Common Folk Using Common Sense

From 11Alive.com:

A 19-year-old man was shot outside of McNair High School in Dekalb County on Friday [Feb. 8] night, while a high school basketball game was going on inside.

Hundreds of kids were pouring out of the school just after the basketball game when the shooting occurred.

DeKalb police are looking for the shooter and trying to figure out what started it all. The shooting happened at about 8:45 p.m., just off McNair High School’s campus.

Investigators said a 19-year-old victim was waiting at a bus stop on Bouldercrest Road.

And just a few days later, again from 11Alive.com:

A 15-year-old McNair High School student was shot in the back at a MARTA bus stop just outside the school on Tuesday [Feb. 12] afternoon.

Investigators said they are looking at the possibility that Tuesday’s shooting and one that happened last Friday night are related — they occurred in the exact same place: the MARTA bus stop just off of McNair’s campus.

The teen was shot at about 3:15 p.m., just after classes dismissed for the day at McNair.

One person shot after a high school basketball game while standing at a bus stop, and then four days later another person was shot in the middle of the afternoon at the same bus stop.

How can this be? First Georgia has the School Safety Zones law. “School safety zone” means in, on, or within 1,000 feet of any real property owned by or leased to any public or private elementary school, secondary school, or school board and used for elementary or secondary education and in, on, or within 1,000 feet of the campus of any public or private technical school, vocational school, college, university, or institution of post secondary education. It’s against the law to have a gun inside of these school safety zones.

Second, it’s illegal to have a gun at a bus stop. Any person who boards or attempts to board an aircraft, bus, or rail vehicle with any explosive, destructive device, or hoax device as such term is defined in Code Section 16-7-80 shall be guilty of a felony. This gun-free zone also includes a reasonable area immediately adjacent to any designated stop along the route traveled by any coach or rail vehicle operated by a transportation company or governmental entity operating aircraft, bus, or rail vehicle transportation facility and parking lots or parking areas adjacent to a terminal - and by “adjacent” Georgia law can mean up to 200 yards from the actual bus stop.

So either using the “school safety zone” laws OR the “bus stop safety zone” laws it’s illegal to have a gun at the location where these two people were shot. These two people were in a “double” gun free zone.

• Did this zone protect the victims?
• Did this zone keep guns away?
• Did this zone prevent a gun crime?
• Did the establishment of a gun free zone have any impact at all?

Gun free zones are attractive to criminals because no law abiding citizens will be able to stop them from taking hostages or killing. Criminals have great incentive to do their crimes within gun free zones. Gun free zones are the safest places for criminals. Gun free zones are the deadliest places for law-abiding citizens. Gun free zones increase gun crime. When well meaning but misguided individuals ban guns at one location or another they are recklessly and negligently putting your life at risk and are giving you a false sense of security.

What gun-control advocates fail to grasp is criminals, by definition, do not follow the law and therefore any attempt to keep them from carrying a gun into a given establishment will fail, often with tragic results.

The goal of legislators nationwide shouldn’t be to keep armed law-abiding citizens from bearing arms in restaurants, bars, schools and so forth. It should be to keep criminals with guns from entering such locations. Posting signs designating an area as “gun free” does not keep criminals from entering with a gun; they invite criminals who know nobody can stop them, and that is exactly what the criminals want.

McNair High School, Dekalb County, MARTA, gun free zone, gun, gun crime

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