By Chip Ford
The Southern Kentucky Performing Arts Center recently imposed a new security policy that deprives patrons of their right to carry a weapon for personal protection, even if they possess a permit. But this policy actual makes SKyPAC customers less safe.
I’m sure the authors of the new SKyPAC policy were well-intentioned. They’re probably confident all risks have been mitigated if not eliminated through their TSA-like security screening impositions. But nothing can ensure total safety, despite sincere assurances to the contrary – especially not against obsessed evil.
On July 20, 2012, about 400 patrons filled a Cinemark multiplex theater in Aurora, Colorado, for a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Among them was 24-year-old James Eagan Holmes.
Holmes bought his ticket, went into the theater, and sat in the front row, according to the police report. About 20 minutes into the film, he slipped outside the darkened theater through an emergency exit door alongside the screen, which opened to a rear parking lot where he’d left his car. On his way out, he propped the door open a crack. Ten minutes later, he returned through that unsecured door and opened fire on the audience – 76 shots from his tactical shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle with a 100-round drum, and a .40-caliber pistol. Twelve people were killed, including a 6-year-old girl; 70 were injured.
Three years later, Holmes was convicted of all 165 counts against him. He was sentenced to 12 life imprisonment sentences without parole and a maximum of 3,318 additional years on attempted murder.
In 2016, a not-liable verdict was returned against Cinemark Cinemas in a civil trial, denying victims and their families damages compensation. Their lawsuit alleged the theater had lacked adequate security. Nobody was held accountable for the theater’s “gun-free zone” invitation.
In a 2012 analysis of the Aurora theater massacre, Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, noted that, of the seven area theaters showing The Dark Knight Rises on that night of July 20th within a 20-minute drive of the targeted theater, six allowed permitted concealed handguns and only one prohibited them: Cinemark Theater had “no weapons” signs prominently posted.
Lott posited: “So why would a mass shooter pick a place that bans guns? The answer should be obvious … disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks. Gun-free zones are a magnet for those who want to kill many people quickly. Even the most ardent gun control advocate would never put ‘Gun-Free Zone’ signs on their home. Let’s stop finally putting them elsewhere.”
As a quasi-private, taxpayer-subsidized enterprise, SKyPAC is perhaps within its rights to impose this misguided policy. Regardless, that disastrous 2012 “gun-free” theater policy, and the unsuccessful 2016 civil lawsuit by the victims against the theater, left 12 helpless patrons dead, 70 injured, and nobody held responsible but an opportunistic, deranged killer.
Personally, I would not be caught dead (perhaps literally) patronizing any venue which strips away my right of lawful self-defense against the potential mayhem of evil.
I suspect I’m not alone.
— Chip Ford of Bowling Green is a member of Warren County Conservatives and of the Green River Gun Club.
Article published in the Bowling Green Daily News November 9, 2022