It's finally dawning on the New York Times that gun-free zones don't work

We need to forget the idea that disarming the innocent will protect them.

Even the media can't ignore the cold, hard reality that depriving people of their commonsense civil rights doesn't protect them.

If you look closely enough, the media are making some stunning admissions.  A recent New York Times article all but conceded that "gun-free zones" don't work.  A newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina asked a question that destroyed this central tenet of gun control.

The piece in the New York Times detailed the creation of a gun-free zone in Times Square, accompanied by an increased police presence and the requisite "gun-free zone" signs.  

While the increased police presence helped reduce crime, it continued.  The signs did nothing to stop criminals from carrying guns, and shootings continued: 

"People feel emboldened to carry guns on the street," said Tom Harris, a retired New York police inspector and the president of the Times Square Alliance, which promotes businesses and coordinates major events.

"A gun-free zone is not going to stop a criminal from carrying a gun," Mr. Harris said.

Anyone with a logical mind could have made the point that a "gun-free zone" only deprives the innocent of their means of self-defense, giving criminals and the government free rein.

Except that the far left tends not to distinguish between innocent people and criminals.  Leftists tend to lump them together and look at aggregate statistics on guns, with the simplistic notion that more guns equals more death and fewer guns equals fewer deaths without any thought on who has them.

Those who put some intellectual effort into understanding this issue realize that there is a vast difference between innocent people and criminals being armed.  But that would require a thoughtful instead of an emotional assessment of the situation.  Doing that destroys any reasons for gun control.

An article a while back in the Raleigh News & Observer posed an interesting question, unintentionally opening up the discussion and intellectually destroying the rationale behind "gun-free zones."  In a piece on the issue of legislation that would let people with concealed carry permits have a gun on school property after hours if the property was being used for religious services, they asked, "How do church congregations protect themselves without guns?"

They offered a choice between protecting the congregation with those with concealed carry permits or hiring off-duty police officers.  What they didn't realize was that they were acknowledging that armed self-defense is the only option — whether hired professionals or not — essentially destroying the silly notion of the "gun-free zone."

This leads us back to the New York Times piece, since that is a similar situation.  The Times is tacitly repudiating its silly notions of gun-free zones and gun control.

The bottom line in all of this is that we need to forget the idea that disarming the innocent will protect them.  We've seen time and time again that this does not work.  Even the New York Times has almost figured this out.

Originally published on the American Thinker