re: Father of slain UCSB student blames politicians and NRA

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February 20, 1874: Agency, Montana, After being ejected from school for disobedience, Thomas Sguires, twenty years old, returned to the school yard a day or two later, and fatally shot Prof. Hayes in abdomen three times without warning.[22]
April 16, 1874: Lebanon, Kentucky, John R. Breckinridge, son of the late Robert Jefferson Breckinridge was shot to death at the Law school in Lebanon, Kentucky, by John L. Anderson, the Mayor's son who was reportedly "crazed with liquor".[23]
January 26, 1876: San Francisco, California, A young boy at the Lincoln Primary School accidentally shot himself while playing with a pistol under his desk. His fingers were badly hurt and he received a flesh wound to his leg. The principal, Miss Kate Sullivan, sent him home in the hopes that his parents would teach him to be a little more careful when handling firearms.[24]
December 6, 1877: San Juan Capistrano, California, The schoolmaster committed suicide by shooting himself after hours. He wrote on the blackboard, "May this solve the problem".[25]
May 24, 1878: St. Paul, Minnesota, A boy, Luckert, accidentally shot and wounded another boy, Allie McDonald at the Neill school. The bullet passed out, and the youth was said to recover. Mrs. McDonald went to the police station, but no formal complaint was filed.[26]
May 24, 1879: Lancaster, New York, Frank Shugart, a telegraph operator, shot and severely injured Mr. Carr, Superintendent of the stables at a girls' school.[27]
1880s
July 25, 1880: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, At Sunday School, a young couple Morris Behrues and his newly secretly married girl had carried a shotgun with, because Charles Behrues, Morris' cousin was in love with the girl, and was out to get them. Charles was seen coming towards the building with a shooting iron, when the school's superintendent went out to ward him away. Charles opened fire and killed the superintendent, and shot Morris, and three others.[28]
October 21, 1880: Cincinnati, Ohio, George Gohen, 14yrs old, shot himself un-fatally in the chest at the schoolhouse with a 22-caliber pistol. He tried to commit suicide, because Principal Sands reprimanded him for truancy.[29]
December, 1880: Sacramento, California, As George E. Landers was teaching at the Willow Slough school house, Mrs. Julia A. Finn drove up in a buggy and called out to him. When he came out to talk, Julia ask him to marry her, and he refused. Julia then took out a gun and fired three shots at him, but missed. She was then tried for attempted murder.[30]
December 1, 1881, Santa Monica, California, While working late on the program for the children's concert at the school house, the school master O'Donnell, and one of the parents got into an argument. the parent Williams pulled a gun and fatally shot O'Donnell in the back.[31]
December 22, 1881: Shelby County, Indiana, Charles J. Gregory, a school teacher shot at a pupil, at close range because he refused to write on the a slate. The bullet missed the boy, but his face was filled with powder. The teacher was arrested with great excitement.[32]
January, 1882: Iola, Kansas, A group of boys shot into a school house, but no one was hurt. Two of the boys were arrested and pleaded guilty three weeks later. They were fined $9.00 each.[33]
April 13, 1882: Huntsville, Texas, G. W. Gray, as student at the Sam Houston Normal School, shot and wounded another student, M. J. Jordan. They were arguing over a comic valentine that was sent in February.[34]
February 14, 1883: Florence, Nebraska, As the children were playing, and throwing snowballs in the front yard of the Ponca Creek school house, a wagon pulled up with three young men and engaged in a snowball fight. When they were leaving, one of the men pointed his 45 caliber, and accidentally shot and killed three of the school girls. Harbaugh, the young man who shot surrendered himself.[35]
November, 1883: Barber County, Kansas, As a bunch of drunken cowboys traveled through the area, they stopped at each schoolhouse forcing the teacher to drink whiskey. They first stopped at the Mayhew schoolhouse and forced teacher, Mr. Beals to drink from the bottle they had. At the next, they fired several shots at it. The school house following, on Bluff creek, they shot off the lock, filled the door full of bullets, and shot the lights and windows out. The next, they fired several shot at the building doing little damage. Finally, they arrived at District 72's schoolhouse, and forced the teacher, John Lowry, to drink whiskey.[36]
January 23, 1884: Sidney, Nebraska, A school boy accidentally shot himself in the hand while fooling around with a pistol. He had pointed the pistol at one of the school girls just moments earlier.[37]
February 28, 1884: Danville, Virginia, As Wamack, a fifteen year old boy drove by a "negro" school house, he called out "school butter." The entire school emptied out and attacked him, several shot were fired at him, and he returned fire shooting two students.[38]

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No you weren't. You're a liar.

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I am not lying about that. That is what we were taught. I'm sure others who took hunter safety classes were taught the same thing.

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YOU KNOW BACK WHEN THE SKY BULLY GOT HIS DAILY DEVOTIONALS, THINGS LIKE THIS NEVAR HAPPENED

for, in addition to being omnipotent, he is also very emotionally needy and vindictive

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MYTH:"Since a gun in a home is many times more likely to kill a family member than to stop a criminal, armed citizens are not a deterrent to crime."

This myth, stemming from a superficial "study" of firearm accidents in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, represents a comparison of 148 accidental deaths (including suicides) to the deaths of 23 intruders killed by home owners over a 16-year period. 2

Gross errors in this and similar "studies"--with even greater claimed ratios of harm to good--include: the assumption that a gun hasn't been used for protection unless an assailant dies; no distinction is made between handgun and long gun deaths; all accidental firearm fatalities were counted whether the deceased was part of the "family" or not; all accidents were counted whether they occurred in the home or not, while self-defense outside the home was excluded; almost half the self-defense uses of guns in the home were excluded on the grounds that the criminal intruder killed may not have been a total stranger to the home defender; suicides were sometimes counted and some self-defense shootings misclassified. Cleveland's experience with crime and accidents during the study period was atypical of the nation as a whole and of Cleveland since the mid-1970s. Moreover, in a later study, the same researchers noted that roughly 10% of killings by civilians are justifiable homicides. 3

The "guns in the home" myth has been repeated time and again by the media, and anti-gun academics continue to build on it. In 1993, Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University and a number of colleagues presented a study that claimed to show that a home with a gun was much more likely to experience a homicide.4 However, Dr. Kellermann selected for his study only homes where homicides had taken place--ignoring the millions of homes with firearms where no harm is done--and a control group that was not representative of American households. By only looking at homes where homicides had occurred and failing to control for more pertinent variables, such as prior criminal record or histories of violence, Kellermann et al. skewed the results of this study. Prof. Kleck wrote that with the methodology used by Kellermann, one could prove that since diabetics are much more likely to possess insulin than non-diabetics, possession of insulin is a risk factor for diabetes. Even Dr. Kellermann admitted this in his study: "It is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide." Law Professor Daniel D. Polsby went further, "Indeed the point is stronger than that: 'reverse causation' may account for most of the association between gun ownership and homicide. Kellermann's data simply do not allow one to draw any conclusion."5

Research conducted by Professors James Wright and Peter Rossi,6 for a landmark study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, points to the armed citizen as possibly the most effective deterrent to crime in the nation. Wright and Rossi questioned over 1,800 felons serving time in prisons across the nation and found:

81% agreed the "smart criminal" will try to find out if a potential victim is armed.

74% felt that burglars avoided occupied dwellings for fear of being shot.

80% of "handgun predators" had encountered armed citizens.
40% did not commit a specific crime for fear that the victim was armed.

34% of "handgun predators" were scared off or shot at by armed victims.

57% felt that the typical criminal feared being shot by citizens more than he feared being shot by police.

Professor Kleck estimates that annually 1,500-2,800 felons are legally killed in "excusable self-defense" or "justifiable" shootings by civilians, and 8,000-16,000 criminals are wounded. This compares to 300-600 justifiable homicides by police. Yet, in most instances, civilians used a firearm to threaten, apprehend, shoot at a criminal, or to fire a warning shot without injuring anyone.

Based on his extensive independent survey research, Kleck estimates that each year Americans use guns for protection from criminals more than 2.5 million times annually. 7 U.S. Department of Justice victimization surveys show that protective use of a gun lessens the chance that robberies, rapes, and assaults will be successfully completed while also reducing the likelihood of victim injury. Clearly, criminals fear armed citizens.

2 Rushforth, et al., "Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a Metropolitan County, " 100 American Journal of Epidemiology 499 (1975).
3 Rushforth, et al., "Violent Death in a Metropolitan County," 297 New England Journal of Medicine 531, 533 (1977).
4 Kellermann, et al., "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," New England Journal of Medicine 467 (1993).
5 Polsby, "The False Promise of Gun Control," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1994.
6 Wright and Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986).
7 Kleck, interview, Orange County Register,Sept. 19, 1993.

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MYTH : "The only purpose of a handgun is to kill people."

This often repeated statement is patently untrue, but to those Americans whose only knowledge of firearms comes from the nightly violence on television, it might seem believable. When anti-gun researcher James Wright, then of the University of Massachusetts, studied all the available literature on firearms, he concluded: "Even the most casual and passing familiarity with this literature is therefore sufficient to believe the contention that handguns have `no legitimate sport or recreational use.' "

There are an estimated 65-70 million privately owned handguns in the United States that are used for hunting, target shooting, protection of families and businesses, and other legitimate and lawful purposes. By comparison, handguns were used in an estimated 13,200 homicides in 1992 --less than 0.02% (two hundredths of 1%) of the handguns in America.

Many of these reported homicides (1,500-2,800) were self-defense or justifiable and, therefore, not criminal. That fact alone renders the myth about the "only purpose" of handguns absurd, for more than 99% of all handguns are used for no criminal purpose.

By far the most commonly cited reason for owning a handgun is protection against criminals. At least one-half of handgun owners in America own handguns for protection and security. A handgun's function is one of insurance as well as defense. A handgun in the home is a contingency, based on the knowledge that if there ever comes a time when it is needed, no substitute will do. Certainly no violent intent is implied, any more than a purchaser of life insurance intends to die soon.

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Did he need three guns

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