Sensitive Places? Try Sensitive Targets

When we say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, anti-gunners roll their eyes. They think it’s just some trite saying we use to shift responsibility or something, but the truth is that the problem is and has always been about people. People are dangerous. People decide to take lives.

Even if guns were gone from the criminal world, we’d still see acts of violence.

Take New York City. 

On Saturday, three people were attacked by a madman with a machete.

As Ammoland editor Duncan Johnson notes, it shows the problem with banning guns in so-called sensitive places.

The Grand Central machete attack is exactly the kind of real-world example gun owners should point to when anti-gun politicians insist that “sensitive places” laws make the public safer.

On Saturday morning, April 11, police say 44-year-old Anthony Griffin randomly attacked three people with a machete inside the 42nd Street–Grand Central subway station before NYPD officers shot and killed him when he refused repeated commands to drop the weapon and advanced toward them. By the time police stopped the threat, an 84-year-old man, a 65-year-old man, and a 70-year-old woman had already been badly injured. AP reported the victims’ injuries were serious but not believed to be life-threatening.

That is the ugly truth behind New York’s so-called “sensitive places” regime. New York and other anti-gun states can put all the signs they want on the wall and write all the criminal statutes they want into the books, but violent criminals do not care. They do not stop and think, “This subway station is a prohibited area, so I guess I won’t carry a weapon today.” Criminals do not reconsider because Albany declared a crowded public space off-limits to concealed carry permit holders. They simply go where people are vulnerable and do what they were already planning to do. Meanwhile, the people who actually obey the law are the ones forced to go unarmed.

New York’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act explicitly treats public transportation and transit facilities as “sensitive locations.” The law covers not just subway cars and train cars, but also stations and other transit facilities connected to passenger transportation. State guidance is even clearer: licensed citizens cannot legally carry firearms in “public transportation and transit facilities,” even if they have a concealed carry license.

In other words, there was literally no way a lawful concealed carrier could have had a lawful firearm on their person when a maniac with a machete tried to dismember passengers.

I’m sorry, but while I don’t want to get shot, if I were forced to pick, I’d rather take a bullet than a machete hacking off parts of me. While fighting with such a tool/weapon is a skill few people really study, when you’re just going after unarmed people, it’s not a fight. It’s an attack, and you can almost do whatever you want because no one is going to be able to do much to fight back.

It’s why we say that people kill people, because good fortune is the only reason this wasn’t more of a bloodbath.

But we also need to remember that sensitive places are really sensitive targets. People who want to hurt others have never been dissuaded by the gun-free zone sign on the door. They have, however, been attracted somewhere because of it.

No one planning a murderous rampage wants to get stopped before they can kill and injure as many people as possible. They might be fine with dying, as that seems to be the plan in a lot of cases, but they want a body count first.

So, rather than go somewhere that they might get shot early on, they find somewhere that bars lawful concealed carry and has a lot of people.

Somewhere like Grand Central Station in the Big Apple.

That’s why schools are regularly targets, as are places like malls, which are often gun-free, and churches. Anywhere a bad guy figures no one will be armed is a potential target, and for those who want to kill, that’s all they need for something to be attractive to them.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

And gun-free zones let them.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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