Truck Massacre Discredits ‘Gun-Free’ Zone Idea

Opinion

While city officials in New Orleans have been trying since last year to create a “gun-free zone” including the city’s entire French Quarter, the slaughter of 14 people on New Year’s Day is graphic proof that bad people are the problem, not firearms, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.

“Alleged mass killer Shamsud Din Jabbar murdered all of his victims with an electric-powered pickup truck,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “While he reportedly had a rifle and pistol, he also apparently placed IED bombs in a couple of places prior to his rampage. Does anyone seriously expect us to believe that designating the area as a ‘gun-free zone’ would have somehow deterred this madman and prevented this horrible crime?”

Jabbar was killed in a short gun battle with New Orleans police officers, but the carnage was really caused by driving the truck through holiday revelers.

This was not the first time in recent memory when a crazed terrorist weaponized a motor vehicle to inflict massive mayhem. Last month saw the Christmas Market attack in Magdeburg, Germany. There was the July 14, 2016 terror attack in Nice, France when a man drove a stolen cargo truck through a crowd, killing 86 people and injuring 434 others. In 2017, another man drove a rented pickup along a bike path in New York City, killing eight people, CCRKBA recalled.

“What does it take to convince public officials, in New Orleans or anywhere else, that restricting the rights of legally-armed, law-abiding citizens will not prevent incidents of horrendous violence,” Gottlieb wondered. “While the myopic gun prohibition lobby concentrates on banning firearms in so-called ‘sensitive places,’ dangerous individuals have demonstrated repeatedly they don’t need guns to commit mass murder. The terrible tragedy in New Orleans merely underscores that fact.

“It’s time to abandon the one-size-fits-all strategy of disarming the public as a solution to violent crime and a preventive measure against wholesale killing,” he stated. “Trampling the constitution has never solved anything. You don’t protect people by disarming them. You simply turn them into defenseless victims.”

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Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.