Another looser takes out a bunch of folks before checking out, this time in a Nebraska shopping mall.  Frequent readers of this blog know how I feel about these pests.

Here’s the latest news:  http://news.google.com/news?q=mall+shooting&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=title

The news media is keen on the fact that he used an SKS “assault rifle.”  Never mind the rifle in question is a civilian version of a military rifle that’s 62 years old and hasn’t been a front-line military weapon in 60 years.  They aren’t very attractive, but they are inexpensive, rugged and fun to shoot.  I’m sure someone will call for a ban, but the rifle has been illegal to import since 1994 (because it's ugly).  No thanks to Bill Clinton (D).  Every firearm on the planet is either based on a military design or incorporates technology that was refined by military designs.

It will be interesting to see how this invertebrate got his hands on a gun.  He had a felony drug conviction on his record.

So again I ask “Why the mall?”  Could it be that anyone carrying a gun there would have been guilty of trespass?  Yep, the mall was a “gun-free” zone.  Thus ensuring the gunman that he’d likely face nobody returning fire.  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,315563,00.html

Malls don’t even generally garner much police protection as they supply their own (unarmed) security.  The only real protection, as John R. Lott, Jr. and William M. Landes state in their 2000 paper Multiple Victim Shootings, ”While arrest or conviction rates and the death penalty reduce “normal” murder rates and these attacks lead to new calls from more gun control, our results find that the only policy factor to have a consistently significant influence on multiple victim public shootings is the passage of concealed handgun laws.”  When a large enough percentage of the law-abiding population is armed, and those who are armed are indistinguishable from the unarmed, then little creeps like this one will either commit suicide quietly, or at the very least take fewer souls with them.