MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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The Folly of “Gun-Free” School Zones
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Gun-control advocates, not surprisingly, have been shamelessly exploiting the April 16 massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University (Virginia Tech), in their zeal for more government controls over the possession, sale, and use of firearms. Predictably, by mid-afternoon on April 16 (well before all the facts about the shootings, including the identity of the killer, had become known), the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence issued a press release lamenting that easy access to weapons was to blame and renewed its call for “tougher” gun-control laws. The anti-gun zealots argue, simplistically, that the tragic killings at Virginia Tech somehow could have been averted – and that other similar killings somehow could be prevented – if only legislators would pass more draconian gun laws. “There ought to be law” to do x – to “close the loopholes” they allege exist in the existing gun-control regime – that’s the mantra that the zealots and demagogic politicians chant. (Among the latter is Senator Chuck Schumer, D.-N.Y., who’s cosponsoring a bill in Congress to impose still more federal government restrictions on the sale of handguns, requiring gun dealers to conduct more extensive “background checks” on buyers. Interestingly, Senator Schumer is also one of those legislators who thinks that there’d be less political “corruption” if only Congress would close more “loopholes” in campaign-finance regulatory laws – rather than recognizing the folly, and unconstitutionality, of the entire system of government restrictions on political speech.) Sadly, it’s all too typical for advocates of more government controls over people’s lives – the “paternalists,” as I call them – to think solely in terms of passing new laws rather than repealing existing laws that may be the real problem. Paternalists overlook the obvious fact that massacres like Virginia Tech and other recent, well-publicized shootings on school grounds (whether college campuses or high schools or grammar schools) happened because the existing laws purporting to make those places safe, “gun-free” zones did not work and, in fact, have made the problem worse. The real lesson coming out of the tragic killings at Virginia Tech is that it’s sheer folly to try to ban guns from campuses – it’s folly to try to create so-called “gun-free zones.” (Philosopher Aeon Skoble argues on the “Liberty and Power” blog, “Rather than passively accept the government euphemism `gun-free zone,’” we ought to use the term “mandatory defenseless zones.” As he explains, “Calling something a `gun-free zone’ doesn’t mean that criminals and lunatics won’t bring guns there – but it does mean that regular people will get in trouble if they do.” Professor Skoble’s point is well-taken: the basic problem with so-called “gun-free” zones is not just that they don’t work – they don’t stop criminals from using guns – but, moreover, that they work perversely: they do prevent law-abiding persons from effectively defending themselves from the criminals. That’s the folly generally of all sorts of “gun-control” laws.) The basic facts of what happened in Blacksburg, Virginia on April 16 have finally emerged (no thanks to the news media, especially the 24-hour cable news channels who wasted most of their coverage with inaccurate, incomplete reports that focused inordinately on second-guessing the actions of the Virginia Tech police and administration). The killer, Seung Hui Cho, a 23-year-old Korean-American student (a resident alien and a Virginia Tech senior majoring in English), armed with two handguns, began his rampage shortly after 7 a.m. by fatally shooting two students in a fourth-floor dormitory room in West Ambler Johnston Hall. He then spent approximately two hours to record a video – his deranged final message, sort of a combination suicide note and hate-filled manifesto – which he mailed to NBC at the Blacksburg post office around 9 a.m. – before resuming the deadliest part of his rampage. In Norris Hall, an engineering classroom building, after chaining shut some of the exterior doors (to prevent his victims’ escape), around 9:30 a.m. he began a killing spree – firing some 170 bullets, killing 30 people (five professors and 25 students) and wounding more than a dozen others – that ended with Cho’s own death, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Notwithstanding some of the media hyperbole – a few commentators erroneously reported Cho’s massacre as “the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history” – the total of 33 dead (including the murderer himself) made the Virginia Tech shootings the worst loss of life at the hands of a lone gunman in modern U.S. history. Additional facts about Cho himself emerged in the week or so following that deadly day. Described by both college and high-school classmates as a “loner” who hardly ever spoke to anyone, he allegedly “stalked” female classmates and had written some alarmingly violent essays for English creative-writing classes. (Several of his professors, including Nikki Giovanni, said they raised concerns about Cho’s “angry” writings with university officials, referring him for counseling; but despite these red flags in his student file, officials did nothing because there were no clear threats or warnings that Cho could turn violent.) Apparently suffering from some sort of mental disorder of long standing (perhaps rooted in childhood autism), he had been taken to a mental hospital for evaluation in December 2005 (after a friend had told police he was suicidal); he was adjudged “an imminent danger to himself,” but not to others, and was ordered to undergo outpatient psychiatric treatment. Although federal law bars gun purchases by anyone deemed a “mental defective” by a court or ordered to be “committed to any mental institution,” Cho fit neither category; according to Virginia State Police, he legally purchased the two handguns he used for his killing rampage. And he bought ammo clips for one of his guns on eBay. Gary Lavergne, author of A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders (1997), has noted the parallels between Cho’s killing rampage and the infamous shootings on August 1, 1966 at the University of Texas in Austin, where sniper Charles Joseph Whitman ascended the university’s Tower and fired 150 high-powered rounds of ammunition down upon the campus, killing or wounding nearly 50 people. As Lavergne observes, “More than four dozen innocent people were gunned down by a murderer [Cho] who [was] completely responsible for what happened. No one died for lack of text messages or an alarm system. They died of gunshot wounds.” He adds that maybe universities will find ways – installing surveillance cameras, for example – steps that “might be helpful in avoiding and reducing the carnage of any future incidents,” but he adds one fundamental truth that many paternalists overlook: “But as long as we value living in a free society, we will be vulnerable to those who do harm – because they want to and know how to do it.” (“The Legacy of the Texas Tower Sniper,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2007.) What compounded the tragedy at Virginia Tech was that those students and faculty in Norris Hall were helpless – unable to defend themselves against a killer armed with two handguns. Their helplessness was underscored by the poignant courage of engineering professor Liviu Librescu, who used his body to block the door to his second-floor classroom, Room 204, and thus sacrificed his own life in order to save the lives of his students, by giving them a precious few seconds of time to kick out the window screens and jump out of the room for safety. (As law professor Jonathan Turley noted in a recent op-ed in USA Today, “The Door to Room 204” (April 25), “the image of Librescu holding back a killer from entering his class is an image that most academics will never forget” – and indeed, “if there is to be a memorial to remember this tragedy, there could be no more poignant or powerful symbol than the bullet-ridden door of Room 204.” It was even more poignant, considering that the 76-year-old Professor Librescu had been a Holocaust survivor in his native Romania and that the day he died – the day of Cho’s homicidal rampage – was Holocaust Remembrance Day.) Self-defense, or “gun-rights,” advocates have pointed out that in other, similar shootings on school grounds in recent years, the ability of law-abiding persons to access guns for self-defense has helped avert further tragedy by enabling teachers or fellow students to effectively stop a killer’s rampage. At a Pearl, Miss., high school in 1997, assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a handgun from his car and apprehended a school shooter. In Edinboro, Pa., a few days after the Pearl event, a school attack ended after a nearby merchant used a shotgun to force the attacker to desist. And at Appalachian Law School, in Grundy, Va., in 2002, a mass murder was stopped by two students with law-enforcement experience, one of whom retrieved his own gun from his vehicle. (Three faculty members were left dead, but the killer’s rampage was stopped after two armed students, along with a third unarmed student, restrained him. As researcher John Lott points out in his book The Bias Against Guns (2003), the remarkable thing about the media’s coverage of the Appalachian Law School shootings was that so few of the stories mentioned that the students who stopped the attack had guns. Indeed, out of 208 news stories Lott found by a Nexis-Lexis search a week after the incident, only four stories mentioned that fact; indeed, 72 stories described how the attacker was stopped – noting that students “restrained” or “tackled” the gunman – without mentioning that the student heroes had guns.) Noting these episodes, David B. Kopel (gun-rights scholar and research director of the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo.) pointed out in a recent op-ed that all over the world armed citizens routinely thwart crimes: “Israel uses armed teachers as part of a successful program to deter terrorist attacks on schools. Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand are following the Israeli example, because of Islamist terrorism.” And here in the United States, despite the proliferation of “gun-free school zone” laws in recent years (see below), the state of Utah has no “gun-free schools” exception to its licensed carry law; in K-12 schools and in universities, “teachers and other adults can and do legally carry concealed guns” and in Utah, “there has never been a Columbine-style attack on a school.” (Kopel, “Gun-Free Zones,” Wall Street Journal, April 18.) A similar point has been made in a recent op-ed by Pierre Lemieux, a research fellow at the Independent Institute. “Obviously, when people are intent on massacring defenseless students, there is no panacea. Yet, there must be a reason why such killings haven’t occurred at places like the University of Utah, where people licensed to carry guns can bring them on campus, including university buildings. . . . So long as we tolerate a nanny-state culture of dependency, in which people are treated as children, disarmed and prohibited from protecting themselves, senseless mass killings will continue, and perhaps increase.” Virginia Tech, like most colleges (public and private) across the United States, bans all guns on campus (except for police and the university’s own security guards); even faculty members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars. This is so even though the state has a law allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. (Indeed, in general state concealed-carry laws typically exempt many places – including K-12 schools and college campuses – from citizens’ right to carry guns in self-defense, making these places supposed “gun-free” zones.) Last year, the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that would have ended the “gun-free zones” in Virginia’s public universities. David Kopel reports that at the time, “a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the General Assembly’s action `because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” He adds that an August 2006 editorial in the Roanoke Times declared: “Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.” Kopel concludes, “Virginia Tech thus went out of its way to prevent what happened” at Pearl, Mississippi and the other campuses where guns helped stop killers. Virginia Tech’s gun-ban policy “only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns.” And as Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said, “The students [at Virginia Tech] were like sheep. If you were in that room [in Norris Hall] waiting to be executed, what would you give to be able to stop that and save the lives of others?” Van Cleave also noted that members of his gun-rights group intend to talk to Virginia lawmakers again “in the very near future,” in hopes of overturning the prohibition. “Virginia Tech will become a rallying cry at the General Assembly,” he predicted. (“Next Debate: Should Colleges Ban Firearms? Wall Street Journal, April 18.) Gun-control advocates generally react with horror at the suggestion that allowing students or professors to carry guns on campus for their self-defense. Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank that supports gun control, called Mr. Van Cleave’s suggestion “ludicrous,” arguing that “it’s insanity to say we should wait for this to happen, and wait for a good guy with a gun to gun down the shooter” (WSJ, April 18). But experience shows that people generally are safer when responsible law-abiding citizens are carrying guns to protect themselves (and others) from criminals. As John Lott discusses in his book More Guns, Less Crime (2d ed. 2000), studies show that the number of defensive gun uses range from 1.5 million to 3.4 million per year, with the best estimate at about 2 million times. By contrast, the number of gun crimes is about 450,000 per year. Lott notes that most of the time armed law-abiding persons do not have to actually use their guns to avert violence; merely showing the gun, or often merely the possibility of law-abiding persons carrying concealed weapons is sufficient to deter criminals. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy blog (April 19, 1:05 p.m.), recently asked the rhetorical question, “What exactly is the reason not to allow professors to carry guns?” The argument that it’s dangerous for persons generally to have weapons, “because they’ll start shooting over arguments or fender-benders,” is “precisely the argument that has been rejected by the 38 states that allow any law-abiding citizen to get a concealed carry license. . . . What’s more, . . . people who get such licenses have in fact almost never committed unjustified homicide or attempted homicide (or even lesser crimes) using their guns,” he notes. “38 states have taken the view that all law-abiding adults should be free to get a license to carry concealed weapons, and haven’t had serious problems from the concealed-carry holders; the question is why those problems would suddenly appear at universities.” Professor Volokh also reiterates the argument that “universities are different because they are places for reasoning, not violence” and that they therefore should be “gun-free zones” because “that’s needed to create the proper climate of peaceful inquiry.” He then gives the rebuttal argument, which should be obvious (but apparently isn’t to some academic idealists): “But the sad fact is that you can’t make a university into a gun-free zone. Mad killers can bring guns, and use them, regardless of what policies you announce. The question is whether they will be able to use them against a disarmed population, or against a partly armed population. Allowing people the tools to defend themselves against the mad killers does not, it seems to me, worsen the climate.” As David Kopel notes, in Utah, where teachers and other adults legally carry concealed guns on campus, there have not been any of the incidents predicted by anti-gun zealots, “such as a teacher drawing a gun on a disrespectful student, or a student teaching a teacher’s gun.” Like the “Wild West” scenarios and other fears hypothesized by anti-gun activists when state legislatures began liberalizing concealed-carry laws, such problems have not occurred. The experience of the majority of U.S. states that have “shall-issue” or similar laws allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed guns is that such hypothetical fears are just that – imaginary. Many of the advocates of “tougher” gun-control laws are motivated by, quite literally, a phobia of guns. But guns are inherently neither bad nor good; they are tools that can be used for evil purposes, by criminals or crazed killers like Cho, or for good purposes, by responsible, rights-respecting persons who would use a gun only for defensive purposes. A deeper problem, underlying much of the paternalists’ rhetoric, is the extent to which many people in America today are repulsed by the whole notion of people being self-reliant. As Pierre Lemieux noted, in the quotation above, we’ve created “a nanny-state culture of dependency, in which people are treated as children, disarmed and prohibited from protecting themselves.” What gun-control advocates really desire – although they’re seldom honest enough to admit it, even to themselves – is for people generally to be utterly dependent on government for their physical security. They abhor self-reliance and individual responsibility when it comes to safety – just as other paternalists and apologists for the 20th-century welfare/regulatory state abhor self-reliance and individual responsibility when it comes to other matters, such as education, health care, and retirement planning. Gun-control laws are destructive of the virtues necessary for a free society – just as destructive as government schools, Medicare, and Social Security, and for the same reasons, for these programs undermine self-reliance and individual responsibility, too. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. As Jefferson and his fellow American founders were well aware, the purpose of creating governments is to safeguard the rights of individuals – by providing courts for the objective and peaceful resolution of disputes by and by enforcing laws that punish people for real crimes (that is, acts that really are injurious to others). Government cannot, and if confined to its legitimate function, ought not to try to, “protect” people, particularly from their own follies, but even from the dangers incident to human life. One of the greatest fallacies of the modern “welfare state” is the notion that a government powerful enough to provide “security” for its citizens, sheltering them from life’s risks “from cradle to grave,” can also allow them to be free. For, as Benjamin Franklin wisely observed in the famous quotation cited at the beginning of this essay, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." A totalitarian police state, with armed officers of the state in every building and on every city block and with surveillance cameras in both private and public places, might provide the kind of “security” that many paternalists desire – but it would not be the kind of society in which human beings worthy of the name would find worth living. An essential part of what it means to be human is to be free – which means, being free to take risks. And what makes life in a free, open society like the United States so worthwhile is the degree of freedom it provides – as Jefferson put, the degree to which society leaves its individual members free to govern themselves. That’s the “essential liberty” about which Franklin wrote – a liberty that cannot exist without some attendant risks, risks that modern paternalists seek to legislate away with their “safety” laws. America’s founders valued the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” (the fundamental right meant to be safeguarded by the federal Second Amendment and similar provisions in state constitutions) not only because of their familiarity with English history (and with tyrannical kings, like James II, who sought to deprive the people of their basic liberties by first disarming them and subjecting them to a standing army). They also understood that the right to firearms was part of all human beings’ natural right to defend themselves – a right that citizens do not lose when they agree to live in a civil society under laws enforced by government. Moreover, they equally understood the folly of trying to “protect” law-abiding persons from criminals by laws that disarm the people generally. As David Kopel notes in his “Gun-Free Zones” op-ed, Thomas Jefferson copied in his legal “Commonplace Book” a passage from Cesare Beccaria (the Enlightenment philosopher who was the founder of criminology), which is as true today as it was in the 18th century: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage them to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” Notwithstanding the ample historical precedents and common sense that underlie a broad understanding of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” American lawmakers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries began passing paternalistic laws restricting citizens’ gun rights, including laws prohibiting the concealed carrying of firearms and other weapons. (As legal historians Robert Cottrol and Raymond Diamond pointed out in their 1991 Georgetown Law Journal article, “The Second Amendment: Toward an African-Americanist Reconsideration,” many of those laws had a racist origin: successors to the notorious “Black Codes” of the post-Civil War South, many of the state laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in southern states with the purpose of depriving black persons of their ability to protect themselves against the armed thugs of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, as Cottrol and Diamond observe, the Ohio Supreme Court’s 1920 opinion upholding the constitutionality of its ban on concealed weapons – despite the explicit language in the state constitution guaranteeing “the right of the people to bear arms for their defense and security” – followed the lead of sister courts in five Southern states, over the objection of a dissenting justice who recognized that “the race issue [in these states] has intensified a decisive purpose to entirely disarm the negro, and this policy is evident upon reading the opinions.”) As David Kopel observes, “[i]n many states, `gun-free schools’ legislation was enacted hastily in the late 1980s or early 1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime. Aimed at juvenile gangsters, the poorly written and overbroad statutes had the disastrous consequence of rendering teachers unable to protect their students.” (Kopel, “”Gun-Free Zones,” Wall Street Journal, April 18.) As if to show that the national legislature was no less naïve than state legislatures – and certainly just as likely to hastily enact legislation with no consideration of its unintended consequences – Congress jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon by passing the federal “Gun-Free School Zones” Act of 1990, which prohibited any person from possessing a firearm within a certain distance of a school building. When the U. S. Supreme Court quite correctly declared that law unconstitutional in its 1995 decision Lopez v. United States (on the grounds that the law exceeded Congress’s legitimate authority to “regulate commerce among the States,” as the law had nothing to do with commercial activity), Congress – showing its utter disregard, if not contempt, for the Constitution – reenacted the law, claiming to get around the Commerce Clause problem by inserting a requirement that the gun possessed near a school have once traveled in interstate commerce (18 U.S.C. § 922 (q) (2002)). (Under that rationalization, note that virtually any activity might be subject to Congress’s regulatory power under the Commerce Clause, thereby rendering the enumerated powers design of the U.S. Constitution virtually dead – but that’s a topic for another blog essay.) The “gun-free school zone” laws, both state and federal, have actually cost lives, as the example of the Pearl, Miss., school shooting (cited above) shows. Because of laws prohibiting firearms within a certain distance of school buildings, no faculty or administrator at the school could keep firearms (even unloaded guns under lock and key) within the building. In order to stop the shooter, assistant principal Joel Myrick had to take several minutes “to leave his office, run all the way to the parking lot, unlock his truck, unlock a gun case, retrieve ammunition, load his gun, run back to the school and confront the shooter,” as Mike Kinsey, coordinator for Ohioans for Concealed Carry, observed in a recent letter to the editor published in the Columbus Dispatch. “How many more people would have been slaughtered if not for the brave actions [of men like Myrick]? How many children were killed while Myrick retrieved his self-defense tools that he wasn’t permitted to keep with him?” (“Law-abiding folks should be able to defend themselves,” April 21.) “Gun-free” zones, whether public or private, thus “have become attractive havens for mass killers,” as Kopel concludes. And, sadly, among those havens that these laws and policies have created for mass-killing are school grounds, college and university campuses. Private property owners (including businesses open to the public and private schools and universities) certainly have the right to prohibit lawful gun possession on their premises; it’s their property and therefore their right to set policies regarding its use. But business owners and private school administrators ought to stop imagining they’re safeguarding their customers or campus community members by banning guns; rather, they’re endangering them. Consider what happened at the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City earlier this year. The owners of Trolley Square had adopted a no-gun rule; signs posted on its doors announced, “No weapons allowed on Trolley Square property.” Yet, as David Kopel reports, “In February of this year a young man walked past the sign prohibiting him from carrying a gun on the premises and began shooting people who moments earlier were leisurely shopping at Trolley Square. He killed five.” Fortunately, though, as Kopel adds, “someone else – off-duty Ogden, Utah, police officer Kenneth Hammond – also did not comply with the mall’s rules. After hearing `popping’ sounds, Mr. Hammond investigated and immediately opened fire on the gunman. With his aggressive response, Mr. Hammond prevented other innocent bystanders from getting hurt. He bought time for the local police to respond, while stopping the gunman from hunting down other victims.” In the wake of the horrific killings at Virginia Tech, there’s been a lot of second-guessing and proposals for change. Many of them would result in a police state, anathema to a free society and the open environment for learning that college and university campuses ought to foster. James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, writes in a recent op-ed about several of the proposals being discussed by college and university administrators to help make their campuses safer: “lockdowns” (locking down students in dorms and classrooms and turning away off-campus students, after a shooting begins), greater use of electronic access cards, more armed security guards on campus. After noting the problems with each of these suggestions, Professor Fox concludes, “Regrettably, there is little that can be done to guard a wide-open, sprawling space such as Virginia Tech’s bucolic Blacksburg campus against a disgruntled, well-armed student. . . . Measures to upgrade security beyond what is reasonable based on the limited risk would hardly provide a pleasant campus climate. What student wants to attend classes in an armed camp?” (“Heightened security not the answer,” USA Today, April 18.) Neither is it the answer to close so-called “loopholes” in existing gun-control laws, by having the government mandate more stringent background checks, for example. Mr. Cho was able legally to purchase his handguns and ammunition, despite existing regulations mandating background checks for persons adjudged mentally defective or committed to an institution, because he had not been so adjudged. Broadening the background checks by going beyond legal records and requiring “character assessments” including interviews with references – as some gun-control activists advocate – would create more problems. In addition to undermining individual privacy and depriving many law-abiding persons of their rights of self-defense (not to mention creating an even more intrusive “Big Brother” government, delving into subjective “mental health” determinations), such proposals would do little to prevent further mass shootings like the Virginia Tech massacre. Someone with a documented history of mental disturbance like Cho might be prevented from buying firearms, but someone lacking such a history – such as a formerly “normal” person who suddenly “snaps” and one day shows up at school or work shooting a gun – would not. Indeed, in public-policy debates, whenever advocates of change call for “tightening” up laws and government regulations in order to “close the loopholes,” it’s always a good idea to question whether the underlying laws and regulations themselves are at fault. Efforts to prevent violent crime by having the government “control” access to firearms simply do not work. No amount of controls, no matter how draconian, will forestall all violent crimes. Only the most naïve paternalist could believe that government, somehow, by waving its magic wand – which means, by using force to deprive persons of their freedom – could prevent crimes like those committed by Mr. Cho at the Virginia Tech campus. As John Lott bluntly notes in a recent USA Today “Opposing View” column, “Good intentions don’t stop killers; people with guns do.” (“Bans don’t deter killers,” April 23). There’s one reform, however, that would simply and effectively help avert similar tragedies on college campuses in the future: “gun-free” zone laws and policies (at both public and private places) should be repealed. Let’s not continue making people on campus (students, staff, and faculty alike) sitting ducks for the next deranged shooter; let’s give members of university communities the same right that all citizens should have in a free society – the right to defend themselves, effectively, which includes the right to carry concealed guns.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Monday, April 30, 2007 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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