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Because they were disarmed by their own governments and thus unable to resist Hitler's Einsatzgruppen, Stalin's NKVD and starvation brigades and the gentle ways of the rest of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army when it comes to "treatment of non-combatants in conquered territories," at least 30 million civilians were murdered in those four countries from 1929 to 1945.

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(CNN) -- The chilling acts the 15-year-old boy is accused of defy imagination:
Pumping his mother, brother and two younger sisters with bullets.
Gunning down his dad when he returned home.
Texting a picture of his lifeless mother to his 12-year-old girlfriend.

Nehemiah Griego has been charged in connection with the shooting deaths of his family.
Plotting to kill strangers outside a supermarket.
But, family members say, Nehemiah Griego is no monster. They can't fathom what could have gone so terribly wrong.
"Whether it was a mental breakdown or some deeper undiagnosed psychological issue, we can't be sure yet," his uncle, former New Mexico state Sen. Eric Griego, said.
"What we do know is that none of us, even in our wildest nightmare, could have imagined that he could do something like this."
The family statement, sent to CNN affiliate KOAT, describes the boy as a gifted athlete and musician who was active in youth services at church.

It said the teen accompanied his father on mission trips to Mexico and wanted to continue a long family history of military service by becoming a soldier.

It's a far different picture of the teen than the one authorities paint.
Sheriff: Teen planned shootings for at least a week
Bernalillo County Sheriff Dan Houston said Griego was "involved heavily" with violent video games, and that he "was quite excited as he got the opportunity to discuss that with our investigators."
He said the boy planned the shootings for at least a week. That he told investigators he was frustrated with his mother. That he contemplated killing his girlfriend's parents. That he hoped to continue his killing spree at a Walmart "with mass destruction" and die in a shootout with police.
The teen's demeanor, as he shared all this, was "stern, very unemotional," Houston said.
Now, Griego will stand trial as an adult in the weekend killings, prosecutors announced.
He was arrested Saturday night, after deputies found the bodies of his mother, father, brother and two of his sisters in their home on the outskirts of Albuquerque.

Opinion: How a boy becomes a killer

The tragedy unfolds
The tragedy unfolded early Saturday morning, when Griego carried a .22-caliber rifle to where his mother and 9-year-old brother slept side by side, an arrest affidavit said.
The teen fatally shot his mother, waking his younger brother Zephania in the process.
When Griego told Zephania that their mother was dead, the younger boy did not believe him, the document stated.
"So Nehemiah picked up his mother's head to show his brother her bloody face," the affidavit said. "Nehemiah stated his brother became upset, so he shot his brother in the head with the same rifle used to kill his mother."
After that, police said, "Nehemiah stated he lost his sense of conscience."

The boy went on to kill his sisters, 5-year-old Jael and 2-year-old Angelina, before his father Greg came home from a volunteer graveyard shift at a homeless shelter.
Authorities believe the father, a former pastor at an Albuquerque church and a chaplain to the city's fire department, was the last to be gunned down in the home.
'Beyond any human reasoning'
Most of the victims were shot with the .22, but a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle was also used in the killings, sheriff's Lt. Sid Covington said. Authorities said the weapons appear to have been purchased legally.
The Griegos had five other, grown children, none of whom lived at home, Covington said.
After the slayings, Griego "spent the majority of the day with his girlfriend," Houston said.
He even sent his girlfriend a picture of his slain mother, Houston said.

Authorities arrested the teen after he attended his family's church with his girlfriend, and a staff member called deputies.
Griego was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday to face two counts of murder and three counts of child abuse resulting in death, but the hearing was waived, KOAT reported.
The affiliate said Griego's case will go to a grand jury within 10 days.
"This is beyond any human reasoning or understanding at this time," the sheriff said.

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Americans are mostly christian. Why does this happen?

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Americans are mostly christian. Why does this happen?

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I've always thought that without the influence of religion, Elodin would have been a rocket scientist or something like that. It corrupts him.

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Ah lovely, the liberals have shown themselves to once again have no rational arguments and have chosen to resort to personal attacks and religion bashing.

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I've always thought that without the influence of religion, Elodin would have been a rocket scientist or something like that. It corrupts him.

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What a strange idea. How did you come up with that?

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Ah lovely, the liberals have shown themselves to once again have no rational arguments and have chosen to resort to personal attacks and religion bashing.

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Elodin has on a number of occasion shown high intelligence.

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What we have an issue with, Forfy, is that you cannot have a discussion with [...]

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Ah lovely, the liberals have shown themselves to once again have no rational arguments and have chosen to resort to personal attacks and religion bashing.

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Nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people -- and nothing is harder than to disarm people who are neither.

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The gun control controversy is only the latest of many issues to be debated almost solely in terms of fixed preconceptions, with little or no examination of hard facts.

Media discussions of gun control are dominated by two factors: the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment. But the over-riding factual question is whether gun control laws actually reduce gun crimes in general or murder rates in particular.

If, as gun control advocates claim, gun control laws really do control guns and save lives, there is nothing to prevent repealing the Second Amendment, any more than there was anything to prevent repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that created Prohibition.

But, if the hard facts show that gun control laws do not actually control guns, but instead lead to more armed robberies and higher murder rates after law-abiding citizens are disarmed, then gun control laws would be a bad idea, even if there were no Second Amendment and no National Rifle Association.

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Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting -- even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun.

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The central issue boils down to the question: What are the facts? Yet there are many zealots who seem utterly unconcerned about facts or about their own lack of knowledge of facts.

There are people who have never fired a shot in their life who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm's clip or magazine. Some say ten bullets but New York state's recent gun control law specifies seven.


Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting -- even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so futile and so polarizing.


Anyone who faces three home invaders, jeopardizing himself or his family, might find 30 bullets barely adequate. After all, not every bullet hits, even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates. You can get killed by a wounded man.


These plain life-and-death realities have been ignored for years by people who go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were fired by the police in some encounter with a criminal. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised by the number of shots fired. I have seen people miss a stationary target at close range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range.

We cannot expect everybody to know that. But we can expect them to know that they don't know -- and to stop spouting off about life-and-death issues when they don't have the facts.

The central question as to whether gun control laws save lives or cost lives has generated many factual studies over the years. But these studies have been like the proverbial tree that falls in an empty forest, and has been heard by no one -- certainly not by zealots who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts.


Most factual studies show no reduction in gun crimes, including murder, under gun control laws. A significant number of studies show higher rates of murder and other gun crimes under gun control laws.


How can this be? It seems obvious to some gun control zealots that, if no one had guns, there would be fewer armed robberies and fewer people shot to death.


But nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people. And nothing is harder than to disarm people who are neither -- especially in a country with hundreds of millions of guns already out there, that are not going to rust away for centuries.


When it was legal to buy a shotgun in London in the middle of the 20th century, there were very few armed robberies there. But, after British gun control zealots managed over the years to disarm virtually the entire law-abiding population, armed robberies became literally a hundred times more common. And murder rates rose.

One can cherry-pick the factual studies, or cite some studies that have subsequently been discredited, but the great bulk of the studies show that gun control laws do not in fact control guns. On net balance, they do not save lives but cost lives.


Gun control laws allow some people to vent their emotions, politicians to grandstand and self-righteous people to "make a statement" -- but all at the cost of other people's lives.

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I've just learned that Washington, D.C.'s petition for a rehearing of the Parker case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was denied today. This is good news. Readers will recall in this case that the D.C. Circuit overturned the decades-long ban on gun ownership in the nation's capitol on Second Amendment grounds.

However, as my colleague Peter Ferrara explained in his National Review Online article following the initial decision in March, it looks very likely that the United States Supreme Court will take the case on appeal. When it does so - beyond seriously considering the clear original intent of the Second Amendment to protect an individual's right to armed self-defense - the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court would be wise to take into account the findings of a recent study out of Harvard.


The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence." Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is "no." And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.

The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

b]Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland's murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study's authors write in the report:

   If the mantra "more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death" were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. b]Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)


Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct - that "gun don't kill people, people do" - the study also shows that Russia's murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.


The important thing to keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun - a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite - but the overall murder rate, regardless of means. The criminologists explain:

   [P]er capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. (p. 663 - emphases in original)

It is important to note here that Profs. Kates and Mauser are not pro-gun zealots. In fact, they go out of their way to stress that their study neither proves that gun control causes higher murder rates nor that increased gun ownership necessarily leads to lower murder rates. (Though, in my view, Prof. John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime does indeed prove the latter.) But what is clear, and what they do say, is that gun control is ineffectual at preventing murder, and apparently counterproductive.

Not only is the D.C. gun ban ill-conceived on constitutional grounds, it fails to live up to its purpose. If the astronomical murder rate in the nation's capitol, in comparison to cities where gun ownership is permitted, didn't already make that fact clear, this study out of Harvard should.

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If I have a gun and break into your house and you have no gun you are at my mercy. That is a FACT. Denying people the right to properly defend themselves is immoral.

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