Jan Morgan Essay on Banning Muslims from Her Gun Range – Authorship Confirmed!
Summary of eRumor:
Jan Morgan, owner of the Gun Cave Indoor Shooting Range in Arkansas, declared her business a “Muslim free zone” and wrote a lengthy essay to explain why.
The Truth:
The lengthy essay that has made the rounds in many forwarded emails was in fact authored by Jan Morgan, the owner of the Gun Cave Indoor Shooting Range in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Jan Morgan describes herself as a 2nd Amendment advocate, speaker, NRA Certified Firearms Instructor and an investigative journalist. She also operates the website Jan Morgan Media and published the “Muslim free zone” essay there in September of 2014:
“To understand why I am have a problem with islamists, you must first consider the nature of my business.
This is not a coffee and donut shop. This is a live fire indoor shooting range. People come here to buy, rent, and shoot lethal weapons.
In the range, people are shooting guns in close proximity to each other, so my patrons depend on me and my discretion regarding who I allow to shoot beside them.
One mistake in judgment on my part could cost innocent people their lives.”
Jan Morgan then lists 10 reasons to explain her decision to ban Muslims from the Gun Cave Indoor Shooting Range. Some of the 10 reasons are general statements about Muslim people, but a number of the claims can be investigated more.
One of Jan Morgan’s first claims is that the Quran contains “109 versus commanding hate, murder and terror against all human beings who submit or convert to Islam.” This claim has been repeated many times, and it remains disputed. Defenders of Islam say that those versus have been “cherry picked” or taken out of context for dramatic effect.
The website The Religion of Peace, which is a self-described presenter of the “politically incorrect truth about Islam,” was among the first groups to make the 109 versus claim:
“The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called ‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.
Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.”
However, people on the other side of the debate say the 109 “violent” passages from the Quran only appear to be open-ended because of the way they are presented. Philip Jenkins, a professor at Penn State University, said violence in the Quran is largely a defense against attack:
“By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane,” he says. “Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide.”
Debates about specific passages in the Bible and the Quran will most likely never be resolved, so Jan Morgan’s claim about the 109 violent passages remains disputed.
Another claim made by Jan Morgan was that Muslims killed 270 million people in Islam’s first 1,400 years of existence, which is also disputed. The claim seems to have first appeared in the online newsletter, “Tears of a Jihad.” The website said it provided a “rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.” Other variations of the claim say that 270 million people were killed by jihad over a 1,000-year period.
Haroon Moghul, a fellow at New America Foundation, called the claim a myth in a column published by Al Jazeera:
“I imagine (the claim) means the period from roughly 600 to 1600 AD, which covers the time when Muslim states were generally not (as was subsequently true) on the receiving end of colonial conquest.
When Islam emerged in western Arabia, around 610 AD, the total population of the world was likely between 300 and 400 million. Fast forward to right past our period. The United Nations Census Report suggests that the world’s total population in the year 1800 was 1 billion; since then, of course, it has shot up to some seven billion.
At that point, the world’s largest Muslim population, which would be located in South Asia, was almost entirely under British rule. (In 1947, the population of the Indian subcontinent was under 350 million.) We are being asked to believe that jihadis killed, by the year 1600, more people than lived in South Asia in the year 1600. Keep in mind that India is one o
f the most densely populated parts of the planet and has long been a centre of world culture and civilization.”
So, while TruthorFiction.com can confirm the authorship of Jan Morgan’s “Muslim Free Zone” essay, we cannot confirm the individual claims she makes about Muslims. Those claims will likely continue to be the subject of debate for years to come.