William Perry Pendley, an NR reader, is president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a public-interest organization devoted to protecting individual liberties. He is also a Colorado resident, and happened to be in Aurora the morning of the massacre. I recommend his USA Today article on the subject, from which I offer this brief excerpt:
Cinemark Holdings Inc., owner of the theater where these murders took place exercises its rights as an owner of private property in Colorado to bar those who hold concealed carry permits from exercising their rights in its theaters. As a result, law-abiding citizens, including owners of concealed carry permits, who were in the theater that dreadful night were unarmed and thus unable to defend themselves and their fellow movie-goers from the murderous attack visited upon them.
Opponents of the Second Amendment and concealed carry laws call the areas created by Cinemark’s decision “gun-free zones.” They are not. As we discovered to our great horror in the early morning hours of July 20 and as we have discovered in the past, they are free only of the guns owned by law-abiding citizens.
This is a caution that would-be gun-controllers would be wise to heed. It’s easy to hate guns. But even if we didn’t have a Second Amendment in the Constitution, the answer to the problem would not be nearly as self-evident as some might wish.