Trump's Stop-and-Frisk Policy

I suppose Trump intends stop-and-frisk for the nation of Chicago only.

Update: Trump now says that under his stop-and-frisk policy, the police would take people's guns. According to The Hill, Trump said during an interview on Fox:

Basically, they will, if they see — you know, they are proactive and if they see a person possibly with a gun or they think may have a gun, they will see the person, and they will look, and they will take the gun away.

MLK Day

"Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. 'Just for self-defense,' King assured him. One of King’s advisors remembered the reverend’s home as 'an arsenal.' Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored."

--Charles Cobb, That Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Shamefully but unsurprisingly, Cobb's book has been ignored by the establishment media. But see this.(Also see my earlier article here.)

Realism and Utopianism in the Gun Debate

After an atrocity like the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, what’s needed is hard-headed realism, not pie-in-the-sky utopianism. Unfortunately we always get more of the latter than the former.

Read the rest here.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society. Become a patron today!

TGIF: Ending Gun Violence: Logic versus Magic

What passes for thinking about the prevention of gun violence is not thinking at all. Thinking (as problem-solving) is a search for means that can be reasonably expected to achieve a given end. By reasonably I mean that supporting arguments can be provided to demonstrate to the satisfaction of reasonable people the connection between the means and ends. What we get from gun-control advocates is nothing like that; instead they operate on the magical belief that uttering certain words -- codifying just the right incantation -- will accomplish the end.

Concealed Carry

I wrote this letter to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after reading that the University of Central Arkansas had decided to forbid faculty members and students from carrying concealed handguns. It was published today.

I see the University of Central Arkansas has chosen to prohibit concealed-carry of handguns.

Why would the school want to make the campus safe for the criminally minded? Nothing is more potentially dangerous than a gun-free zone.