeli Answer to Terrorism by Massad Ayoob.

Israel does not have more civilians who can carry defensive firearms than the United States. We have the Second Amendment and Israel doesn’t.

But by disarming its theater patrons Cinemark accepted legal liability for their safety, and the victims disarmed by these enablers need to sue this corporation into bankruptcy for its failure to protect them from James Holmes.

The jokers who keep enabling gun massacres are the advocates of making us work, shop, and see movies in gun-free zones, and these massacres won’t stop until we stop these jokers from disarming us.

My 1994 book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns made me a celebrity to the Second Amendment movement. Charlton Heston wrote of the book, “”Mr. Schulman’s book is the most cogent explanation of the gun issue I have yet read. He presents the assault on the Second Amendment in frighteningly clear terms. Even the extremists who would ban firearms will learn from his lucid prose.”

Dennis Prager who had opposed private ownership of guns, told his national radio audience, “He has truly helped change my mind on guns and self-defense.”

Liberal Los Angeles talk-show host Michael Jackson said of me on his KABC radio show, “His research is impeccable. Nobody expresses the other side better.”

My writings on firearms have been used by witnesses on both sides of the gun-control debate in congressional hearings before the House Subcommittee on Crime.

I’m webmaster of The World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock that calculates and comparies the number of defensive-gun-uses to criminal uses, suicides, and accidents, based on peer-reviewed academic, and law-enforcement, criminological studies.

One chapter from Stopping Power was chosen to be reprinted in the book Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Health and Society, Second Edition, Edited by Eileen K. Daniel, (Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, 1996), as rebuttal to “Guns in the Household” by Jerome P. Kassirer, MD, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Another chapter, “Talk At Temple Beth Shir Shalom,” was reprinted in the book, Guns in America : A Reader , Jan E. Dizard, editor (New York University Press, 1999), and my chapter was praised in the Village Voice’s review as “a tough Jew manifesto.”

Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns

I got my first NRA shooting certificate when I was 12-years-old and my NRA pistol certification when I was 38.

I’ve been an NRA member for a couple of decades, and I’m currently a Life Member. When I lived in Southern California I was President of the NRA Members Council of West Side Los Angeles.

J. Neil Schulman wearing NRA Cap at 1994 rally

My father, concert violinist Julius Schulman, was also an NRA member — at least as far back as the 1960′s to his passing in 2000 — and I remember American Rifleman mailed to our house in Natick, Mass., and reading the digest of newspaper stories highlighting gun-owner defenses in the “Armed Citizen” column every month. That — and my father’s own personal accounts of how on several occasions he used his CCW-licensed handgun to save his own and others’ lives from criminal attacks — is one of the reasons I eventually wrote my 1994 Charlton-Heston-endorsed book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns.

My 1995 book, Self Control Not Gun Control, contains this from my chapter, “In Defense of the NRA“:

Most of what you hear about guns on TV and radio, and most of what you read about guns in prominent magazines and newspapers, is distorted to the point of lying, by writers who have a prejudice against private ownership of guns by the American public.

Most journalists today write as if the NRA–usually lumped in with the Tobacco Institute–represents only the commercial interests of “merchants of death” who don’t care how many lives are lost–particularly the lives of our young people–just so long as they get to keep selling their product.

So let’s get that myth out of the way right now.

The National Rifle Association of America is a 124-year-old organization almost entirely financed by the dues and small contributions of its 3.2 million members, not by money from the gun manufacturers. In addition to the NRA’s other programs, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action lobbies for the right to keep and bear arms not only of 70 million current American gun owners, but of anyone who might want to exercise that right in the future.

This media hostility to the NRA permeates the entire debate about guns and violence in this country, and allows lie to be piled upon lie. When NRA held a news conference to tell the media that a new Luntz-Weber poll showed that most Americans don’t think gun control will reduce crime or violence, the room was empty. When Handgun Control, Inc., called a news conference around the same time to discuss the results of a Louis Harris poll, the room was jammed with reporters and TV cameras, and the media reported Handgun Control’s interpretation of the poll results as if it were a papal encyclical.

At some point, you just have to ask yourself the following question: who knows more about guns–the millions of NRA members who own them, handle them on a regular basis, and have taken NRA’s safety courses…or journalists who talk and write about guns for television networks and national magazines, but are often afraid even to be in the same room with one?

As a comparison, would you believe a writer who spent his life railing about how dangerous automobiles were, but who had never sat behind the steering wheel of a car? Why on earth would you believe a critic who spent his life telling you how to improve automotive safety but who had never bothered to get an engineering degree–and who dismissed the opinions of real automotive experts who pointed out the critic’s incompetence and bias, sneering that the experts were “just mouthpieces for the automobile manufacturers’ lobby”?

So if I’m now telling the NRA’s political strategists that they’re acting like cowards — acting out of fear of what their enemies might do — understand that it’s said out of love.

The NRA is considering endorsing the solidly anti-gun-owner Nevada Senator Harry Reid — the current Senate Majority Leader — in his run against the solidly pro-gun-owner Sharron Angle.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Sharron Angle, even though the list of areas where we agree is formidable. She believes in the absolute right to keep and bear arms; so do I. She wants to phase out the Department of Education — a massive bureaucracy that doesn’t educate anybody — and Social Security — which given its bankruptcy guarantees the young workers being taxed for it no security whatsoever.

But Sharron Angle also is so opposed to legalizing marijuana that she’d bring back alcohol prohibition if necessary to prevent it; is opposed to legal gambling in her state whose entire economy is based on legal gambling; and is more anti-abortion than the Pope, who isn’t as opposed to saving the life of a mother as Mrs. Angle is.

I just don’t trust anyone who picks and chooses which of the Bill of Rights she likes and which she doesn’t like, and Sharron Angle’s devotion to the State using its police power to enforce her ideas on Christian morality makes me think that if push ever came to shove, she’d sell out the Second Amendment to keep something that offends her church illegal in a Las Vegas minute.

The 2012 election is coming up, and for you Heinlein fans out there, keep a sharp eye out for the crop of Nehemiah Scudders currently infecting the Tea Party movement. Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin give me the willies. But if Sharron Angle is elected, as a first-time senator she’ll be a back-bencher — no seniority, little power. No immediate threat.

There is just no excuse for the NRA considering endorsing Harry Reid to keep his U.S. Senate seat and his position as Senate Majority Leader simply because some election tout at 11250 Waples Mill Road is pissing his pants that if Nevada voters fire Reid New York Senator Charles Schumer might replace him.

So what? Even if the Republicans don’t take back one house or the other, are we so afraid of the outcome of one lousy election that we have to give our sanction of the victim to Harry Reid who is just as opposed to gun-owner rights as Schumer, but has the slight tactical advantage that he’s more retarded?

We’ve got the facts of gun-owner defenses on our side. We’ve got the Constitution on our side. At this fleeting moment in time we even have the Supreme Court on our side. Now’s no time to show the white feather.

The NRA is made up of people who are willing to shoot back when attacked. It’s intolerable that the world’s biggest organization defending the political immunities of gun owners should put up with lobbyists and political tacticians who are afraid of their own shadows.

As I wrote in a song I put on the soundtrack of my movie, Lady Magdalene’s, “I’d rather be tried by twelve than carried by six.”

The news and analysis of this historic decision is all over, so what’s left for the author of Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns to do?

This:

O. McDonald has a gun, eee-yi-eee-yi-oh!
And Mayor Daley had a cow, eee-yi-eee-yi-oh!
With a moo moo here and a moo moo there!
Here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo moo!
O. McDonald has a gun, eee-yi-eee-yi-oh!

Add your own verses!

Neil

The specific reason that this case is being heard before the Supreme Court is a legal contrivance — an attempt by those who believe in the individual right to keep and bear arms to establish that right in the federal courts, where it can be enforced.

Specifically, in this case, a ban on handgun ownership in a private home is being challenged on grounds previously established in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court recognized the Second Amendment as enshrining in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights an individual right to keep and bear arms.

But the Bill of Rights was originally intended to restrict and limit only powers granted by the Constitution to the Federal Government. It wasn’t until after the Civil War and the passage of the 14th amendment that rights enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights were thought to be able to be enforced by federal courts on state and local governments.

And therein lies the primary question: do you want the Government of the United States — federal marshals, FBI agents, the EPA, IRS, even the ATF — coming to your defense when your rights are violated by state and local officials?

It’s not a question that remotely crossed the minds of the Founding Fathers when they carefully crafted the balance of powers between the United States and the states themselves, because they did not contemplate what we have today: a federal government that has taken upon itself vast powers never granted to it by the Constitution that survived a rebellion from the States and the people.

The Founding Fathers — Jefferson and Madison in particular — would have been shocked by nothing so much in subsequent American history as the federal government winning the war against states seceding from the Union.

So when Alan Gura — the attorney for the plaintiff seeking relief in a federal court from the oppression of the City of Chicago — argues to the Supreme Court that the “privileges and immunities” clause of the 14th amendment should be used by federal courts to forbid the City of Chicago from violating Otis McDonald’s Second Amendment-protected right to keep a handgun at home, Mr. Gura is using the arguments of liberal civil-rights lawyers and liberal activist judges to further weaken state and local governments and further empower the federal government.

The conservatives on the court — who want to give no more power to the federal government — are caught on the horns of a dilemma. They believe in the Second Amendment. They believe the right protected by the Second Amendment is no less deserving of protection than other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights which previous courts have already held can be enforced by federal courts against state and local officials.

But they do not want to unleash a swarm of federal bureaucrats on state and local governments as an unintended consequence of attempting to protect individual rights.

Likewise, the liberals on the court would like nothing better than to expand the power of federal courts to intervene in state and local matters — and what better excuse than protecting rights enshrined in the Constiitution? — but they get sick to their stomach when they contemplate that the right to own and carry guns will be among those protected rights.

It puts every Justice outside of their usual comfort zones.

It gets even more complicated because the authors of the Bill of Rights got even more radical than the idea of the people being well-armed to protect the possibility of future revolutions. In the Ninth and Tenth Amendments they said that just because they missed writing down a specific right didn’t mean the right disappeared. They created a category of “unenumerated rights” — rights held by the people at the time the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1792 — and if you take the Constitution at all seriously, what this means is that every bit of personal freedom that was legal for an individual in 1792 is still legal today — and any legislation to the contrary is null and void.

Taking the idea of unenumerated rights seriously was so threatening to Justice Scalia that when Alan Gura brought it up — in passing — Scalia asked Gura if he was trying to get himself a job as a law professor. After all — let’s get serious. It’s only in an ivory tower that one could possibly take seriously the thought that the Supreme Court is supposed to launch a Second American Revolution by actually enforcing the people’s individual rights against a Leviathan Engine that regards them as fuel!

The problem with Justice Scalia’s panic is that Alan Gura isn’t the problem.

The American people are Justice Scalia’s problem.

Even after over a century of public-schooling and major media working to legitimize a powerful, paternalistic welfare/warfare State, there are still millions of Americans who read the Constitution — which is a fairly short document written in plain English — and regard it as a contract in which certain rights and powers are their own, not any employee receiving a paycheck paid for with their taxes.

It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court says. They know what the contract says is theirs, and they’re going to get ornery, uncooperative, and possibly even go ballistic when that contract is violated and their lives are disempowered and impoverished thereby.

That, Justice Scalia, is revolution. Madison writing in the Federalist Papers knew that no matter how many weapons systems are in service to protecting the establishment powers, nothing can prevent the people from eventually reaching a point where merely by refusing to cooperate the system collapses in on itself.

It’s not just guns that would come out in the streets when that happens. It would be SUV’s, iPhones, IED’s, and — in general — the indignation and ingenuity of millions of people who have their garages, attics, and basements filled with so much lethal junk that even I — a science-fiction writer — can’t imagine the havoc they could create if the Middle Class American ever really got pissed off.

The Supreme Court of the United States is the mediator between a nation of potential revolutionary maniacs and an establishment that exists — no shit, really — only by their sufferance.

I am not the one making this threat, Justice Scalia. I’m just a reporter. Don’t shoot the messenger.

But pay attention. However you decide the balance of power between the federal government and states and localities, it had better have as its object the maximum preservation and protection of what the American people see as their natural and obvious Constitutional rights.

An earlier Supreme Court made a mistake about this once in a case called Dred Scott v. Sandford. Somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 Americans died because of that mistake.

I suggest you err, next time — just for the sake of public safety — on the side of liberty.