John Monroe called calls for more gun control "a knee-jerk reaction."
Rebecca Breyer
Just two days before 20 children and six adults were gunned down at a Connecticut elementary school, an attorney for an organization that fights gun laws across Georgia sent a letter to the city of Atlanta asserting that an ordinance banning weapons from public gatherings is illegal and must be repealed.
Senoia attorney Edward A. Stone, who wrote the letter on behalf of GeorgiaCarry.org, said the organization's mission to end laws that restrict licensed gun owners from carrying their firearms wherever they want remains unchanged in the wake of the Newtown shootings.
And Roswell attorney John Monroe, who also litigates on behalf of GeorgiaCarry, branded the renewed push for gun control around the country "a knee-jerk reaction of trying to impose new regulations without much regard as to whether it will accomplish anything."
Stone, a former police officer who earned his law degree at Emory University and is one of GeorgiaCarry's founders, called the Newtown shootings "heartbreaking."
"But I do want to point out that there were several competent adults that this murderer had to kill or bypass before he got to the first child," he said. "One armed adult could have put a stop to this."
Connecticut gun regulations, Stone continued, left the elementary school faculty "armed with nothing but their courage and despair, and I think that's immoral. … I don't think staff should be left with the only option of trying to hide children in a closet or protect children with their bodies."
A gun in the hands of school administrators or teachers, he said, might well have saved lives.
Monroe—who earned his law degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and is also a former police officer—has represented GeorgiaCarry, often successfully, in challenges to state and local gun laws. He told the Daily Report that gun laws limiting or banning the use of high-velocity, semi-automatic weaponry such as the AR-15 that authorities say was used in Newtown, or regulations banning large-capacity magazines, would not have made a difference at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.
"We're talking about somebody who obviously is not concerned about the most serious felonies we have on the books, a mass murderer," he said. "Why would we think that … regulating guns would have any effect?"
"Whenever you have a gun-free zone, what you really have is a victim disarmament zone," Monroe continued. "You don't hear about shootings at GeorgiaCarry conventions or NRA [National Rifle Association] conventions. You'd be a fool to go in there and open fire. You hear about them in churches, schools, government buildings where the shooter knows the chances of someone shooting back are pretty low."
