Perfection. Truth. Just plain awesome. Everything I have been saying for years.
January 8, 2013
By Christopher S. Brownwell
The hatred of people leads to gun control. I am talking about not the shooter's hatred, but the gun controller's hatred.
Liberals have a reputation for caring about people -- an undeserved reputation. They don't believe that people ought to live free and govern themselves. Liberals like Harry Belafonte, Woody Allen, and Bill Maher have openly advocated that President Obama take the authority of a dictator. Observe how liberal celebrities such as Sean Penn gush over foreign dictators like Hugo Chávez. How many of your liberal friends own a Che Guevara t-shirt or poster? Liberals hate people so much that they do not trust them to govern themselves.
The dirty little secret that everybody knows is that gun control is not about stopping the bloodshed. Even though an automobile does not have the specific purpose to kill, it has more killing power than a firearm. According to the Center for Disease Control, cars kill more people than firearms. Where is the support for an automobile ban? Liberals do not support one. You see, a ban of firearms is not about concern for murder victims.
Liberals are so irrationally attached to gun control because they love government more than they love people. They love government more than they love liberty. They seek government handouts, whether for themselves or for those they think deserve forced charity from the "rich." They adore government over-regulation of things they hate, like guns, logging, drilling for oil, and 20-oz. sodas. They love government regulation of people, like forcing us to purchase health insurance, pay for abortions, provide contraception, eat "healthy" foods.
Government is the sovereign god to liberals. They worship at its altar and support their priests every election despite their crimes and scandals. Liberals demand that their religious morality be forced on the rest of us. Carbon emission regulations, "sin" taxes, and public school lunches are just a few examples of the imposition of liberal morality.
Liberals do not see a need for the people to have firearms because they do not see a need to fear their government. They worship it. Banning automobiles is not on the table because automobiles do not threaten government authority like the firearm does. (But just you wait: when liberals continue to implement their utopian "fundamental transformation of America," the freedom to travel will be taken. Liberals then will support a ban on automobiles.)
The right to individually bear firearms is not about hunting or personal self-defense, although those are subsumed in the 2nd Amendment. The right to bear arms is about securing an arsenal in the hands of the sovereign people in order to strike fear in government officials of the possibility of violence by a well-regulated militia under the guidance and control of an accountable civil authority. We the people have a collective right in our state governments to put our federal government officials in fear of violence for their "long train of abuses and usurpations." This God-given, natural right is embodied in our nation's Declaration of Independence.
I am talking not about wanton, reckless individuals or unaccountable paramilitary groups. Violence has to be accountable to and restrained by a civil authority. But if we truly believe in the sovereignty of the people, if we are truly classical liberals, the fear of proper, organized, accountable violence is a necessity for a free republic. Thomas Jefferson affirmed that "[w]hen governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Liberty is a paradox. Unrestrained liberty is not freedom, but anarchy. The liberty to do anything you want to do destroys liberty. G.K. Chesterton stated of social and political liberty in his timeless work Orthodoxy, "The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the 'Odyssey.' He is free from national prejudices and outside of patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside 'Henry V.' ... For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out."
What satisfied Chesterton about the Christian paradox is that Christianity achieved the balancing of parallel passions. "[T]he more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." Therefore, liberty is not the freedom to do anything we want to do. Liberty is the freedom to do what we ought to do.
The paradox of liberty extends to its defense and preservation. If force can take away liberty, force is necessary to preserve it. It is the hatred of violence alongside the willingness to use violence that preserves liberty. In order for us to live as free men, we have to hate the violence that takes away liberty, yet at the same time, we must embrace the violence that preserves it. That is the paradox our founders appreciated and made work for over 200 years.
Modern liberals, however, do not fear the "long train of abuses and usurpations" because they do not believe in popular sovereignty. They worship tyrannical authority. Liberals show affection to and apologize for evil men like Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Tung, Bill Ayers, the Muslim Brotherhood. They show disdain for patriots like John Adams, Patrick Henry, Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, and the Tea Party. Liberals fear their liberty-loving neighbors more than they do their power-hungry politicians. Liberals would rather shackle their neighbors than let them live in liberty.
In a fiery speech on August 1, 1776, Samuel Adams bellowed, "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom -- go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!"
Liberals prefer shackles to the wild adventure of liberty. Because they prefer shackles, they cannot bear others having liberty. In their bleeding hearts is not love for people, but a will to dominate them and to be dominated. Our Founders knew that taking away firearms from the citizen was essentially to turn him into a subject, a slave. Congressman Allen West affirmed this sentiment when he said, "An armed man is a citizen. A disarmed man is a subject."
Turning men into slaves is not love. But that is what gun control is all about: turning men into slaves. Love for mankind is not in taking care of him, but in letting him be free to take care of himself. With gun control, liberals want to take away the means for men to preserve their liberty.
Liberals say they want gun control because they want to end the bloodshed. But beware. What is at the heart of support for gun control is not love of men, but hatred for them.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
When seconds count...
Some of us already knew/know this. Who is going to protect your family?
January 7, 2013
Cliff Thier
We learn today from CNN:
At the police station, dispatchers began to take calls from inside the school. Authorities say the first emergency call about the shooting came in at "approximately" 9:30 a.m.
"Sandy Hook school. Caller is indicating she thinks someone is shooting in the building," a dispatcher told fire and medical personnel, according to 911 tapes.
Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.
Police report that no law enforcement officers discharged their weapons at any point.
The gunman took his own life, police said. He took out a handgun and shot himself in a classroom as law enforcement officers approached, officials said.
The police station is 2 miles from the school.
Might it be fair to speculate that if the police arrived in 5 minutes, 15-20 of the 26 killed might still be alive?
If we expect the police to arrive in time to save us from a gunman, we're deluding ourselves.
January 7, 2013
Cliff Thier
We learn today from CNN:
At the police station, dispatchers began to take calls from inside the school. Authorities say the first emergency call about the shooting came in at "approximately" 9:30 a.m.
"Sandy Hook school. Caller is indicating she thinks someone is shooting in the building," a dispatcher told fire and medical personnel, according to 911 tapes.
Police and other first responders arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.
Police report that no law enforcement officers discharged their weapons at any point.
The gunman took his own life, police said. He took out a handgun and shot himself in a classroom as law enforcement officers approached, officials said.
The police station is 2 miles from the school.
Might it be fair to speculate that if the police arrived in 5 minutes, 15-20 of the 26 killed might still be alive?
If we expect the police to arrive in time to save us from a gunman, we're deluding ourselves.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Obama's Disarming Haste
No different than Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. Wake up America!
January 7, 2013
By Daren Jonescu
According to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker, President Obama is committed to moving quickly on gun violence legislation. Reported as good news, in truth this carefully projected haste and urgency ought to be regarded -- and would be reported, by a media that did not have a stake in leftist authoritarianism -- as the gravest warning sign.
"A warning sign of what?" asks the scoffing useful idiot. "Of the end of even the pretense of liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism, or any other form of government answerable to the governed."
It became a cliché during the last century to say that tyranny has the advantage over freedom in a crisis, because while the legitimate government must follow its own internal processes for assuring the consent of the people (or of their representatives) prior to acting, the tyrant may simply issue a decree, irrespective of anyone's objections.
It is true that legitimate governments comprised of co-equal branches, or of deliberative bodies, are somewhat limited in their power to act precipitately. And that limit is precisely the source of their legitimacy.
In almost all circumstances, sometimes even including the most grave and pressing, legitimate governments are compelled to engage in some measure of deliberation. That is, they are restricted in their actions and responses to what can be agreed upon through a process of reasoning. If there are disagreements about the need for action, they must be heard. If there are quibbles about the course of action to be pursued, they must be heard.
Churchill argued vehemently and repeatedly in and out of the British parliament against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and in favor of forceful action. Through this process, his case, which was initially unpopular both in parliament and among the British people, grew in force and effect, and Churchill himself was chiselled by it into a greater leader of men -- precisely when Britain, and the world, needed such a leader. His path to action was longer and more laborious than Hitler's, but he had right on his side -- and he won.
Churchill was forced to these extremes of patient argumentation in the face of an immediate threat to his nation's survival by a tyrannical lunatic commanding the most powerful military in Europe. That is a case study in what I am calling "legitimate government." Illegitimate government, by contrast, would follow the opposite trajectory: pursue the most radical policy proposals while circumventing or avoiding patient argumentation and debate, even in matters of relatively little urgency.
To state this contrast differently, a free nation thinks before it acts in its own best interests, even in a genuine crisis, while an unfree nation is dragged into unthinking action against its own interests, in response to an illusory crisis.
When Rahm Emanuel described the Obama administration's modus operandi as "never let a serious crisis go to waste," many conservatives latched onto this supposed revelation as Exhibit A against the administration's integrity. In truth, Emanuel was putting the idea out there early, in the first weeks of the administration, so that, through repetition, it could be transformed, over the course of Obama's first term, from evidence of alarming cynicism into the definition of responsible governance.
Thus it is that mainstream reporters can now matter-of-factly describe the White House's mission on gun control this way:
Obama's advisers have calculated that the longer they wait, the more distance there is from the Newtown massacre and the greater the risk that the bipartisan political will to tackle gun violence will dissipate.
"This is not something that I will be putting off," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview broadcast last Sunday.
At the White House meeting, [Sheriff Richard] Stanek said, "the vice president indicated that there was a very short timeline for him to get back to the president with his recommendations because the American public has a short memory."
Think about that. The president and vice president of the United States are urging immediate action on gun control, pre-empting all debate about the measures' constitutionality; and their justification for this urgent, anti-constitutional action is that "the American public has a short memory." In other words, this is not a real crisis (i.e., an ongoing threat), and the public will soon realize that, and carry on with life as usual; therefore, we must act before that happens.
Here is Rucker's account of the administration's intentions:
A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.
As for where the federal government would get the authority to require "universal background checks," monitor the "movement" of private property, impose "stronger" mental health checks (on whom?), or punish private citizens for "giving" guns to minors (teaching your son to shoot?), these are precisely the kinds of questions for which the normal process of legitimate government would be in order -- deliberate, debate, reason. But the administration is unwilling to accept the likely outcome of such a process, and therefore wishes to foist its illiberal ideas on the public without open discussion. We all know the pattern now: in place of the deliberative process designed to protect the public from unjust government, Obama, Feinstein, et al will rush through legislation and executive orders, and then "lead a public relations offensive to generate public support."
There is a striking dissonance between the alleged need to act immediately, and the nature of the measures proposed. Rucker repeatedly tells us the government's response will be "comprehensive"; Biden's working group has "expanded its focus" to areas in which the president may act without congressional support, such as "changes to federal mental-health programs"; the administration is "quietly talking with a diverse array of interest groups"; they are "developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association," such as "rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses" (i.e., crony capitalism in the name of restricting gun sales); their proposals constitute a "deeper exploration than just the assault-weapons ban"; and the discussions include the secretaries of Homeland Security, Education, and Health and Human Services.
These are strategies for radical change in the nature and order of American society. One does not solve an immediate crisis by abandoning the entity undergoing the crisis. A man whose kitchen is on fire does not respond by calling a real estate agent to discuss buying a new house; he calls the fire department, and tries to save his property. A nation in a crisis does not abandon its laws and principles; it tries to shore them up with some form of corrective action. Conservatives were rightly disdainful of George W. Bush's nonsense about "abandoning the free market in order to save it." Now, the Obama administration's response to a violation of individual rights (gun violence) is to abandon individual liberty and the right of self-preservation.
A government that responds to a genuine crisis -- such as foreign attack, or wide-scale insurrection -- in a precipitate fashion is acting irresponsibly. A government that manufactures a crisis in order to justify acting precipitately is behaving tyrannically. A government that follows this pattern as its normal method of operation is not merely behaving tyrannically - it is a tyranny.
"Never let a crisis go to waste" is cynical politics of the highest order. "Never let an opportunity to create the illusion of a crisis go to waste" is worse than cynical; it is diabolical. It is also fundamentally delegitimizing of the government that pursues this policy. A health care "crisis" necessitates immediate passage of a bill that no one has read, let alone debated. A student loan "crisis" necessitates a federal government takeover of the loan industry. A fiscal "crisis" necessitates the passage of a bill that was presented to the U.S. Senate -- "the world's greatest deliberative body" -- six minutes prior to the vote. And so on.
Now, a gun violence "crisis" -- which has been cleverly expanded into a mental health "crisis" -- requires immediate, undeliberated measures to begin the final process of ending private gun ownership, while extending the federal government's power to assess, label, restrict, and/or detain private citizens as "mentally unstable," according to guidelines that will be written by the leftist authoritarians at HHS, the Justice Department, and Homeland Security. Talk about the lunatics running the asylum!
The only real crisis at play here is a crisis of liberty; the U.S. federal government has become unmoored from any notion of legitimate representative government, and its illegitimate practices have become broadly acceptable to the American public. Corrective measures are certainly in order, but these will not come from the government. They will come, if they come, from the people.
Here, from the Washington Post article, is the sensibility now governing America's public policy, in a nutshell:
"As we get involved in these ad nauseam debates over the Second Amendment, our children are still at risk," said Jon Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. "Debating is not the action verb we need to protect our children."
Actually, Mr. Adler, it is. Debating -- discussing the appropriateness of proposed policy in light of the nation's interests and fundamental principles -- is what legitimate governments do, as long as they wish to represent the will, rather than exploit the ignorance and fear, of the people.
While we're at it, Americans might like to consider a few other action verbs pertinent to this moment, and to "protecting their children": resisting, debunking, teaching, thinking, and fighting.
January 7, 2013
By Daren Jonescu
According to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker, President Obama is committed to moving quickly on gun violence legislation. Reported as good news, in truth this carefully projected haste and urgency ought to be regarded -- and would be reported, by a media that did not have a stake in leftist authoritarianism -- as the gravest warning sign.
"A warning sign of what?" asks the scoffing useful idiot. "Of the end of even the pretense of liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism, or any other form of government answerable to the governed."
It became a cliché during the last century to say that tyranny has the advantage over freedom in a crisis, because while the legitimate government must follow its own internal processes for assuring the consent of the people (or of their representatives) prior to acting, the tyrant may simply issue a decree, irrespective of anyone's objections.
It is true that legitimate governments comprised of co-equal branches, or of deliberative bodies, are somewhat limited in their power to act precipitately. And that limit is precisely the source of their legitimacy.
In almost all circumstances, sometimes even including the most grave and pressing, legitimate governments are compelled to engage in some measure of deliberation. That is, they are restricted in their actions and responses to what can be agreed upon through a process of reasoning. If there are disagreements about the need for action, they must be heard. If there are quibbles about the course of action to be pursued, they must be heard.
Churchill argued vehemently and repeatedly in and out of the British parliament against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and in favor of forceful action. Through this process, his case, which was initially unpopular both in parliament and among the British people, grew in force and effect, and Churchill himself was chiselled by it into a greater leader of men -- precisely when Britain, and the world, needed such a leader. His path to action was longer and more laborious than Hitler's, but he had right on his side -- and he won.
Churchill was forced to these extremes of patient argumentation in the face of an immediate threat to his nation's survival by a tyrannical lunatic commanding the most powerful military in Europe. That is a case study in what I am calling "legitimate government." Illegitimate government, by contrast, would follow the opposite trajectory: pursue the most radical policy proposals while circumventing or avoiding patient argumentation and debate, even in matters of relatively little urgency.
To state this contrast differently, a free nation thinks before it acts in its own best interests, even in a genuine crisis, while an unfree nation is dragged into unthinking action against its own interests, in response to an illusory crisis.
When Rahm Emanuel described the Obama administration's modus operandi as "never let a serious crisis go to waste," many conservatives latched onto this supposed revelation as Exhibit A against the administration's integrity. In truth, Emanuel was putting the idea out there early, in the first weeks of the administration, so that, through repetition, it could be transformed, over the course of Obama's first term, from evidence of alarming cynicism into the definition of responsible governance.
Thus it is that mainstream reporters can now matter-of-factly describe the White House's mission on gun control this way:
Obama's advisers have calculated that the longer they wait, the more distance there is from the Newtown massacre and the greater the risk that the bipartisan political will to tackle gun violence will dissipate.
"This is not something that I will be putting off," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in an interview broadcast last Sunday.
At the White House meeting, [Sheriff Richard] Stanek said, "the vice president indicated that there was a very short timeline for him to get back to the president with his recommendations because the American public has a short memory."
Think about that. The president and vice president of the United States are urging immediate action on gun control, pre-empting all debate about the measures' constitutionality; and their justification for this urgent, anti-constitutional action is that "the American public has a short memory." In other words, this is not a real crisis (i.e., an ongoing threat), and the public will soon realize that, and carry on with life as usual; therefore, we must act before that happens.
Here is Rucker's account of the administration's intentions:
A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by key law enforcement leaders that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the sources said.
As for where the federal government would get the authority to require "universal background checks," monitor the "movement" of private property, impose "stronger" mental health checks (on whom?), or punish private citizens for "giving" guns to minors (teaching your son to shoot?), these are precisely the kinds of questions for which the normal process of legitimate government would be in order -- deliberate, debate, reason. But the administration is unwilling to accept the likely outcome of such a process, and therefore wishes to foist its illiberal ideas on the public without open discussion. We all know the pattern now: in place of the deliberative process designed to protect the public from unjust government, Obama, Feinstein, et al will rush through legislation and executive orders, and then "lead a public relations offensive to generate public support."
There is a striking dissonance between the alleged need to act immediately, and the nature of the measures proposed. Rucker repeatedly tells us the government's response will be "comprehensive"; Biden's working group has "expanded its focus" to areas in which the president may act without congressional support, such as "changes to federal mental-health programs"; the administration is "quietly talking with a diverse array of interest groups"; they are "developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association," such as "rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses" (i.e., crony capitalism in the name of restricting gun sales); their proposals constitute a "deeper exploration than just the assault-weapons ban"; and the discussions include the secretaries of Homeland Security, Education, and Health and Human Services.
These are strategies for radical change in the nature and order of American society. One does not solve an immediate crisis by abandoning the entity undergoing the crisis. A man whose kitchen is on fire does not respond by calling a real estate agent to discuss buying a new house; he calls the fire department, and tries to save his property. A nation in a crisis does not abandon its laws and principles; it tries to shore them up with some form of corrective action. Conservatives were rightly disdainful of George W. Bush's nonsense about "abandoning the free market in order to save it." Now, the Obama administration's response to a violation of individual rights (gun violence) is to abandon individual liberty and the right of self-preservation.
A government that responds to a genuine crisis -- such as foreign attack, or wide-scale insurrection -- in a precipitate fashion is acting irresponsibly. A government that manufactures a crisis in order to justify acting precipitately is behaving tyrannically. A government that follows this pattern as its normal method of operation is not merely behaving tyrannically - it is a tyranny.
"Never let a crisis go to waste" is cynical politics of the highest order. "Never let an opportunity to create the illusion of a crisis go to waste" is worse than cynical; it is diabolical. It is also fundamentally delegitimizing of the government that pursues this policy. A health care "crisis" necessitates immediate passage of a bill that no one has read, let alone debated. A student loan "crisis" necessitates a federal government takeover of the loan industry. A fiscal "crisis" necessitates the passage of a bill that was presented to the U.S. Senate -- "the world's greatest deliberative body" -- six minutes prior to the vote. And so on.
Now, a gun violence "crisis" -- which has been cleverly expanded into a mental health "crisis" -- requires immediate, undeliberated measures to begin the final process of ending private gun ownership, while extending the federal government's power to assess, label, restrict, and/or detain private citizens as "mentally unstable," according to guidelines that will be written by the leftist authoritarians at HHS, the Justice Department, and Homeland Security. Talk about the lunatics running the asylum!
The only real crisis at play here is a crisis of liberty; the U.S. federal government has become unmoored from any notion of legitimate representative government, and its illegitimate practices have become broadly acceptable to the American public. Corrective measures are certainly in order, but these will not come from the government. They will come, if they come, from the people.
Here, from the Washington Post article, is the sensibility now governing America's public policy, in a nutshell:
"As we get involved in these ad nauseam debates over the Second Amendment, our children are still at risk," said Jon Adler, national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. "Debating is not the action verb we need to protect our children."
Actually, Mr. Adler, it is. Debating -- discussing the appropriateness of proposed policy in light of the nation's interests and fundamental principles -- is what legitimate governments do, as long as they wish to represent the will, rather than exploit the ignorance and fear, of the people.
While we're at it, Americans might like to consider a few other action verbs pertinent to this moment, and to "protecting their children": resisting, debunking, teaching, thinking, and fighting.
Friday, January 11, 2013
An opinion on gun control
The most sensible thing I have read on the internet about guns. Long but worth it.
Posted on December 20, 2012 by correia45
I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.
A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.
I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.
I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.
I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate and studying the heck out of the actual events.
I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and 3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the populace.
I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.
Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things. So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and none of this stuff is new.
Armed Teachers
So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.
Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!
No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.
But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.
Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.
Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.
When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.
I personally taught several hundred teachers. I quickly discovered that pretty much every single school in my state had at least one competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and capable. Good for them.
After Virginia Tech, I started teaching college students for free as well. They were 21 year old adults who could pass a background check. Why should they have to be defenseless? None of these students ever needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy to say that a couple of rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my time well spent.
Over the course of a couple years I taught well over $20,000 worth of free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds of teachers, students, and staff. All of them were responsible adults who understood that they were stuck in target rich environments filled with defenseless innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line of defense. It was the least I could do.
Permit holders are not cops. The mistake many people make is that they think permit holders are supposed to be cops or junior danger rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple. If someone is threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm, and that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner which suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is allowed to use lethal force against them.
As of today the state legislatures of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are looking at revamping their existing laws so that there can be legal guns in school. For those that are worried these teachers will be unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in those states who’d be willing to teach them for free.
For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and demand that they allow concealed carry in schools.
Gun Free Zones
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.
Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.
The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.
I testified before the Utah State Legislature about the University of Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley Square shooting in Salt Lake City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started shooting up this mall. He killed several innocent people before he was engaged by an off duty police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off duty Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a customer of mine) I sent one of my employees down to Trolley Square to take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I then showed the picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS ALLOWED.
The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.
There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.
1.Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.
2.Texas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.
3.Connecticut. GUN FREE ZONE. Shooters kills until the police arrive. Suicide. 26 dead.
4.China. GUN FREE COUNTRY. A guy with a KNIFE stabs 22 children.
And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.
The Media
Every time there is a mass shooting event, the vultures launch. I find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people get murdered, and the same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They strike while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen it succeed here before.
Yet when anyone from my side responds, then we are shouted at that we are blood thirsty and how dare we speak in this moment of tragedy, and we should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead, while they are free to promote policies which will simply lead to more dead… If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt. It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted monster (the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry because they are promoting policies which are tactically flawed and which will do the exact opposite of the stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.
But that’s not why I want to talk about the media. I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.
The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected, have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking back at their peer group.
These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your nose.
If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear.
You are a star.
Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and his struggles.
And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.
They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them faster.
Mental Health Issues
And right here I’m going to show why I’m different than the people I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to know how to fight them better.
So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment… Oh please, if only some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand that the bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the same.
Gun Control Laws
As soon as there is a tragedy there comes the calls for “We have to do something!” Sure, the something may not actually accomplish anything as far as solving whatever the tragedy was or preventing the next one, but that’s the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and preferably we have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.
The left side of the political spectrum loves it some gun control. Gun control is historically extremely unpopular in red state and purple state America, and thus very hard to pass bit stuff, but there’s a century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones. There have been a handful of major federal laws passed in the United States relating to guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily been enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the BATF related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the average American is extremely uneducated about what gun laws already exist, what they actually do, and even fundamental terminology, so I’m going to go through many of the things I’ve seen argued about over the last few days and elaborate on them one by one.
I will leave out the particularly crazy things I was confronted with, including the guy who was in favor of mandating “automatic robot gun turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a teacher CCW, so let’s put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented yet) in schools. Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.
We need to ban automatic weapons.
Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a cop.
Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective government bans are.
When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.
Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!
Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.
Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.
Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.
We should ban handguns!
Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under my shirt.
Concealed Carry works. As much as it offends liberals and we keep hearing horror stories about blood in the streets, the fact is over my lifetime most of the United States has enacted some form of concealed carry law, and the blood in the streets wild west shootouts over parking spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At this point in time there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue states and all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime, where once again, the criminals simply don’t care.
For information about how more guns actually equals less crime, look up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts, look up the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work of any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother Jones.
As for why CCW is good, see my whole first section about arming teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture. Basically bad people are going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to hurt you and take your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career, and they are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere they think they can get away with it. We fixate on the mass shooters because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running in to one of them is tiny. Your odds of having a violent encounter with a run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes higher.
I do find one thing highly amusing. In my personal experience, some of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever associated with will usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if something bad happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and naïve that is.
We should ban Assault Rifles!
Define “assault rifle”…
Uh…
Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around a lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created back during the Clinton years. It was one of those tricks where you name legislation something catchy, like PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed through while emotions were high and nobody was thinking, go figure).
To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of weapon which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed, select fire (meaning capable of full auto), intermediate cartridge (as in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come back to that later) infantry weapon.
The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary.
I had somebody get all mad at me for pointing this out, because they said that the term had entered common usage. Okay… If you’re going to legislate it, DEFINE IT.
And then comes up that pesky problem. The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it said that it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns) And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon.
Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.
One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic. See above. Hard to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun in the world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then what if it takes a detachable magazine! That’s got to be an Evil Feature. And yes, we really did call the Evil Features. I’ll talk about magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to ban something that common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide mission.
For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. Let’s say having a flash hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil feature. Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. EVIL.
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!
It has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied “I think it is the shoulder thing which goes up.” Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime, but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.
Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry though, because the same people who fling around the term assault weapons also think of scoped deer rifles as “high powered sniper guns”.
Basically, what you are thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.
Now, the reason that semi-automatic, magazine fed, intermediate caliber rifles are the single most popular type of gun in America is because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking about fun, or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you, in order to make them stop trying to hurt you. These types of guns are superb for defending your home. Now some of you may think that’s extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights comes from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/carbine-vs-shotgun-vs-pistol-for-home-defense/
I had one individual tell me that these types of guns are designed to slaughter the maximum number of people possible as quickly as possible… Uh huh… Which is why every single police department in America uses them, because of all that slaughtering cops do daily. Cops use them for the same reason we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an attacker quickly in a variety of circumstances.
When I said “stop an attacker quickly” somebody on Twitter thought that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s just a euphemism for kill!” Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker surrenders or passes out from blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I care about is making them stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which caused me to shoot them to begin with.
The guns that many of you think of as assault rifle are common and popular because they are excellent for fighting, and I’ll talk about what my side really thinks about the 2nd Amendment below.
We should ban magazines over X number of shots!
I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer rounds, ergo then he’ll not be able to shoot as many people.
Wrong. And I’ll break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in our gun, second why tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and third, why stopping them is a logistical impossibility.
First off, why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more.
The last assault weapons ban capped capacities at ten rounds. You quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. Legally, you can shoot them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in mind that what normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I used to tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.
Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The more you train, the better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”
So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.
Now tactically, let’s say a mass shooter is on a rampage in a school. Unless his brain has turned to mush and he’s a complete idiot, he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.
In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
A good friend of mine (who happens to be a very reasonable democrat) was very hung up on this, sure that he would be able to take advantage of the time in which it took for the bad guy to reload his gun. That’s a bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that addresses that sort of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has sort of made the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.
Finally, let’s look at the logistical ramifications of another magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over ten rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it was a felony to possess those.
Over the ten years of the ban, we never ran out. Not even close. Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal.
Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out either. And if they did, like I said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get or make more. If you can cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old company designed a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy, spent $20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This could’ve been done out of my garage.
Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.
Once the AWB timed out, because every politician involved looked at the mess which had been passed in the heat of the moment, the fact it did nothing, and the fact that every single one of them from a red state would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went away. Immediately every single gun person in America went out and bought a couple guns which had been banned and a bucket of new magazines, because nothing makes an American want to do something more than telling them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up ever since. If the last ban did literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even less. (except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get to that below).
I bought $600 worth of magazines for my competition pistol this morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my rifles. Gun and magazine sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician starts to vulture in on a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this, but Barack Obama is personally responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time gun purchases, than anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had a picture of him on the wall and a caption beneath it which said SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.
So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you can confiscate them all, but I’ll talk about confiscation later.
One last thing to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this is something all gun people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When you put an artificial cap on a weapon, and tell us that we can only have a limited number of rounds in that weapon, we’re going to make sure they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody bought 9mms which held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can only have ten rounds, they’re going to be bigger, so we all started buying 10 shot .45s instead.
You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!
Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2nd Amendment being for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2nd Amendment is about bearing arms to protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.
Spare me the whole, “You won’t be happy until everybody has nuclear weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms, as in things that were man portable. And as for the founding fathers not being able to see foresee our modern arms, you forget that many of them were inventors, and multi shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day, arms included cannon, since most of the original artillery of the Continental Army was privately owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees with me. See DC v. Heller.
Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to murder people!
It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.
I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.
Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.
So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.
So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.
But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.
So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.
Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and take them all away like a civilized country.
Well, I suppose if your need to do something overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.
Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened America.
Because once again, repeat it with me, criminals simply do not give a crap.
That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder to get, and explosives become the weapon of choice. Please do keep in mind that the largest and most advanced military coalition in human history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group using high school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.
The biggest mass killings in US history have used bombs (like Bath, Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub) or airliners. There is no law you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which will make some not be evil.
And all of this is irrelevant, because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national suicide.
You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.
Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.
We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?
Boo Evil Gun Culture!
Really? Because I hate to break it to you, but when nearly six hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun Free Chicago, that’s not my people doing the shooting.
The gun culture is all around you, well obviously except for those of you reading this in elite liberal urban city centers where you’ve extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends, relatives, and coworkers. The biggest reason gun control has become increasingly difficult to pass over the last decade is because more and more people have turned to CCW, and as that has become more common, it has removed much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of elite urban liberal city centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The gun culture is simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their lives and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who tries to victimize them.
The gun culture is who protects our country. Sure, there are plenty of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and who use it as part of their job who could care less. However, the people who build the guns, really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and usually end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the gun culture.
The media and the left would absolutely love to end the gun culture in America, because then they could finally pass all the laws they wanted.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally succeeds in utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi terrorists simply walked into town and started shooting people. It was a rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted, simple terrorist attack. They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has incredibly strict gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.
That’s not my point this time however, I want to look at the response. These ten men shut down an entire massive city and struck fear into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS. Depending on where this happened in America it would have been over in three minutes or three hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked. The marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and completely fell apart.
In talking afterwards with some individuals from a small agency of our government who were involved in the clean-up and investigation, all of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they told me the problem was that the Indian police had no clue what to do because they’d never been taught what to do. Their leadership hated and feared the gun so much that they stamped out the ability for any of their men to actually master the tool. When you kill your gun culture, you kill off your instructors, and those who can pass down the information necessary to do the job.
Don’t think that we are so far off here. I recently got to sit down with some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police departments in America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all of them were gun nuts who practiced on their own dime, and all of them were intimately familiar with real violence. These are the guys that you want responding when the real bad stuff goes down.
What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly liberal and extremely anti-gun, just like most big cities in America. They walked me through what their responses were supposed to be in case of a Mumbai style event, and how their “scary assault weapons” were kept locked up where they would be unavailable, and how dismal their training was, and how since the state had run off or shut down most of the gun ranges, most of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify anymore.
So now they were less safe, the people they were protecting were less safe, the bad guys were safer, but most importantly their leadership could pat themselves on the back, because they’d done something.
Well, okay. You make some good points. But I’d be more comfortable if you gun people were force to have more mandatory training!
And I did actually have this one said to me, which is an amazing victory by internet arguing standards.
Mandatory training is a placebo at best. Here is my take on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/mandatory-training-for-ccw/
In conclusion, basically it doesn’t really matter what something you pick when some politician or pundit starts screaming we’ve got to do something, because in reality, most of them already know a lot of what I listed above. The ones who are walking around with their security details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys, they care about giving themselves more power and increasing their control.
If a bad guy used a gun with a big magazine, ban magazines. If instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple guns. If he used a more powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he used hollowpoints, ban hollowpoints. (which I didn’t get into, but once again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses them). If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free Zones. If he killed a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the innocents even harder for next time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns that weren’t even involved in any crimes, just because they’re too big, too small, too ugly, too cute, too long, too short, too fat, too thin, (and if you think I’m joking I can point out a law or proposed law for each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes some politician irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.
They will never be happy. In countries where they have already banned guns, now they are banning knives and putting cameras on every street. They talk about compromise, but it is never a compromise. It is never, wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable solution to ending mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always, what can we take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some federal apparatus?
Then regular criminals will go on still not caring, the next mass shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the most famous person in the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the people who actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing actually changes to protect our kids.
If you are serious about actually stopping school shootings, contact your state representative and tell them to look into allowing someone at your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to install some speed bumps.
Posted on December 20, 2012 by correia45
I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.
A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.
I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.
I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.
I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate and studying the heck out of the actual events.
I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and 3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the populace.
I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.
Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things. So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and none of this stuff is new.
Armed Teachers
So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.
Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!
No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.
But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.
Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.
Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.
When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.
I personally taught several hundred teachers. I quickly discovered that pretty much every single school in my state had at least one competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and capable. Good for them.
After Virginia Tech, I started teaching college students for free as well. They were 21 year old adults who could pass a background check. Why should they have to be defenseless? None of these students ever needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy to say that a couple of rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my time well spent.
Over the course of a couple years I taught well over $20,000 worth of free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds of teachers, students, and staff. All of them were responsible adults who understood that they were stuck in target rich environments filled with defenseless innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line of defense. It was the least I could do.
Permit holders are not cops. The mistake many people make is that they think permit holders are supposed to be cops or junior danger rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple. If someone is threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm, and that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner which suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is allowed to use lethal force against them.
As of today the state legislatures of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are looking at revamping their existing laws so that there can be legal guns in school. For those that are worried these teachers will be unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in those states who’d be willing to teach them for free.
For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and demand that they allow concealed carry in schools.
Gun Free Zones
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.
Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.
The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.
I testified before the Utah State Legislature about the University of Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley Square shooting in Salt Lake City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started shooting up this mall. He killed several innocent people before he was engaged by an off duty police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off duty Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a customer of mine) I sent one of my employees down to Trolley Square to take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I then showed the picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS ALLOWED.
The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.
There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.
1.Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.
2.Texas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.
3.Connecticut. GUN FREE ZONE. Shooters kills until the police arrive. Suicide. 26 dead.
4.China. GUN FREE COUNTRY. A guy with a KNIFE stabs 22 children.
And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.
The Media
Every time there is a mass shooting event, the vultures launch. I find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people get murdered, and the same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They strike while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen it succeed here before.
Yet when anyone from my side responds, then we are shouted at that we are blood thirsty and how dare we speak in this moment of tragedy, and we should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead, while they are free to promote policies which will simply lead to more dead… If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt. It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted monster (the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry because they are promoting policies which are tactically flawed and which will do the exact opposite of the stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.
But that’s not why I want to talk about the media. I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.
The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected, have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking back at their peer group.
These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your nose.
If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear.
You are a star.
Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and his struggles.
And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.
They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them faster.
Mental Health Issues
And right here I’m going to show why I’m different than the people I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to know how to fight them better.
So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment… Oh please, if only some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand that the bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the same.
Gun Control Laws
As soon as there is a tragedy there comes the calls for “We have to do something!” Sure, the something may not actually accomplish anything as far as solving whatever the tragedy was or preventing the next one, but that’s the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and preferably we have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.
The left side of the political spectrum loves it some gun control. Gun control is historically extremely unpopular in red state and purple state America, and thus very hard to pass bit stuff, but there’s a century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones. There have been a handful of major federal laws passed in the United States relating to guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily been enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the BATF related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the average American is extremely uneducated about what gun laws already exist, what they actually do, and even fundamental terminology, so I’m going to go through many of the things I’ve seen argued about over the last few days and elaborate on them one by one.
I will leave out the particularly crazy things I was confronted with, including the guy who was in favor of mandating “automatic robot gun turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a teacher CCW, so let’s put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented yet) in schools. Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.
We need to ban automatic weapons.
Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a cop.
Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective government bans are.
When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.
Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!
Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.
Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.
Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.
We should ban handguns!
Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under my shirt.
Concealed Carry works. As much as it offends liberals and we keep hearing horror stories about blood in the streets, the fact is over my lifetime most of the United States has enacted some form of concealed carry law, and the blood in the streets wild west shootouts over parking spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At this point in time there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue states and all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime, where once again, the criminals simply don’t care.
For information about how more guns actually equals less crime, look up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts, look up the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work of any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother Jones.
As for why CCW is good, see my whole first section about arming teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture. Basically bad people are going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to hurt you and take your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career, and they are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere they think they can get away with it. We fixate on the mass shooters because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running in to one of them is tiny. Your odds of having a violent encounter with a run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes higher.
I do find one thing highly amusing. In my personal experience, some of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever associated with will usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if something bad happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and naïve that is.
We should ban Assault Rifles!
Define “assault rifle”…
Uh…
Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around a lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created back during the Clinton years. It was one of those tricks where you name legislation something catchy, like PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed through while emotions were high and nobody was thinking, go figure).
To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of weapon which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed, select fire (meaning capable of full auto), intermediate cartridge (as in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come back to that later) infantry weapon.
The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary.
I had somebody get all mad at me for pointing this out, because they said that the term had entered common usage. Okay… If you’re going to legislate it, DEFINE IT.
And then comes up that pesky problem. The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it said that it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns) And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon.
Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.
One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic. See above. Hard to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun in the world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then what if it takes a detachable magazine! That’s got to be an Evil Feature. And yes, we really did call the Evil Features. I’ll talk about magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to ban something that common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide mission.
For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. Let’s say having a flash hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil feature. Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. EVIL.
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!
It has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied “I think it is the shoulder thing which goes up.” Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime, but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.
Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry though, because the same people who fling around the term assault weapons also think of scoped deer rifles as “high powered sniper guns”.
Basically, what you are thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.
Now, the reason that semi-automatic, magazine fed, intermediate caliber rifles are the single most popular type of gun in America is because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking about fun, or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you, in order to make them stop trying to hurt you. These types of guns are superb for defending your home. Now some of you may think that’s extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights comes from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/carbine-vs-shotgun-vs-pistol-for-home-defense/
I had one individual tell me that these types of guns are designed to slaughter the maximum number of people possible as quickly as possible… Uh huh… Which is why every single police department in America uses them, because of all that slaughtering cops do daily. Cops use them for the same reason we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an attacker quickly in a variety of circumstances.
When I said “stop an attacker quickly” somebody on Twitter thought that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s just a euphemism for kill!” Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker surrenders or passes out from blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I care about is making them stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which caused me to shoot them to begin with.
The guns that many of you think of as assault rifle are common and popular because they are excellent for fighting, and I’ll talk about what my side really thinks about the 2nd Amendment below.
We should ban magazines over X number of shots!
I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer rounds, ergo then he’ll not be able to shoot as many people.
Wrong. And I’ll break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in our gun, second why tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and third, why stopping them is a logistical impossibility.
First off, why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more.
The last assault weapons ban capped capacities at ten rounds. You quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. Legally, you can shoot them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in mind that what normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I used to tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.
Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The more you train, the better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”
So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.
Now tactically, let’s say a mass shooter is on a rampage in a school. Unless his brain has turned to mush and he’s a complete idiot, he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.
In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
A good friend of mine (who happens to be a very reasonable democrat) was very hung up on this, sure that he would be able to take advantage of the time in which it took for the bad guy to reload his gun. That’s a bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that addresses that sort of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has sort of made the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.
Finally, let’s look at the logistical ramifications of another magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over ten rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it was a felony to possess those.
Over the ten years of the ban, we never ran out. Not even close. Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal.
Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out either. And if they did, like I said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get or make more. If you can cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old company designed a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy, spent $20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This could’ve been done out of my garage.
Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.
Once the AWB timed out, because every politician involved looked at the mess which had been passed in the heat of the moment, the fact it did nothing, and the fact that every single one of them from a red state would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went away. Immediately every single gun person in America went out and bought a couple guns which had been banned and a bucket of new magazines, because nothing makes an American want to do something more than telling them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up ever since. If the last ban did literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even less. (except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get to that below).
I bought $600 worth of magazines for my competition pistol this morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my rifles. Gun and magazine sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician starts to vulture in on a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this, but Barack Obama is personally responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time gun purchases, than anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had a picture of him on the wall and a caption beneath it which said SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.
So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you can confiscate them all, but I’ll talk about confiscation later.
One last thing to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this is something all gun people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When you put an artificial cap on a weapon, and tell us that we can only have a limited number of rounds in that weapon, we’re going to make sure they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody bought 9mms which held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can only have ten rounds, they’re going to be bigger, so we all started buying 10 shot .45s instead.
You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!
Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2nd Amendment being for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2nd Amendment is about bearing arms to protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.
Spare me the whole, “You won’t be happy until everybody has nuclear weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms, as in things that were man portable. And as for the founding fathers not being able to see foresee our modern arms, you forget that many of them were inventors, and multi shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day, arms included cannon, since most of the original artillery of the Continental Army was privately owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees with me. See DC v. Heller.
Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to murder people!
It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.
I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.
Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.
So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.
So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.
But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.
So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.
Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and take them all away like a civilized country.
Well, I suppose if your need to do something overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.
Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened America.
Because once again, repeat it with me, criminals simply do not give a crap.
That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder to get, and explosives become the weapon of choice. Please do keep in mind that the largest and most advanced military coalition in human history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group using high school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.
The biggest mass killings in US history have used bombs (like Bath, Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub) or airliners. There is no law you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which will make some not be evil.
And all of this is irrelevant, because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national suicide.
You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.
Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.
We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?
Boo Evil Gun Culture!
Really? Because I hate to break it to you, but when nearly six hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun Free Chicago, that’s not my people doing the shooting.
The gun culture is all around you, well obviously except for those of you reading this in elite liberal urban city centers where you’ve extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends, relatives, and coworkers. The biggest reason gun control has become increasingly difficult to pass over the last decade is because more and more people have turned to CCW, and as that has become more common, it has removed much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of elite urban liberal city centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The gun culture is simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their lives and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who tries to victimize them.
The gun culture is who protects our country. Sure, there are plenty of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and who use it as part of their job who could care less. However, the people who build the guns, really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and usually end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the gun culture.
The media and the left would absolutely love to end the gun culture in America, because then they could finally pass all the laws they wanted.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally succeeds in utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi terrorists simply walked into town and started shooting people. It was a rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted, simple terrorist attack. They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has incredibly strict gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.
That’s not my point this time however, I want to look at the response. These ten men shut down an entire massive city and struck fear into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS. Depending on where this happened in America it would have been over in three minutes or three hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked. The marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and completely fell apart.
In talking afterwards with some individuals from a small agency of our government who were involved in the clean-up and investigation, all of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they told me the problem was that the Indian police had no clue what to do because they’d never been taught what to do. Their leadership hated and feared the gun so much that they stamped out the ability for any of their men to actually master the tool. When you kill your gun culture, you kill off your instructors, and those who can pass down the information necessary to do the job.
Don’t think that we are so far off here. I recently got to sit down with some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police departments in America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all of them were gun nuts who practiced on their own dime, and all of them were intimately familiar with real violence. These are the guys that you want responding when the real bad stuff goes down.
What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly liberal and extremely anti-gun, just like most big cities in America. They walked me through what their responses were supposed to be in case of a Mumbai style event, and how their “scary assault weapons” were kept locked up where they would be unavailable, and how dismal their training was, and how since the state had run off or shut down most of the gun ranges, most of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify anymore.
So now they were less safe, the people they were protecting were less safe, the bad guys were safer, but most importantly their leadership could pat themselves on the back, because they’d done something.
Well, okay. You make some good points. But I’d be more comfortable if you gun people were force to have more mandatory training!
And I did actually have this one said to me, which is an amazing victory by internet arguing standards.
Mandatory training is a placebo at best. Here is my take on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/mandatory-training-for-ccw/
In conclusion, basically it doesn’t really matter what something you pick when some politician or pundit starts screaming we’ve got to do something, because in reality, most of them already know a lot of what I listed above. The ones who are walking around with their security details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys, they care about giving themselves more power and increasing their control.
If a bad guy used a gun with a big magazine, ban magazines. If instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple guns. If he used a more powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he used hollowpoints, ban hollowpoints. (which I didn’t get into, but once again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses them). If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free Zones. If he killed a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the innocents even harder for next time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns that weren’t even involved in any crimes, just because they’re too big, too small, too ugly, too cute, too long, too short, too fat, too thin, (and if you think I’m joking I can point out a law or proposed law for each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes some politician irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.
They will never be happy. In countries where they have already banned guns, now they are banning knives and putting cameras on every street. They talk about compromise, but it is never a compromise. It is never, wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable solution to ending mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always, what can we take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some federal apparatus?
Then regular criminals will go on still not caring, the next mass shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the most famous person in the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the people who actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing actually changes to protect our kids.
If you are serious about actually stopping school shootings, contact your state representative and tell them to look into allowing someone at your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to install some speed bumps.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
A Marine Tells it to Sen. Feinstein
YEAH BITCH! Go fuck yourself. Just in case you missed this story.
January 4, 2013
Jack Kemp
Shortly after the Sandy Hook shootings, Sen. Diane Feinstein proposed a new version of the 1994 assault weapons ban to be introduced at the beginning of this new 2013 Senate session. The new bill requires universal gun registration, banning of ammo clips greater than 10 bullets for rifles and handguns, and banning rifles with "one or more military characteristics." But her bill allows for "legitimate hunters."
What is a "military" characteristic? Being able to march on a parade field with it, holding the gun stock? What is a "legitimate" hunter? Food markets are found in all fifty states, so who needs to hunt for food, anyway? And we haven't even gotten to see the fine print of a bill authored by the same political party that gave us ObamaCare's thousands of pages -- an over one million word monstrosity. The fact is these two benign sounding terms, and the ambiguous term "assault rifle" are really vague weasel words to placate the gullible. But most gun owners are not gullible when it comes to new gun legislation introduced by Sen. Feinstein, a politician with a long public record of being very much against gun rights.
In 1995, Diane Feinstein created quite a furor as she stood at a microphone to say she wished she had the votes in the U.S. Senate for a total confiscation of every gun in America. That same year, Feinstein admitted at a Senate hearing that she had a concealed carry permit to protect herself from "The New World Liberation Front" which had shot out her windows and placed a bomb (which didn't detonate) at her home. Despite what seems to be a hypocritical contradiction, there is no conflict in Sen. Feinstein's thinking. She is strongly in favor of herself being well armed for self-protection. The rest of us, well, not so much. The rest of us can wait for the police to arrive. Or the ambulance. Or the hearse.
Recently, a retired U.S. Marine decided to answer Senator Feinstein's call for radically restrictive new gun legislation in a public letter stating his objections. The Corporal's words are a stirring reaffirmation of our rights as Americans that makes the case against the government's attempt to make us less than free citizens in our homes and homeland.
Corporal Joshua Boston's January 3rd letter has been going viral from one social network site to another and then on to many websites. It's 219 words, seen at the Family Security Matters political news website, Family Security Matters is reproduced below:
January 3, 2013
Senator Dianne Feinstein,
I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government's right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma'am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.
I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.
I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.
I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.
We, the people, deserve better than you.
Respectfully Submitted,
Joshua Boston
Cpl, United States Marine Corps
2004-2012
January 4, 2013
Jack Kemp
Shortly after the Sandy Hook shootings, Sen. Diane Feinstein proposed a new version of the 1994 assault weapons ban to be introduced at the beginning of this new 2013 Senate session. The new bill requires universal gun registration, banning of ammo clips greater than 10 bullets for rifles and handguns, and banning rifles with "one or more military characteristics." But her bill allows for "legitimate hunters."
What is a "military" characteristic? Being able to march on a parade field with it, holding the gun stock? What is a "legitimate" hunter? Food markets are found in all fifty states, so who needs to hunt for food, anyway? And we haven't even gotten to see the fine print of a bill authored by the same political party that gave us ObamaCare's thousands of pages -- an over one million word monstrosity. The fact is these two benign sounding terms, and the ambiguous term "assault rifle" are really vague weasel words to placate the gullible. But most gun owners are not gullible when it comes to new gun legislation introduced by Sen. Feinstein, a politician with a long public record of being very much against gun rights.
In 1995, Diane Feinstein created quite a furor as she stood at a microphone to say she wished she had the votes in the U.S. Senate for a total confiscation of every gun in America. That same year, Feinstein admitted at a Senate hearing that she had a concealed carry permit to protect herself from "The New World Liberation Front" which had shot out her windows and placed a bomb (which didn't detonate) at her home. Despite what seems to be a hypocritical contradiction, there is no conflict in Sen. Feinstein's thinking. She is strongly in favor of herself being well armed for self-protection. The rest of us, well, not so much. The rest of us can wait for the police to arrive. Or the ambulance. Or the hearse.
Recently, a retired U.S. Marine decided to answer Senator Feinstein's call for radically restrictive new gun legislation in a public letter stating his objections. The Corporal's words are a stirring reaffirmation of our rights as Americans that makes the case against the government's attempt to make us less than free citizens in our homes and homeland.
Corporal Joshua Boston's January 3rd letter has been going viral from one social network site to another and then on to many websites. It's 219 words, seen at the Family Security Matters political news website, Family Security Matters is reproduced below:
January 3, 2013
Senator Dianne Feinstein,
I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government's right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma'am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.
I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.
I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.
I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.
We, the people, deserve better than you.
Respectfully Submitted,
Joshua Boston
Cpl, United States Marine Corps
2004-2012
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Why Does Anybody Need a 30-Round Magazine?
Amen brother, and pass the ammunition. But in my state 30 round mags are illegal. so I will have to do with 15 round mags. What a pain in the ass.
By William A. Levinson
Senator Dianne Feinstein's latest divide-and-conquer attack on the Second Amendment has made even Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a sucker for the argument that private citizens do not need high-capacity magazines. These include not only 30-round rifle magazines, but 17-round magazines for handguns like the Glock.
Why does anybody need a high capacity magazine? If Senator Manchin were to educate himself by, for example, attending Front Sight's four-day defensive handgun class, he would learn the two primary answers:
(1) Failure to stop the aggressor, and
(2) Multiple aggressors
Failure to Stop
The classic .38 caliber revolver, with a capacity of six rounds, was the standard sidearm of the United States Army during the Moro insurrection in the Philippines. The Army found at least one dead Army officer with an empty sidearm, and his head split open by a machete or similar weapon. They also found the soldier's killer, who had finally bled to death. Six rounds of .38 were therefore not enough to convince even one determined attacker.
Police instructor Masaad Ayoob's The Truth About Self Protection adds an incident in which a female police officer saw a crazed gunman murder a woman, who then shot her as well before she could do anything. "She lay helpless as she watched a neighbor empty a .22 rifle into the killer; the neighbor then had to club the madman down with the empty rifle, again and again, before he succumbed."
Ayoob does not report the size of the .22's magazine, but the Moro insurrection exemplifies why even a 30-round rifle clip might not be enough to stop a crazed and determined attacker, such as one hopped up on a drug like PCP. "He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet -- a Colt .45 slug through both ears." The Krag-Jorgensen's 30-caliber cartridge was far more powerful than the .22 in Ayoob's example, but not sufficiently powerful to civilize this particular attacker even when fired in mass.
Colonel Jeff Cooper's To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truthadds the case of a man who was prosecuted for shooting his attacker eight times with a .380 automatic pistol. The prosecutor admitted that the dead man had been the aggressor, but argued that the shooter had taken the law into his own hands by continuing to shoot an adversary who had "obviously" been disabled. Cooper, whom the defense called as an expert witness, cited a suicide in which "the deceased shot himself amidships four times with a .380 Webley. Presumably the first three hits did not convince him."
The .45-caliber Automatic Colt Pistol was the Army's specific solution to the "failure to stop" problem in the Philippines. A single hit from a .45 caliber bullet will (per Cooper) stop the aggressor 95 percent of the time. This does not mean, however, that 7 or 8 rounds are enough for all conceivable defensive scenarios. Front Sight teaches students to change magazines in (ideally) less than two seconds. The other issue that Senator Manchin fails to recognize is that of multiple attackers.
Gang Bangers and the Knockout Game
Front Sight's 4-day defensive handgun class included scenarios with multiple aggressors, including four gang bangers on a street and five or more in a house (along with innocent bystanders). Front Sight's standard doctrine is to fire a controlled pair into an aggressor's thoracic cavity and, in the event of failure to stop, another into his cranio-ocular cavity to take out his central nervous system.
In the street gang situation, though, one shot is fired into each gang member due to the need to economize on both time and ammunition; only those that don't go down (or flee) then get "seconds." You might conceivably stop four gang members with seven or eight rounds of .45 ACP; that is what the cartridge was designed to do. A small man or woman who can handle only a 9 mm comfortably might not be able to end the incident even with 15 or 17 rounds, unless he or she can make the far more difficult head shots. It is particularly telling that most police officers carry either .45s or high-capacity 9 mm sidearms.
Then there is the knockout game, in which a street gang selects a victim at random, knocks him or her down, and then maybe beats him or her to a pulp. Here is an example that involved six individuals; only one struck a blow, but the others seemed to approve. Although the Web page and the book it promotes focuses on black racial violence, there is similar Caucasian-on-black crime, such as that perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. In any event, if there are six (or more) bad guys, you are obviously going to need far more than six bullets.
The anti-Second Amendment camp may argue that the teacher who was assaulted in this video would not have had time to defend himself with a firearm or anything else, because his attacker hit him by surprise. (While use of a firearm in response to a fist might normally be considered excessive force, multiple aggressors, even unarmed ones, create a disparity of force situation that might indeed justify a lethal response. The same applies if a single unarmed aggressor is much younger, bigger, and/or stronger than the victim, e.g. a teenage punk against a senior citizen or woman.) This is where the five conditions of mental awareness, as taught by Front Sight, come into play.
States of Mental Awareness
The knockout game victim was in what Front Sight calls Condition White, which means he was not paying attention to his surroundings. Front Sight recommends living in Condition Yellow. This does not mean a state of paranoia but it includes, for example, not getting too close to alleys or other positions from which you can be ambushed. It also means looking around you when you are handling your car keys in a parking lot. Violent criminals often avoid people who are clearly alert; they, like all predators in the animal kingdom, don't want to take a chance with anybody or anything that might hurt them.
Condition Orange means you have identified a potential threat. Had the teacher been in Condition Yellow, he would have seen the six young males in time to recognize them as such. Condition Orange can prevent a confrontation before it even becomes a confrontation. You don't get hurt, and you don't have to explain to the police why you hurt somebody else.
Condition Red means a known threat is in front of you. In the case of an imminent "knockout game," you have laid out in your mind how you are going to put the gang bangers down if they escalate to Condition Black by initiating hostilities.
Senator Feinstein's latest attack on the Second Amendment relies entirely on public ignorance of firearms and their legitimate uses, and this ignorance extends even to many people who support the principles of the Second Amendment. Education is the cure for ignorance and Front Sight, along with Gunsite (founded by Colonel Cooper) offers some of the best.
William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.
By William A. Levinson
Senator Dianne Feinstein's latest divide-and-conquer attack on the Second Amendment has made even Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a sucker for the argument that private citizens do not need high-capacity magazines. These include not only 30-round rifle magazines, but 17-round magazines for handguns like the Glock.
Why does anybody need a high capacity magazine? If Senator Manchin were to educate himself by, for example, attending Front Sight's four-day defensive handgun class, he would learn the two primary answers:
(1) Failure to stop the aggressor, and
(2) Multiple aggressors
Failure to Stop
The classic .38 caliber revolver, with a capacity of six rounds, was the standard sidearm of the United States Army during the Moro insurrection in the Philippines. The Army found at least one dead Army officer with an empty sidearm, and his head split open by a machete or similar weapon. They also found the soldier's killer, who had finally bled to death. Six rounds of .38 were therefore not enough to convince even one determined attacker.
Police instructor Masaad Ayoob's The Truth About Self Protection adds an incident in which a female police officer saw a crazed gunman murder a woman, who then shot her as well before she could do anything. "She lay helpless as she watched a neighbor empty a .22 rifle into the killer; the neighbor then had to club the madman down with the empty rifle, again and again, before he succumbed."
Ayoob does not report the size of the .22's magazine, but the Moro insurrection exemplifies why even a 30-round rifle clip might not be enough to stop a crazed and determined attacker, such as one hopped up on a drug like PCP. "He had 32 Krag balls through him and was only stopped by the 33rd bullet -- a Colt .45 slug through both ears." The Krag-Jorgensen's 30-caliber cartridge was far more powerful than the .22 in Ayoob's example, but not sufficiently powerful to civilize this particular attacker even when fired in mass.
Colonel Jeff Cooper's To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truthadds the case of a man who was prosecuted for shooting his attacker eight times with a .380 automatic pistol. The prosecutor admitted that the dead man had been the aggressor, but argued that the shooter had taken the law into his own hands by continuing to shoot an adversary who had "obviously" been disabled. Cooper, whom the defense called as an expert witness, cited a suicide in which "the deceased shot himself amidships four times with a .380 Webley. Presumably the first three hits did not convince him."
The .45-caliber Automatic Colt Pistol was the Army's specific solution to the "failure to stop" problem in the Philippines. A single hit from a .45 caliber bullet will (per Cooper) stop the aggressor 95 percent of the time. This does not mean, however, that 7 or 8 rounds are enough for all conceivable defensive scenarios. Front Sight teaches students to change magazines in (ideally) less than two seconds. The other issue that Senator Manchin fails to recognize is that of multiple attackers.
Gang Bangers and the Knockout Game
Front Sight's 4-day defensive handgun class included scenarios with multiple aggressors, including four gang bangers on a street and five or more in a house (along with innocent bystanders). Front Sight's standard doctrine is to fire a controlled pair into an aggressor's thoracic cavity and, in the event of failure to stop, another into his cranio-ocular cavity to take out his central nervous system.
In the street gang situation, though, one shot is fired into each gang member due to the need to economize on both time and ammunition; only those that don't go down (or flee) then get "seconds." You might conceivably stop four gang members with seven or eight rounds of .45 ACP; that is what the cartridge was designed to do. A small man or woman who can handle only a 9 mm comfortably might not be able to end the incident even with 15 or 17 rounds, unless he or she can make the far more difficult head shots. It is particularly telling that most police officers carry either .45s or high-capacity 9 mm sidearms.
Then there is the knockout game, in which a street gang selects a victim at random, knocks him or her down, and then maybe beats him or her to a pulp. Here is an example that involved six individuals; only one struck a blow, but the others seemed to approve. Although the Web page and the book it promotes focuses on black racial violence, there is similar Caucasian-on-black crime, such as that perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. In any event, if there are six (or more) bad guys, you are obviously going to need far more than six bullets.
The anti-Second Amendment camp may argue that the teacher who was assaulted in this video would not have had time to defend himself with a firearm or anything else, because his attacker hit him by surprise. (While use of a firearm in response to a fist might normally be considered excessive force, multiple aggressors, even unarmed ones, create a disparity of force situation that might indeed justify a lethal response. The same applies if a single unarmed aggressor is much younger, bigger, and/or stronger than the victim, e.g. a teenage punk against a senior citizen or woman.) This is where the five conditions of mental awareness, as taught by Front Sight, come into play.
States of Mental Awareness
The knockout game victim was in what Front Sight calls Condition White, which means he was not paying attention to his surroundings. Front Sight recommends living in Condition Yellow. This does not mean a state of paranoia but it includes, for example, not getting too close to alleys or other positions from which you can be ambushed. It also means looking around you when you are handling your car keys in a parking lot. Violent criminals often avoid people who are clearly alert; they, like all predators in the animal kingdom, don't want to take a chance with anybody or anything that might hurt them.
Condition Orange means you have identified a potential threat. Had the teacher been in Condition Yellow, he would have seen the six young males in time to recognize them as such. Condition Orange can prevent a confrontation before it even becomes a confrontation. You don't get hurt, and you don't have to explain to the police why you hurt somebody else.
Condition Red means a known threat is in front of you. In the case of an imminent "knockout game," you have laid out in your mind how you are going to put the gang bangers down if they escalate to Condition Black by initiating hostilities.
Senator Feinstein's latest attack on the Second Amendment relies entirely on public ignorance of firearms and their legitimate uses, and this ignorance extends even to many people who support the principles of the Second Amendment. Education is the cure for ignorance and Front Sight, along with Gunsite (founded by Colonel Cooper) offers some of the best.
William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Feinstein's New Gun-Ban Bill Likely to be Introduced January 22
Rights stealing scum bag assholes. Everyone that cashes a government paycheck. Maybe the anarchists are right. No government is best. Hell, limited government doesn't work here anymore because those in it will not let it.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)--author of the federal "assault weapon" and "large" ammunition magazine ban of 1994-2004--has said for weeks that she will soon introduce an even more restrictive bill. Leaders in the U.S. Senate have stated that January 22 will be the first day on which new Senate legislation can be proposed, so that is the most likely date for the new, sweeping legislation to be introduced.
On Dec. 17th, Feinstein said, "I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation" and "It will be carefully focused." Indicating the depth of her research on the issue, she said on Dec. 21st that she had personally looked at pictures of guns in 1993, and again in 2012.
According to a Dec. 27th posting on Sen. Feinstein's website and a draft of the bill obtained by NRA-ILA, the new ban would, among other things, adopt new definitions of "assault weapon" that would affect a much larger variety of firearms, require current owners of such firearms to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act, and require forfeiture of the firearms upon the deaths of their current owners. Some of the changes in Feinstein's new bill are as follows:
* Reduces, from two to one, the number of permitted external features on various firearms. The 1994 ban permitted various firearms to be manufactured only if they were assembled with no more than one feature listed in the law. Feinstein's new bill would prohibit the manufacture of the same firearms with even one of the features.
* Adopts new lists of prohibited external features. For example, whereas the 1994 ban applied to a rifle or shotgun the "pistol grip" of which "protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon," the new bill would drastically expand the definition to include any "grip . . . or any other characteristic that can function as a grip." Also, the new bill adds "forward grip" to the list of prohibiting features for rifles, defining it as "a grip located forward of the trigger that functions as a pistol grip." Read literally and in conjunction with the reduction from two features to one, the new language would apply to every detachable-magazine semi-automatic rifle. At a minimum, it would, for example, ban all models of the AR-15, even those developed for compliance with California's highly restrictive ban.
* Carries hyperbole further than the 1994 ban. Feinstein's 1994 ban listed "grenade launcher" as one of the prohibiting features for rifles. Her 2013 bill goes even further into the ridiculous, by also listing "rocket launcher." Such devices are restricted under the National Firearms Act and, obviously, are not standard components of the firearms Feinstein wants to ban. Perhaps a subsequent Feinstein bill will add "nuclear bomb," "particle beam weapon," or something else equally far-fetched to the features list.
* Expands the definition of "assault weapon" by including:
--Three very popular rifles: The M1 Carbine (introduced in 1941 and for many years sold by the federal government to individuals involved in marksmanship competition), a model of the Ruger Mini-14, and most or all models of the SKS.
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," except for tubular-magazine .22s.
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has an overall length of less than 30 inches," any "semiautomatic handgun with a fixed magazine that has the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," and any semi-automatic handgun that has a threaded barrel.
* Requires owners of existing "assault weapons" to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The NFA imposes a $200 transfer tax per firearm, and requires an owner to submit photographs and fingerprints to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), to inform the BATFE of the address where the firearm will be kept, and to obtain the BATFE's permission to transport the firearm across state lines.
* Prohibits the transfer of "assault weapons." Owners of other firearms, including those covered by the NFA, are permitted to sell them or pass them to heirs. However, under Feinstein's new bill, "assault weapons" would remain with their current owners until their deaths, at which point they would be forfeited to the government.
* Prohibits the domestic manufacture and the importation of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The 1994 ban allowed the importation of such magazines that were manufactured before the ban took effect. Whereas the 1994 ban protected gun owners from errant prosecution by making the government prove when a magazine was made, the new ban includes no such protection. The new ban also requires firearm dealers to certify the date of manufacture of any >10-round magazine sold, a virtually impossible task, given that virtually no magazines are stamped with their date of manufacture.
* Targets handguns in defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects the right to have handguns for self-defense, in large part on the basis of the fact handguns are the type of firearm "overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose." Semi-automatic pistols, which are the most popular handguns today, are designed to use detachable magazines, and the magazines "overwhelmingly chosen" by Americans for self-defense are those that hold more than 10 rounds. Additionally, Feinstein's list of nearly 1,000 firearms exempted by name (see next paragraph) contains not a single handgun. Sen. Feinstein advocated banning handguns before being elected to the Senate, though she carried a handgun for her own personal protection.
* Contains a larger piece of window dressing than the 1994 ban. Whereas the 1994 ban included a list of approximately 600 rifles and shotguns exempted from the ban by name, the new bill's list is increased to nearly 1,000 rifles and shotguns. But most of the guns on the list either wouldn’t be banned in the first place, or would already be exempted by other provisions. On the other hand, the list inevitably misses every model of rifle and shotgun that wasn’t being manufactured or imported in the years covered by the reference books Sen. Feinstein’s staff consulted. That means an unknown number of absolutely conventional semi-auto rifles and shotguns, many of them out of production for decades, would be banned under the draft bill.
The Department of Justice study: On her website, Feinstein claims that a study for the DOJ found that the 1994 ban resulted in a 6.7 percent decrease in murders. To the contrary, this is what the study said: "At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders. Our best estimate is that the ban contributed to a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders between 1994 and 1995. . . . However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban. Nor can we rule out effects of other features of the 1994 Crime Act or a host of state and local initiatives that took place simultaneously."
"Assault weapon" numbers and murder trends: From the imposition of Feinstein's "assault weapon" ban (Sept. 13, 1994) through the present, the number of "assault weapons" has risen dramatically. For example, the most common firearm that Feinstein considers an "assault weapon" is the AR-15 rifle, the manufacturing numbers of which can be gleaned from the BATFE's firearm manufacturer reports, available here. From 1995 through 2011, the number of AR-15s--all models of which Feinstein's new bill defines as "assault weapons"--rose by over 2.5 million. During the same period, the nation's murder rate fell 48 percent, to a 48-year low. According to the FBI, 8.5 times as many people are murdered with knives, blunt objects and bare hands, as with rifles of any type.
Traces: Feinstein makes several claims premised on firearm traces, hoping to convince people that her 1994 ban reduced the (already infrequent) use of "assault weapons" in crime. However, traces do not indicate how often any type of gun is used in crime. As the Congressional Research Service and the BATFE have explained, not all firearms that are traced have been used in crime, and not all firearms used in crime are traced. Whether a trace occurs depends on whether a law enforcement agency requests that a trace be conducted. Given that existing "assault weapons" were exempted from the 1994 ban and new "assault weapons" continued to be made while the ban was in effect, any reduction in the percentage of traces accounted for by "assault weapons" during the ban, would be attributable to law enforcement agencies losing interest in tracing the firearms, or law enforcement agencies increasing their requests for traces on other types of firearms, as urged by the BATFE for more than a decade.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)--author of the federal "assault weapon" and "large" ammunition magazine ban of 1994-2004--has said for weeks that she will soon introduce an even more restrictive bill. Leaders in the U.S. Senate have stated that January 22 will be the first day on which new Senate legislation can be proposed, so that is the most likely date for the new, sweeping legislation to be introduced.
On Dec. 17th, Feinstein said, "I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation" and "It will be carefully focused." Indicating the depth of her research on the issue, she said on Dec. 21st that she had personally looked at pictures of guns in 1993, and again in 2012.
According to a Dec. 27th posting on Sen. Feinstein's website and a draft of the bill obtained by NRA-ILA, the new ban would, among other things, adopt new definitions of "assault weapon" that would affect a much larger variety of firearms, require current owners of such firearms to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act, and require forfeiture of the firearms upon the deaths of their current owners. Some of the changes in Feinstein's new bill are as follows:
* Reduces, from two to one, the number of permitted external features on various firearms. The 1994 ban permitted various firearms to be manufactured only if they were assembled with no more than one feature listed in the law. Feinstein's new bill would prohibit the manufacture of the same firearms with even one of the features.
* Adopts new lists of prohibited external features. For example, whereas the 1994 ban applied to a rifle or shotgun the "pistol grip" of which "protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon," the new bill would drastically expand the definition to include any "grip . . . or any other characteristic that can function as a grip." Also, the new bill adds "forward grip" to the list of prohibiting features for rifles, defining it as "a grip located forward of the trigger that functions as a pistol grip." Read literally and in conjunction with the reduction from two features to one, the new language would apply to every detachable-magazine semi-automatic rifle. At a minimum, it would, for example, ban all models of the AR-15, even those developed for compliance with California's highly restrictive ban.
* Carries hyperbole further than the 1994 ban. Feinstein's 1994 ban listed "grenade launcher" as one of the prohibiting features for rifles. Her 2013 bill goes even further into the ridiculous, by also listing "rocket launcher." Such devices are restricted under the National Firearms Act and, obviously, are not standard components of the firearms Feinstein wants to ban. Perhaps a subsequent Feinstein bill will add "nuclear bomb," "particle beam weapon," or something else equally far-fetched to the features list.
* Expands the definition of "assault weapon" by including:
--Three very popular rifles: The M1 Carbine (introduced in 1941 and for many years sold by the federal government to individuals involved in marksmanship competition), a model of the Ruger Mini-14, and most or all models of the SKS.
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," except for tubular-magazine .22s.
--Any "semiautomatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle that has an overall length of less than 30 inches," any "semiautomatic handgun with a fixed magazine that has the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds," and any semi-automatic handgun that has a threaded barrel.
* Requires owners of existing "assault weapons" to register them with the federal government under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The NFA imposes a $200 transfer tax per firearm, and requires an owner to submit photographs and fingerprints to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), to inform the BATFE of the address where the firearm will be kept, and to obtain the BATFE's permission to transport the firearm across state lines.
* Prohibits the transfer of "assault weapons." Owners of other firearms, including those covered by the NFA, are permitted to sell them or pass them to heirs. However, under Feinstein's new bill, "assault weapons" would remain with their current owners until their deaths, at which point they would be forfeited to the government.
* Prohibits the domestic manufacture and the importation of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The 1994 ban allowed the importation of such magazines that were manufactured before the ban took effect. Whereas the 1994 ban protected gun owners from errant prosecution by making the government prove when a magazine was made, the new ban includes no such protection. The new ban also requires firearm dealers to certify the date of manufacture of any >10-round magazine sold, a virtually impossible task, given that virtually no magazines are stamped with their date of manufacture.
* Targets handguns in defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects the right to have handguns for self-defense, in large part on the basis of the fact handguns are the type of firearm "overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose." Semi-automatic pistols, which are the most popular handguns today, are designed to use detachable magazines, and the magazines "overwhelmingly chosen" by Americans for self-defense are those that hold more than 10 rounds. Additionally, Feinstein's list of nearly 1,000 firearms exempted by name (see next paragraph) contains not a single handgun. Sen. Feinstein advocated banning handguns before being elected to the Senate, though she carried a handgun for her own personal protection.
* Contains a larger piece of window dressing than the 1994 ban. Whereas the 1994 ban included a list of approximately 600 rifles and shotguns exempted from the ban by name, the new bill's list is increased to nearly 1,000 rifles and shotguns. But most of the guns on the list either wouldn’t be banned in the first place, or would already be exempted by other provisions. On the other hand, the list inevitably misses every model of rifle and shotgun that wasn’t being manufactured or imported in the years covered by the reference books Sen. Feinstein’s staff consulted. That means an unknown number of absolutely conventional semi-auto rifles and shotguns, many of them out of production for decades, would be banned under the draft bill.
The Department of Justice study: On her website, Feinstein claims that a study for the DOJ found that the 1994 ban resulted in a 6.7 percent decrease in murders. To the contrary, this is what the study said: "At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders. Our best estimate is that the ban contributed to a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders between 1994 and 1995. . . . However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban. Nor can we rule out effects of other features of the 1994 Crime Act or a host of state and local initiatives that took place simultaneously."
"Assault weapon" numbers and murder trends: From the imposition of Feinstein's "assault weapon" ban (Sept. 13, 1994) through the present, the number of "assault weapons" has risen dramatically. For example, the most common firearm that Feinstein considers an "assault weapon" is the AR-15 rifle, the manufacturing numbers of which can be gleaned from the BATFE's firearm manufacturer reports, available here. From 1995 through 2011, the number of AR-15s--all models of which Feinstein's new bill defines as "assault weapons"--rose by over 2.5 million. During the same period, the nation's murder rate fell 48 percent, to a 48-year low. According to the FBI, 8.5 times as many people are murdered with knives, blunt objects and bare hands, as with rifles of any type.
Traces: Feinstein makes several claims premised on firearm traces, hoping to convince people that her 1994 ban reduced the (already infrequent) use of "assault weapons" in crime. However, traces do not indicate how often any type of gun is used in crime. As the Congressional Research Service and the BATFE have explained, not all firearms that are traced have been used in crime, and not all firearms used in crime are traced. Whether a trace occurs depends on whether a law enforcement agency requests that a trace be conducted. Given that existing "assault weapons" were exempted from the 1994 ban and new "assault weapons" continued to be made while the ban was in effect, any reduction in the percentage of traces accounted for by "assault weapons" during the ban, would be attributable to law enforcement agencies losing interest in tracing the firearms, or law enforcement agencies increasing their requests for traces on other types of firearms, as urged by the BATFE for more than a decade.
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