Dealing with Evil

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[bigdog]

Usually, I find The Onion to decidedly funny. This is poignant. I think it captures the spirit of a nation, in some very real ways. Very bad language.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-nation-reports,30743/

[G M]

How many children died from Obama's Fast and Furious guns? Where is the anguish for those victims? I'm sure our professional journalists will get right on that.

[c - Shadow Dog]

Gm,

Once i think we have reached rock bottom today you go and open you mouth and exploit a tragedy.

c- shadow dog

[G M]

Just pointing out the truth. The posturing politicians are exploiting the tragedy, not me.

[Crafty_Dog]

GM, if you reflect upon it a moment more I am sure it will occur to you that there will be time enough for the politics and that now is the time to mourn.

http://nation.foxnews.com/ct-school-shooting/2012/12/14/abc-news-shooter-autistic-had-personality-disorder

[Crafty_Dog]

About the shooter http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-1215-shooter-20121215,0,3373353.story

Mass knifings in China:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/12/14/167237822/in-repeat-of-disturbing-news-man-with-knife-attacks-school-children-in-china?sc=tw

[G M]

China has had lots of mass murders though a variety of methods, including one mass shooting with an AK/AKM.

[DougMacG]

Shooting up a kindergarten is about as bad as it can get.

The Onion piece made as much sense as anything.

I watch news closely but turn away during the big disaster stories - if I can't do anything to help.

Exploitation for gun control began early: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/michael-bloomberg-gun-control-school-shooting_n_2303499.html  I don't get what any of his proposals would do to prevent this.  He favors more rules at gun shows, not construction of a giant magnet.  More likely to prevent someone from stopping a shooting like this.  They always seem to happen in gun free zones.

Pres. Obama said: “We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,”  - I'm all ears.  He's had 4 years.  What is the meaningful action - TSA everywhere people gather?

The only answer I see is to put a closer watch and curtail the liberties of a very large number of people who show symptoms of any of a number of mental disorders, people who haven't shot anyone.  I don't know how that would work and it isn't what Pres. Obama and Mayor Bloomberg are talking about anyway.

I would like to never see the shooter included in the victim count.  I don't want to be put in the situation of blaming the victim.

News coverage I saw bothered me beyond the tragedy.  Did we really need real time viewing of parents learning they lost their precious little son or daughter?  Is this reality TV? 

It seems to me there is some element of copycat to these events, maybe tied to coverage and national obsession to watch, maybe not avoidable.

I wish whoever saw him first was carrying, and quicker than him on the draw.

[bigdog]

http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html

[G M]

http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html

Good thing the left pushed through deinstitutionalization decades ago.

[Guide Dog]

Good thing the left pushed through deinstitutionalization decades ago.

What a brilliant takeaway from that article, GM.
Since tone can sometimes be hard to convey on an Internet discussion board, let me confirm the presence of scathing sarcasm in the previous sentence.

No doubt that you'll counter by writing that I am trying to suppress you opinion or your expression. Let me save you the trouble by writing that your right to your opinions and your freedom of expression are good things.

Just please stop purposefully being a dick.

[Crafty_Dog]

That was very moving BD, thank you for the post.


======================
http://takimag.com/article/gunsville_usa_jim_goad/print#axzz2FKTX6rfN

• An autopsy concluded that Columbine killer Eric Harris had the SSRI antidepressant Fluvoxamine in his bloodstream at the time of his death.
 
• Jeff Weise, who killed nine people and himself at a Minnesota high school in 2005, was taking increasingly high doses of Prozac at the time of his spree.

 
• Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people and himself at an Omaha mall in 2007, reportedly “had been on antidepressants” at the time of his shooting. He allegedly had taken antidepressants since he was six years old.
 
• Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 and wounded 23 at Virginia Tech in 2007, had been prescribed Prozac and had previously taken Paxil for a year, but he apparently had ceased taking his medication at the time of the shooting.
 
• Andrew Engeldinger killed five people and himself after being fired from his job in 2012. A police search of his house revealed he’d been prescribed the antidepressants Mirtazapine and Trazodone, as well as the insomnia medication Temazepam.
 
• Eduardo Sencion, who killed four people and himself with an assault rifle at a Utah IHOP in 2011, was a paranoid schizophrenic whose “medications were changed” during the summer prior to his attack.
 
Robert Kenneth Stewart, who murdered eight people at a North Carolina nursing home in 2009, submitted to a blood test that revealed he had Lexapro, Ambien, Benadryl, and Xanax in his system at the time of his spree.
 
• Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five people and himself on Valentine’s Day in 2008, had allegedly been prescribed Xanax, Ambien, and Prozac, although according to his girlfriend he had stopped taking Prozac prior to the massacre.
 
• James Eagan Holmes, who shot up a Colorado movie theater in July, reportedly took 100MG of Vicodin before the shooting. He had also allegedly seen three school psychiatrists prior to his attack. Although his psychiatric records are privileged information, in his mug shot he appears to be medicated up to the eyeballs.
 
And Adam Lanza, slayer of over two dozen people on Friday, appears to have had a classic pair of Medication Eyes himself. He was also reportedly “troubled” and possibly “autistic.” A neighbor of Lanza’s claims he was taking medication.

======================

Separately, here's this by the parent of an autistic child:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/12/17/asperger_s_and_newtown_school_shooting_autistic_does_not_mean_violent.html

[DougMacG]

A fair point made about tone, but in his own succinct, biting way he entered into the discussion the unmentionable.  The article was scary and the mother was crying our for help.  Parenting as we know it doesn't work in her situation.  Being firm, loving and consistent doesn't address real mental illness.

I had the experience of seeing these warning signs including talk of murder-suicide.  I called the woman's doctor who said bring her to the emergency room.  I did, partially by tricking, against the will of an adult.  The doctor checked out the situation, prescribed a narcotic, decided she was no threat to herself or anyone else and released her.  She had one more incident (manic episode) that night resulting in a police call, was driven home by the police, then killed someone the next day. (Not with a gun.)  Less than 24 hours after pleading for help and denied I was proven right about the danger and was face to face with the same doctor who had determined otherwise.  He operates under an accepted set of laws and guidelines and probably followed them correctly.

Perhaps every family has some connection to mental illness and most (99.9%?) pose no threat.  I don't propose any change and I am a big advocate of individual liberty, but for as long as we extend total freedom to the troubled among us, saying things like "never again" or "can't tolerate this anymore" is either sheer ignorance or political duplicity.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/12/far-left-groups-defeated-connecticut-mental-health-protection-laws-just-months-before-shooting/

[G M]

Good thing the left pushed through deinstitutionalization decades ago.

What a brilliant takeaway from that article, GM.
Since tone can sometimes be hard to convey on an Internet discussion board, let me confirm the presence of scathing sarcasm in the previous sentence.

**Actually the takeaway comes from years of working in law enforcement, often at the nexus of the criminal justice system and the mentally ill.

No doubt that you'll counter by writing that I am trying to suppress you opinion or your expression. Let me save you the trouble by writing that your right to your opinions and your freedom of expression are good things.

**Where did you ever get that idea? I very much enjoy debate and I work in a job where I tell unpleasant things to tatted up gang members, some of whom are doing life. Forgive me, but getting called a dick on the forum doesn't exactly get my pulse racing.

Just please stop purposefully being a dick.

**I'm blunt, I say what I see. I don't sugarcoat things. That's how I communicate things. You can call it however you like to.

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/until-u-s-understands-police-limitations-some-will-put-faith-in-gun-control/?singlepage=true

Until U.S. Understands Police Limitations, Some Will Put Faith in Gun Control
We cops know the truth, but we rarely explain it, or want to. by
Mike McDaniel

Bio
December 17, 2012 - 8:23 am     Newtown, Connecticut: twenty children and seven adults are dead at the hands of a madman. Across the nation, police officers are shaking with frustration.

They rage because the facts of the attack — which will continue to develop for many days — are already all too familiar. They think, over and over again, what they might ever do to respond to an active shooter in a school, yet they know there is very little they can do. As in this vile crime, all they’ll be likely to do is to coordinate medical care for the wounded and to deal with the crime scene surrounding the shooter, who in almost every case will have shot himself long before the police could lay gun sights on him.

What can be done to prevent this kind of wanton murder? Security measures such as locks, reinforced doors, security cameras, hardened glass, and a variety of other devices and procedures are useful, but ultimately cannot stop a determined attacker armed with tools no more complex and high-tech than a hammer and crowbar.

They can only delay him, and only for a matter of seconds. Run and hide policies and drills are useful, but do nothing to deter or stop an active shooter.

There is one thing that can immediately stop an active shooter, and which if handled properly, may even serve as a deterrent. Unlike most governmental initiatives, it will cost little or nothing, and is undeniably effective. However: until the public understands the reality facing the police — the people they look to for the protection of themselves and their children — that single most effective solution is impossible.

Active duty officers usually cannot tell the whole truth to the public; they’d lose their jobs.

Police administrators won’t tell the whole truth to the public; they have to please the politicians that hired them.

Since I’m no longer serving as a police officer, I can tell the truth — the whole truth — and it’s not encouraging. Remember, above all, this foremost truth: No one is responsible for your personal safety and that of those you love but you.

The Police Want To Help You, but They Don’t Have To Help You

Have no doubt: police officers love to catch bad guys in the act. They particularly love to catch bad guys who would harm children. Virtually nothing pegs their righteous takedown meter faster than stopping a school shooter, hopefully with blindingly fast and effective overwhelming violence, and before the shooter can harm a single child.

But every competent officer knows the chance of that happening is on the order of being hit by a meteor: virtually nonexistent.

They also know they have no obligation whatever to protect or help any individual, and they cannot be successfully sued for failing to provide such protection. It sounds outrageous, but it’s rational and necessary.

If municipalities and individual officers could be sued for failure to keep each citizen from harm, how could any city afford a police force? Who would become a police officer knowing every dime they ever made would be spent fending off lawsuits for matters about which they had no knowledge?

Police officers won’t refuse to respond to active shooters in schools. However, that is cold comfort to them and to any parent aware of the facts.

There Are A Lot Of Bad Guys Out There

Most Americans would be stunned to learn how few police officers are patrolling the streets of their communities at any time of the day or night.

Police agencies are always undermanned and staff their shifts accordingly, with the largest number of officers when they are most needed, commonly the evening and midnight shifts, and particularly Friday and Saturday nights.

The day shift, the shift coinciding with school hours, is virtually always the most sparsely staffed.

This means that when an active shooter invades a school, there will be very few officers available, fewer than at any other time of the day.

Unfortunately, more and more states and cities are in deep financial trouble, and many have been laying off police officers — or simply not replacing those who retire or leave for other reasons — for years. The San Bernardino, CA City Attorney recently took the previously unimaginable step of telling citizens to “Go home, lock your doors, and load your guns,” so desperate has the crime problem become there and so hard-pressed the police force.

Things will be unlikely to improve — anywhere — in the foreseeable future.

The Police Are Less Ready Than You Think

The police did learn from Columbine (April 20, 1999). In those days, active shooters were handled with the belief that time was on the side of the police. Officers were taught never to enter a school, to contain and control the situation, and to call in SWAT. Negotiations would be established, and the kinds of responses commonly portrayed on TV and in the movies would unfold.

Unfortunately, that response model cost lives.

While the police at Columbine waited for hours to enter, people who might have been saved bled out, and the shooters — as is almost always the case — killed themselves long before the first SWAT officer entered the building.

Since that day, the police response model has evolved to require the first officers on the scene to immediately enter the school and to seek out and assault any shooters. Unfortunately, not every police agency has adopted this model, and the quality and quantity of training in the necessary tactics and skills is far from standardized and effective.

Most Americans would be equally stunned to learn that a great many police officers are not good shots.

Many fire their duty handguns only for yearly qualifications on courses of fire with generous passing scores. A great many citizens are far more capable with firearms, and due to military training — most police officers are no longer veterans — and other specialized training widely available to civilians, more tactically adept.

Firearm training and standards vary wildly from agency to agency.

Time Is Not On The Side Of The Good Guys

Response times for emergencies vary enormously from place to place. In some rural or semi-rural areas, emergency response is measured in hours. Even in towns or cities, a five-minute response — from the moment an officer receives the radio call until he arrives in a school parking lot — would be amazingly fast.

Consider, however, that radio call likely would not have been made until someone at the school realized what was happening and made a call, a call that will take precious seconds — even minutes — to make and to be understood. By the time a radio signal flashes out, a shooter could easily have been shooting for five minutes or more.

And even when that first officer arrives in the parking lot, he will likely not have clear directions. Few police officers have so much as been inside every school in their jurisdiction; fewer know them well. Even if that first officer can hear continuing gunfire, unless by chance he happens to enter the school near the shooter it will take additional minutes to find and stop the shooter. Unless the shooter stops him first.

Every minute is an eternity in a school attack. Every minute costs lives. All competent police officers know this; it’s one of their greatest frustrations. They know that in virtually every imaginable scenario, the real issue is how many will die before they are in a position to do anything.

They also know that if the modern history of school shootings is any guide, the shooter will virtually always have killed himself long before they arrive.

In virtually every American school shooting, the police have had no role in stopping the shooter.

Feel-Good Measures Harm, Not Help

The police are by and large practical people. They do their best to do what works, because anything else can cost lives. They know that gun-free school zones are actually “victim disarmament zones”, areas killers can attack with the assurance no one will be able to resist them. They know people planning the mass murder of children will not be deterred by any law restricting guns.

They also know guns aren’t the only means of causing harm, as was the case recently in Casper, WY where a teacher was murdered by his son, who fired an arrow into his head and ultimately killed him by stabbing him with a knife. A knife the son then used to kill himself.

The Single Most Effective Solution

In a free society, nothing can stop the deranged from committing crimes. Everything the Connecticut killer did is already as illegal as human beings can make it, which means little to one planning to take his own life.

Additional laws, particularly those disarming the innocent and law-abiding, accomplish nothing. What I’m about to relate, rank and file police officers — the men and women who have to charge into danger — broadly support. Their bosses, by and large, do not.

Because seconds matter in school attacks, only the arming of school staff by means of concealed handguns can possibly deter attacks and save lives.

Millions of Americans, including teachers, already have concealed carry permits issued by the states and form a ready pool of the qualified.

The deterrent effect of concealed carry in schools can be considerable. Any potential attacker, knowing that a given school district allows concealed carry but takes pains to keep the identities and numbers of teachers on a given campus carrying handguns secret, is conferring the benefit of deterrence on every school in that district.

Police officers know criminals fear armed citizens far more than they fear the police.

Only armed and capable school staff, ready to respond to an armed attack when and where it occurs, can possibly save lives – perhaps, even stop an attack before it begins. Even an armed teacher in another hallway when the first shot rings out will be able to stop an attacker far sooner than any police officer still minutes from even receiving a radio call.

“We’ve got to do something!” Indeed we do. And now you know what the police know, and the source of their frustration. It’s time to do the only thing that works against deadly school attacks. All else is wishful thinking.

[G M]

http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html

Good thing the left pushed through deinstitutionalization decades ago.

http://www.claytoncramer.com/speeches/mental.htm

Do judges not want to lock up people in mental hospitals? I am beginning to fear that this is the problem. In the 1960s, psychiatrists like R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz challenged the traditional view of mental illness, especially schizophrenia, one of the psychoses that causes so many of the problems we're seeing. Dr. Laing argued that schizophrenics were, if anything, more sane than the rest of us. Dr. Szasz saw the mentally ill as victims as a plot by the government to oppress people -- rather like the way the Soviet Union regularly declared political dissidents to be mentally ill. [3]

If these ideas had stayed in dusty journal articles, I don't think we would be facing the problem we have today. This notion that mentally ill people aren't really so different from the rest of us -- perhaps even a bit more sane -- showed up repeatedly in movies of the late 1960s and 1970s. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, They Might Be Giants, and King of Hearts are just a few of the movies that were popular as I was reaching adulthood, and I fear have profoundly shaped the thinking of a great many judges.

Some years ago, when Ed Koch was mayor of New York City, there was a homeless woman living on a steam grate. Her clothes were filthy, covered with excrement; she was clearly insane. Mayor Koch finally became so upset about the continual news coverage of this tragedy that he ordered the police to take her to a mental hospital. They did so. The ACLU, incensed at this high-handed treatment of a homeless person, filed suit. While the lawyers filed briefs, and the judges pondered the question of due process, the mental hospital treated her.

By the time the courts ordered her release, some time later, she was no longer incoherent. The lawyers doing this fine work for the ACLU hired her to work as a receptionist in their office. Eventually, the ACLU won a resounding victory for the Constitution, due process, and, in their eyes, for this homeless woman. The appellate court judges that heard the case decided that forcing her into a mental hospital denied the basic human dignity to make our own decisions.

That's not the end of the story, however. After a few months of not taking her medicine, this woman again became delusional. She started to act strangely enough that the lawyers finally had to let her go. Newspaper reporters were still following the case; and the last act I saw reported in this tragedy was that she was back on the steam grate, defecating in her pants. Isn't human dignity wonderful?

[G M]

http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html

Good thing the left pushed through deinstitutionalization decades ago.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/deinstitutionalization-mass-murder-and-untreated-madness/?singlepage=true

‘Deinstitutionalization’: Mass Murder and Untreated Madness
It's all but impossible now to involuntarily commit the obviously ill. by
Clayton E. Cramer

July 25, 2012 - 12:00 am     The network news coverage of the recent shooting rampage in Aurora, Colorado, seemingly asserted that we should be surprised by the background of the alleged killer: Phi Beta Kappa graduate of University of California, Riverside, and until recently, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado medical school. There isn’t any reason to be surprised: there is a very strong relationship between severe mental illness and murder, and another strong relationship between mental illness and intelligence.

As my new book points out, for centuries the connection between mental illness and violence was considered sufficiently obvious that the legal system provided various ways to hospitalize the severely mentally ill when they first provided clear indications that they were a hazard to themselves or others. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did our society decide that this system was unfair. It then embarked on a policy of “deinstitutionalization.” The idea: standards for long-term, involuntary commitment of the mentally ill should be just a bit less demanding than the standards of proof for criminal conviction.

Unsurprisingly, emptying out the mental hospitals and making it difficult to hospitalize people with serious mental illness problems meant that society as a whole became a bit more like a low-grade mental hospital. Supporters of gun control argue that we need stricter laws because ordinary, law-abiding people just “snap” and go on rampages. There are people who indeed snap and go on rampages (and not just with guns) — but they are seldom ordinary. Often, they are people with long histories of mental illness who in 1960 would have been hospitalized before they killed someone. Gun control is in some respects an attempt to make all of America into a low-grade mental institution, where we don’t trust people with deadly weapons.

For those of you under 40 — it used to be startling indeed to see people begging in the streets or obviously insane in public. Homelessness and various forms of urban degradation were byproducts of deinstitutionalization. A more ominous result: murder rates rose in response to this emptying out of the hospitals, and the poor solution was to increase the number of mentally ill murderers we sent to prison.

We are continuing down this path; one of the first mental hospitals built in the United States, Taunton State Hospital in Massachusetts, just narrowly dodged closure. As these mass murders demonstrate, we keep harvesting the bitter fruit of this well-intentioned belief of the 1960s that it should be very difficult to hospitalized a person with severe mental illness.

I mentioned earlier the connection between intelligence and mental illness. It has been noticed for a long time that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are genetic. Your mother doesn’t drive you crazy; you inherit genes that increase your risk of developing these two mental illnesses. It also appears that creativity and intelligence are associated with these genes. We have many examples of very smart people whose descent into madness led to violence.

Think of the Unabomber, a Ph.D. in mathematics who taught at Berkeley. Or Professor Amy Bishop at the University of Alabama, accused of not only mass murder in her department, but also of the murder of her brother many years before.  Or Professor Ernesto Bustamante at the University of Idaho, whose mental illness led him to murder and suicide. Or Cynthia Clinkingbeard, an endocrinologist who lost her medical license because of bipolar disorder problems, and pretty well blew her chance of winning the Democratic nomination for Congress in my district because of a crazy incident involving a pistol and Staples. I can supply dozens more examples.

We do not yet have all the data on James Holmes, the accused killer in the Aurora case, but he fits a pattern that I have found common when I was researching my new book: very, very intelligent, and yet when Holmes’ mother was contacted by the news media, she did not for a second question the possibility that her son was the killer.

When you watch a relative spiral down into severe mental illness, you know that there is something terribly wrong, but our legal system has made it nearly impossible to provide help to those who are insane. In late May, a mentally ill man named Ian Stawicki committed mass murder in the Café Racer in Seattle — read his father’s anguished description of watching this disaster in preparation, and being unable to prevent it.

The mainstream media, of course, are using this tragedy in Aurora as an argument for restrictive gun control. But the core problem — the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill — is simply being ignored.

[Crafty_Dog]

Thank you for fleshing out your initial , , , laconic response GM.  Those were interesting pieces.

Continuing explorations in our search of solutions , , ,

http://www.policeone.com/active-shooter/articles/2058168-Lt-Col-Dave-Grossman-to-cops-The-enemy-is-denial/

[Crafty_Dog]

GM:

Thank you for fleshing out your passion on your point in your PM to me.  May I ask you to share it with the board?

MArc

[G M]

Not at this time.

[Crafty_Dog]

Alrighty then.

Folks, I will say GM acted quite admirably at risk to his career and his passion on the matter comes from true engagement with it.

[Guide Dog]

Actually the takeaway comes from years of working in law enforcement, often at the nexus of the criminal justice system and the mentally ill.

Okay. The context of your frustration is better understood.

Forgive me, but getting called a dick on the forum doesn't exactly get my pulse racing.

Good. The pieces you posted are insightful.

I'm blunt, I say what I see. I don't sugarcoat things. That's how I communicate things. You can call it however you like to.

Now I'm clear that you are expressing a written reaction to a topic about which you are passionate.

Because seconds matter in school attacks, only the arming of school staff by means of concealed handguns can possibly deter attacks and save lives.

GM - I am a public high school teacher in southern California. The line above caught my attention. The information about districts with concealed carry permits is also fascinating. Is there a particular department in my district I should contact to find out what our policy is regarding concealed carry permits? I realize CA is a "May Grant" state and depending on the county a CCW might be impossible to obtain, but I would like more information.

When I got home from work last Friday, my wife and I had a chance to debrief the shooting for the first time. I said something like, "We (educators) need a highly-regulated way to conceal weapons in the classroom. Even if the average school site only has 20-25% of the staff armed, that is a huge deterrant."

No sarcasm intended, but I really would like more information if you would be willing to supply it.

[DougMacG]

In February 2012, Connecticut Senate Bill 452 (SB452) was put forward to remedy the fact that Connecticut was one of less than ten states in the U.S. to lack an "assisted outpatient treatment" (AOT) law.  (also known as 'involuntary treatment')

AOT laws allow a state to institutionalize a mentally ill person for treatment if the state has reason to suspect such institutionalization will prevent the individual from doing harm to self or others.

The ACLU said [the bill] would "infringe on patients' privacy rights by expanding [the circle of] who can medicate individuals without their consent." They also said it infringed on patient rights by reducing the number of doctors' opinions necessary to commit someone to institutionalization.

http://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/JUDdata/Tmy/2012SB-00452-R000329-David%20McGuire-%20ACLU-TMY.PDF

... What rights of kindergartners were infringed?

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.dennisprager.com/columns.aspx?g=42452f97-f8e4-475f-98c9-0083811664c4&url=conscience-not-guns-n1469001

[G M]

GD,

I'll expand on ideas for you when I get the chance. I'd look at taking up FS on their offer to start with.



_______________________________________________________________________________________________________


For Immediate Release: Monday, December 17, 2012
 
Dear G M,

Please Forward to Your Local Newspapers, Radio Stations, and Television News Stations
 
Back in 1999 I gave our nation the solution to stop innocent children from being slaughtered.
 
Every year since then, I have given the nation the solution. Isn't it time our nation allows Front Sight to provide the solution, free of charge?
 
I'm angered that more children have to die when I have the solution for every school in America and I am willing to pay for it.
 
Subject: Gun School For Teachers

Las Vegas, Nevada: In the wake of the yet another senseless school massacre, I ask all our politicians, law enforcement officials, and school administrators one simply question:

WHEN ARE WE GOING TO WAKE UP AS A NATION AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN?

How many more children have to die before we will find the testicular fortitude, as a nation, to put in place REAL policies that will stop a deranged gunman in his tracks, before he can commit mass murder on innocent and defenseless children?

How many times do I have to offer the nation THE solution?

What the hell is wrong with the leaders of our country? Find a pair, and make the RIGHT decision to protect our children, not more of the wrong decisions that create the opportunity for the next lunatic to murder at will with zero resistance!

Once again, Front Sight Firearms Training Institute, arguably the world leader in providing intensified courses in the defensive use of firearms for private citizens, has the answer to stopping further attacks on school children. Front Sight will once again offer free firearms training to any school administrator, teachers, or full time staff members designated as school Safety Monitors.

Front Sight will accept for training up to three staff members from each school, college or university.

Applicants must submit a letter requesting training on school letterhead signed by the top school district official and designating the applicant as the school's Safety Monitor.

Please forward this e-mail to your state and federal legislators, local law enforcement departments and your child's school administrator, as well as your friends and family, asking them to do the same.

Guns and Teachers

As Front Sight's Founder and Director, I understand my offer to train armed school teachers may offend some school administrators and parents who do not see arming and training selected school staff members as a positive solution to violent attacks. However, historically, my approach has worked while gun control has actually increased violent crime by shifting the balance of power to favor the criminals and lunatics.

My offer is not a new idea. In the early 70's, Israel was faced with much greater problems of armed terrorist attacks on schools. The cry for more gun control was heard then too, but Israel very carefully analyzed all possible options before adopting the proactive position of arming and training their teachers. School shootings stopped and terrorists looked for easier targets. Gun control never has and never will stop criminals and madmen from carrying out acts of gun violence.



Here is the reason why there are no school shooting in Israel. Wake up America!
 
In our country, every time a misguided individual on psychiatric drugs goes on a killing spree, anti self-defense legislators, watch the polls and exploit the dead victims in order to fool the public into accepting more gun control. It is time our country finds some resolve and the will to tackle the real problem, which is rooting out the actual influences in the lives people hat predispose them to commit atrocities. The problem is not guns. Guns don't cause these incidents to occur any more than cameras cause child pornography or automobiles cause traffic fatalities.

Israel had the right answer. Society is safer when we train and arm our law abiding citizens. As the defensive training leader in the USA, Front Sight is willing and able to set the example for the rest of the country to follow.

Armed Teachers

Dave Clark, who recently retired after teaching for the last 25 years at Junction Junior High School in Livermore, California agrees with Front Sight's philosophy. In fact, Mr. Clark has previously attended a Four Day Defensive Handgun course at Front Sight at his own expense and found the course to be exactly what is needed to train fellow teachers to stop an attack similar to Columbine school and Virginia Tech. "Front Sight provides safe and responsible training to a level that exceeds law enforcement standards." Says Mr. Clark. "Among the many lessons taught, I learned universally accepted rules in justifiable use of deadly force. More importantly, I learned when not to shoot and how to be more mentally prepared to see a lethal confrontation coming before it happens in order to avoid it. The firearms training is second to none and clearly gives the graduates the skill needed to save the lives of those in their charge if ever attacked. If my school district chose to adopt a policy of sending selected teachers to Front Sight for concealed handgun training, I would wholeheartedly support it and volunteer as a Safety Monitor. There is no reason for our children to continue to be victimized when free, professional training is available to stop school attacks."

Guns in Schools

There is evidence that a gun in the hand of a teacher will stop an armed attacker. The vice-principal of a school in Pearl, Mississippi used his handgun to stop and detain an armed killer until the police arrived. It seems obvious that armed and trained staff members inside the school are in a better position to identify the attackers and do something immediately to resolve the situation. It is much harder for police, who arrive on the scene too late to stop the killing.

Lawmakers With Blood on Their Hands

An obstacle to training and arming teachers is the current law in many states prohibiting the possession of firearms on school grounds even when the possessor is qualified and has a concealed weapons license.

Understand that those laws did not prevent or stop the gun violence at numerous schools over the last ten years. The brazen attacks in school after school during the last decade indicate criminals have concluded that 'Gun-Free-School-Zone' actually means 'Government Certified, Helpless and Unarmed Victim Zone.'

Schools Can't Afford to Pass on No Cost Security

Most school districts cannot afford to have even one full time police officer in every school, but they can easily afford to train three or more of their selected staff members to a higher level of firearms training than offered in police academies because Front Sight will provide the training at no cost.

Retired law enforcement firearms instructor, Mike Waidelich from Bakersfield, California strongly supports the Front Sight concept of arming and training teachers. "Nearly every tragedy on or off school grounds in the entire 30 years of my law enforcement career could have been prevented or the damage done considerably limited, by the presence of an armed and trained individual."
 
Concealed Guns

The training provided in Front Sight's basic training classes easily exceeds the training provided in most police basic training academies.

Front Sight proved it on their nationally televised reality series Front Sight Challenge. 80 Seasoned law enforcement officers from around the country went head-to-head in tests of marksmanship, speed and tactics against 80 private citizens-- including teachers-- who had not received any training other than Front Sight's firearms courses. Remarkably, the Front Sight trained, private citizens won over half of every contest.

Teachers will be trained to carry a concealed weapon, so potential attackers will not know which teachers are armed and which are not. In states that have adopted concealed weapon laws for private citizens, violent crime has dropped. School attacks will drop as well once it is known that any of the teachers and staff members on school grounds have the ability and training to stop a violent attack immediately.

There is also scientific research that supports Front Sight's stance on concealed weapon training from John Lott, Jr. at University of Chicago School of Law who published Crime, Deterrence and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns in July 1996. Mr. Lott's research of cross-sectional time-series data from all 3054 U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992 found that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crime and appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. If those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed handgun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly.

Gun Control Increases Violent Crime

How many times must we experience another Littleton, Colorado or Virginia Tech or Newtown Connecticut massacre before we wake up, study the research and adopt policies which actually reduce crime and begin saving our children instead of leaving them helpless victims when the next psych drug user snaps?

Gun control increases violent crime yet some politicians continue to tout disarming law abiding citizens as a solution. Front Sight has a better solution.

Arm and train school teachers to carry a concealed weapon. And post a DIFFERENT sign outside of ever school!

 
Look for the RIGHT sign all over America. They are in front of the homes of armed and trained Front Sight students. If you were a deranged murderer, which house would you invade? One with an armed and trained occupant with a Front Sight sign or one who had a "Gun Free Zone" sign in his yard? The answer is simply to any rational person.
 
WHY ARE SCHOOLS ANY DIFFERENT?

Don't have a sign? Get one here: http://www.readytodefend.com/frontsight/
 




Front Sight Yard Signs

 


Front Sight Window Decals




It is time WE WAKE UP and start providing REAL protection for our children in schools. Front Sight stands ready, willing and able to train every teacher in America if that is what it takes! Help us protect your children by demanding YOUR school send their teachers to Front Sight!

Sincerely,

Dr. Ignatius Piazza
 Founder and Director
 Front Sight Firearms Training Institute
 7975 Cameron Drive, #900
 Windsor, CA 95492
http://www.frontsight.com
info@frontsight.com
 1.800.987.7719

[Rachel]

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/18/15999109-if-you-do-good-youll-feel-good-ann-curry-explains-origins-of-26acts-of-kindness?lite


If you are on twitter you an use #26acts
This was on a friends facebook page
Here's an idea, send holiday cards to Newtown first responders:

Monroe Police Department
7 Fan Hill Road
Monroe, CT 06468

Newtown Police Department
3 Main Street
Newtown, CT 06470

Connecticut State Police
Public Information Office
1111 Country Club Road
Middletown, Connecticut 064575

[Crafty_Dog]

Very nice Rachel.

Shifting unseamlessly to something of a , , , different tone, here's this:

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2012/12/18/

[objectivist1]

Gun Culture and Gun-Control Culture

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 19, 2012 - www.frontpagemag.com

Hardly had the blood been scrubbed off the floors in Newtown than everyone who was anyone had begun shifting the blame from Adam Lanza to some intangible social failure.

Back in 2002, Michael Moore trundled his bulk over to Colorado to exploit the Columbine massacre for a general rant about gun culture, American foreign policy and how hard it was to find a shop selling bacon grease by the ton at two in the morning.

In his film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, Moore gave his audience what they wanted, lots of scenes of “hicks and hillbillies” buying, selling and giving away guns all over the place to illustrate the murderous ravages of American gun culture. Some of those scenes were staged, but it didn’t matter since Moore was catering to an audience that had nothing but contempt for working class Americans and would believe any awful thing about them.

What did gun culture have to do with a plot by two disgruntled dorks with tastes in pop culture far afield from the rural gun-loving dystopia that Moore was doing his best to depict? About as much as gun culture has to do with headcases like Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner.

Your average school shooter is unhappy and angry, irreligious, incapable of fitting into a community and filled with rage that he exercises through violent fantasies. His culture isn’t gun culture. It’s loner culture. Video games do not cause him to kill, but they are how he entertains himself until he can get a taste of the real thing.

Adam Lanza, Dylan Kleibold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, James Holmes, One L. Goh and Jared Loughner had as much in common with what the Michael Moore Fan Club thinks of as “gun culture” as Michael Moore does with the working class. Whatever gun culture they had was not the American Scots-Irish culture of the hunter, the rancher and the militia member, but the urban posse of emasculated men of no worth that brandish weapons as a way to get respect.

The gun culture of the school shooter is the lobby scene in The Matrix, the frag or be fragged multiplayer gaming culture of Halo and Doom, and the Joker killing his way across Gotham. None of these products of mass entertainment make one a killer, but they are also far more illustrative of the type of gun culture that defines school shooters, than anything that Michael Moore and the MSNBC talking heads mean by gun culture.

For most Americans there is no gun culture, only the ownership of guns. To the extent that any gun culture has developed it was in response to a gun-control culture that sought to demonize the ownership of firearms. The traditional and religious culture of the American gun owner has little in common with the power fantasies of the school shooter. To the gun owner, a firearm is a necessary tool. To the school shooter, it is a way to stop feeling powerless, a way to get beyond the ersatz joys of killing bots and avatars, of watching Keanu Reeves spin through the air while filling a mob of policemen full of lead, with the joy of the real kill.

For all the loose talk about American gun culture, no one really seems to be able to define what it is. Defining gun culture by the entertainment industry drifts too far into Hollywood and Detroit, and away from the rural culture that is the real target of gun-control culture.

Instead there are a thousand articles written in children’s blood crying out, “We can’t just do nothing.” Something must be done. Now. Last week. If only we ban more weapons, we can be as safe as Norway, home of the worst shooting spree of all, or Connecticut, which already has an assault weapons ban. For the children… who had no one to protect them when a gunman came to their school and will still have no one to protect them when gun-control culture gets its way.

After these come a torrent of armchair psychology analyses of America’s gun culture, which are only slightly more elegant versions of Michael Moore’s thesis about rural America. And those are what gun culture is really about. After all how can you be confident of your own superiority unless you have a documentary and a hundred articles affirming it for you by the traditional method of putting down the people at the bottom of the ladder.

What liberals think of as gun culture is really shorthand for rural America. It’s what liberals won’t say, but it’s what they mean. Americans are still sentimental about the village, so, for now, the number of movies that portray the rural community as ideal, rather than a hive of small-minded bigots, is still rather high. But there are backdoor ways of getting at the same topic, and talking about gun culture is one of them.

When liberals talk about “gun culture”, they mean the same thing that Barack Obama did when he told his San Francisco fundraiser friends about the people out there who still cling to their bibles and their guns. It isn’t about the guns really, though gun-control culture is worried about having that much personal autonomy in the hands of people who don’t share their values and like their independence, it’s about rural America. And rural America, like guns, is another symbol that stands in for traditional America.

The left cannot talk about how much it hates this country. Gun culture is one of its dog whistles. Talking about gun culture allows the left to publicly vent its hatred for America. But the truth about gun culture is that the left has a great deal more in common with Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner. Far more than those shooters had with any phantom conservative gun culture.

The American left, like any high school shooter, is bitter, angry, disgruntled and filled with contempt for the rest of the country. Stuck in a country made of flyover country, the left treats Americans to their own Columbine Massacre every time it defends criminals and terrorists, every time it wrecks American manufacturing and laughs all the way to the bank as it bankrupts Americans.

And both the left and the shooters agree that the people should not have guns.

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/air-marshals-armed-teachers-and-gun-free-zones-are-you-consistent/?singlepage=true

Air Marshals, Armed Teachers, and Gun-Free Zones: Are You Consistent?

Most of the U.S. supports the air marshal program, fewer support "school marshals." Is this rational?


by
David Steinberg


December 19, 2012 - 12:00 am


If you are instinctively uncomfortable with the thought of concealed-carry teachers — personally, I have difficulties imagining Ms. Fitzpatrick from my kindergarten reading Good Night Moon, packing under her green cardigan — I would first suggest you attempt to reconcile your objection to trained, armed teachers with your (statistically likely) support for air marshals.
 
Following 9/11, most Americans demanded an armed undercover marshal on every flight. Little resistance presented to the idea, and expeditiously it became law. The new job of air marshal itself drew tremendous interest, likely aided by the pride of profession applicants expected. Administratively, the program has not run smoothly: concerns have centered around cost effectiveness, the actual percentage of flights which have a marshal on board, and employee mistreatment and discrimination, among others.

 


Yet objections to the armed security presence have remained minimal. Airplanes in flight are likely never again to be “gun-free zones”; they will instead approach “gun-mandatory zones,” and you likely are pleased with this.
 
Schools fall under federal “gun-free zone” law. Far more Americans support gun-free schools than support gun-free flights; a segment of the U.S. population thus exists which supports undercover air marshals yet rejects undercover “school marshals.”
 
Leave aside the emotion: does logical reasoning present grounds for this divergence in opinion?
 
Even prior to 9/11, airplanes were certainly no soft target. Today, someone wishing to do harm to an airplane in flight must breach several layers of security to board with a weapon, and further, can be expected to face physical confrontation with other adult (or sufficiently large teenaged) passengers. The ratio of physically capable passengers to the helpless or infirm is generally large in all but the most unusual cases; four to one seems a reasonably conservative estimate.
 
Finally, the perpetrator must deal with that trained, armed marksman that most of America insists be there.
 
The death toll from 9/11 dwarfs that of all combined school mass shootings over the past couple decades. However, the frequency of school shootings dwarfs the frequency of attempted and successful incidents of in-air attacks. Even with the 18 hijackers of 9/11 included, the number of school shooting perpetrators is greater.
 
A more ghoulish comparison — figuring the potential death toll from either situation — certainly seems to fall in favor of the flight being the more high-value target deserving of greater security resources. A passenger plane may carry several hundred passengers, and a successful hijacking may murder them all, while the worst U.S. school shooting resulted in 32 murdered souls.
 
Yet — it is not clear from the Newtown massacre that the carnage might not have reached the unthinkable body count of a downed plane had the murderer not chosen to end his rampage by committing suicide. He had the ammunition to continue his spree, and he did murder at least one adult hero who, unarmed, attempted to physically stop him. Only his psychological state brought the horror to an end at 26 deaths.
 
In Newtown, had a more “stable” psychopath attacked — perhaps a murderer prepared to die, yet not by his own hand, like the Mumbai terrorists — well, G-d help us. Considering the difficulty in bringing down a plane and the ease with which all of Sandy Hook Elementary could have been slain, the potential for death in both incidents is logically equal: everyone present.
 
A school, contrary to an airplane, obviously has no comparable screening process for entrance; perpetrators contend only with possibly locked doors and closed windows. And the locked doors are only an issue if the perpetrator is not a familiar face nor already bearing a visible weapon that would prevent him from being buzzed in. Indeed, the killer is almost always familiar to the occupants of the building.The Newtown killer did need to contend with a locked door, but was quickly able to break the glass and to open the door from the inside.
 
Once in, the only remaining barriers to his massacre were the heroism of the adults present and his own mental capacity.
 
So — two situations comparable in attractiveness to a murderer and in vulnerability of the potential victims present:
 

– A large segment of society has demanded that one of these situations be secured with the absolute best available security apparatus, and further feels additionally safer with an armed undercover marshal present.
 
– This same segment of society does not demand the other situation be similarly screened and secured, and further feels more vulnerable by the thought of an armed undercover marshal present.
 
Are you one of these people? If so, have you taken your child on a plane since George W. Bush expanded the air marshal program, or taken them anywhere else with an armed guard, such as a museum or sporting event?
 
Why did you feel your child was safe there?
 
Is your rejection of school marshals logical, or emotional?
 





David Steinberg is the New York City Editor of PJ Media, joining the company in 2009. Previously, David worked in film development and production in Los Angeles. A graduate of Tufts University with a B.S. in Computer Science, he lives in Connecticut with his wife Melissa, children Jack and Talia, and cats/home office companions Dr. Katz and Earl Grey. Follow his tweets at @DavidSPJM.

[G M]

So, from what I've seen from media reports (which may or may not be accurate) several school personnel ran to the sound of the guns and died trying to protect while lacking the training and equipment to do so.

First rule of gunfighting: Have a gun.

So, I propose the following which was suggested in the prior post, the school version of the Federal Flight Deck Officer program. After 9/11, congress created the FFDO program as it only makes sense to have pilots who can shoot to stop hijackers breaching the cockpit. The have limited law enforcement status and only get a few weeks of training related to their role. No need to learn search&seizure, traffic stops, responding to domestics, issuing summons, courtroom testimony and so on.

The School Security Officers (insert your preferred name here) would get backgrounded the POST standards, get the same basic psych as a standard LEO. Then at least 3 weeks of core marksmanship skills, gun handling, presentation from concealment, low light shooting and use of force decisionmaking, malfunctions clearances, tactical scenarios, weapon retention and disarming, combat mindset, use of force laws and caselaw, tactical lifesaver and active shooter/rapid deployment.

Those who pass are given a limited law enforcement commission allowing them to carry 24/7, but fall under state statutes concerning non-peace officer use of force unless acting in their role as an employee of the school and responding to what a reasonable person would believe is a potential deadly force scenario involving the school, students, employees, parents or anyone else lawfully related to school operations or present on school grounds or on school functions off school grounds.

[bigdog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/opinion/the-nra-protection-racket.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2012/12/18/top-10-myths-about-mass-shootings/?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

[Crafty_Dog]

The second of those pieces made many excellent points, though I did disagree with the comment on CCW and found the conclusion rather weak.

However, I'm not sure why you are posting the first piece.  The NRA SHOULD be beating up legislators who seek to castrate our gun rights!

Of course there are cases where reasonable people can disagree, but let's look at the author's example of NRA :extremism" from a TE state election:

"The N.R.A. spent around $100,000 to defeat her in the primary, because she would not support a bill that would have allowed people to keep guns locked in their cars on private property without the property owner’s consent."

 I suspect the issue is employers policies making it impossible as a practical matter for CCW citizens to carry to and from work.   For example if I had my right to carry recognized by my home jurisdiction (unfortunately I live in Los Angeles) and my drive to and from work took me through dangerous territory (and Memphis and Nashville have some really nasty high crime areas) why should I have to surrender that right because my employer is a weenie or give up my job?

Agree or disagree, is the NRA's position here "extreme"?   I think not.

[c - Shadow Dog]

As the property owner dont i have the right to choose what does or does not come onto my private property?

[Crafty_Dog]

A very fair point C-SD.

My only point here is that the contrary point is, contrary to the author's opinion, not extreme.

[G M]

As the property owner dont i have the right to choose what does or does not come onto my private property?

Sure, and you should face serious legal jeopardy if you disarm your employees and theiy are injured/killed as a result, right?

I think a law that states that a employer with a pro-victimization policy faces direct liability with uncapped civil litigation damages is the way to go here.

[G M]

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

An opinion on gun control
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.

[objectivist1]

I agree with G M on this point.  Here in Georgia, we fought tooth-and-nail for years before finally getting a bill through the state legislature that mandated employers to allow firearms in employees' locked vehicles.  An employer can (and usually does) still prohibit anyone - including concealed carry permit holders - to bring a firearm into the workspace with them.  I agree that the employer ought to be directly liable for any killings that result from this policy - without limitation.

[G M]

BTW,

All those gun haters should know that every gun store I know of has now about sold out of every so-called "assault rifle" and magazine to be had, at inflated prices.

At least Buraq has managed to stimulate a bit of the economy.

[Crafty_Dog]

Coming back to posts #35-37, arguably one could distinguish commercial property and private property.

Anyway, superb article GM.  I will be spreading it forward!

[G M]

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/12/us/sandy-hook-timeline/?hpt=hp_c2

First responders arrive
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.

Hear police dispatch from the scene

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.

Twenty students, ages 6 and 7, and six adults were killed at the school.

Police secured the building, ensuring no other shooters were on site. Police then escorted students and faculty out of the building to a nearby firehouse.

As reports of the shooting made their way around town, frantic parents descended on the firehouse where the children had been taken.

By nightfall, the firehouse became a gathering point for parents and family members whose loved ones would never walk out of the school.

[bigdog]

The second of those pieces made many excellent points, though I did disagree with the comment on CCW and found the conclusion rather weak.

However, I'm not sure why you are posting the first piece.  The NRA SHOULD be beating up legislators who seek to castrate our gun rights!

Of course there are cases where reasonable people can disagree, but let's look at the author's example of NRA :extremism" from a TE state election:

"The N.R.A. spent around $100,000 to defeat her in the primary, because she would not support a bill that would have allowed people to keep guns locked in their cars on private property without the property owner’s consent."

 I suspect the issue is employers policies making it impossible as a practical matter for CCW citizens to carry to and from work.   For example if I had my right to carry recognized by my home jurisdiction (unfortunately I live in Los Angeles) and my drive to and from work took me through dangerous territory (and Memphis and Nashville have some really nasty high crime areas) why should I have to surrender that right because my employer is a weenie or give up my job?

Agree or disagree, is the NRA's position here "extreme"?   I think not.

I posted it because I found it interesting. In particular, the fact that it was written by a Republican, from Montana who worked in the Bush administration. And, if he is telling the truth, the fact that gun rights support in Montana is waning. Western states are famous for their support of the 2nd Amendment, so this may be telling (though MT is not an especially conservative GOP state).

You don't want an employer to be forced to account for affirmative action in hiring, because it limits the rights of the employer, IIRC. BUT, in a different right, you don't support the right of the employer? Why not? And, arguably there is nothing stopping the employee from taking a different route.

"Extreme" might be a poor choice. How about uncompromising?

[Crafty_Dog]

Well as I see it, unike the right to bear arms, there is no right to affirmative action 

Anyway, I wasn't really taking sides on the point, merely quibbling with the description of one side as "extreme".

[Crafty_Dog]

Even Pravda on the Beach admits, on page 28, that mass shootings are not increasing.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-mass-shootings-common-20121218,0,6511082.story

[G M]

The USSS has other things to do.

[G M]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gregory-mocks-lapierre-proposing-armed-guards-sends-kids-high-security-school_691057.html

Gregory Mocks LaPierre for Proposing Armed Guards, but Sends Kids to High-Security School
4:58 PM, Dec 23, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
David Gregory mocked the NRA's Wayne LaPierre for proposing that armed guards be at every school in America. But the NBC host seems to have no problem with armed guards protecting his kids everyday where they attend school in Washington, D.C.

"You proposed armed guards in school. We'll talk about that in some detail in a moment. You confronted the news media. You blamed Hollywood and the gaming industry. But never once did you concede that guns could actually be part of the problem. Is that a meaningful contribution, Mr. LaPierre, or a dodge?," asked Gregory.

Later the host suggested that guns don't prevent violence in schools (he cited the mass shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech). "But you would concede that, as good as an idea as you think this is, it may not work. Because there have been cases where armed guards have not prevented this kind of massacre, this kind of carnage. I want you would concede that point, wouldn't you?," Gregory pleaded.

The NBC host would go on the rest of the segment to suggest that armed guards might not be effective in preventing mass murders at school. Which is perhaps an interesting theoretical argument.

But when it comes to Gregory's own kids, however, they are secured every school day by armed guards.

The Gregory children go to school with the children of President Barack Obama, according to the Washington Post. That school is the co-ed Quaker school Sidwell Friends.

According to a scan of the school's online faculty-staff directory, Sidwell has a security department made up of at least 11 people. Many of those are police officers, who are presumably armed.

Moreover, with the Obama kids in attendance, there is a secret service presence at the institution, as well.

It's safe to say the school where Gregory sends his kids is a high-security school. It's just odd he'd want it for his kids, but wouldn't be more open to it for others.

[Crafty_Dog]

Facts get in way of good story:

 http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22272843/newtown-school-shooter-adam-lanza-wasnt-wearing-bulletproof

[G M]

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55534344-78/class-utah-concealed-teachers.html.csp?page=1

More than 150 Utah teachers, school workers go to gun class
Utah school employees who come to the free session say a gun would help them feel safer.



By lisa schencker
| The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published Dec 27 2012 04:49 pm • Last Updated Dec 28 2012 11:10 am

More than 150 Utah teachers and school workers took time off from their winter breaks Thursday to attend a free class on how to carry concealed weapons and respond to mass violence such as the recent shooting in a Connecticut elementary school.

It’s a course that’s been offered to Utah educators for more than a decade, but Thursday it attracted about 10 times as many people as usual, said Clark Aposhian, an instructor with Fairwarning Training and a chairman of the Utah Shooting Sports Council, which hosted the class with OPSGEAR. Aposhian said organizers had to turn away about 40 or 50 people for lack of space.

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He credited the course’s sudden popularity to increased media attention on the class and its timing, coming just weeks after a gunman’s massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school killed 20 children and six adults.

Aposhian said parents and school employees in Utah and across the nation felt "utterly helpless" when they saw the tragedy that unfolded in Newtown.

"We want to give school employees one more option to protect themselves and their students," Aposhian said of the class, which went over the basics of responding to an attack, carrying concealed weapons and applying for concealed weapon permits.

"You’re never going to get all the mentally and criminally insane people off the streets, and you’re never going to be able to disarm all the criminals, so logically what do you do?"

Utah is one of two states that already allows concealed weapons permit holders to carry firearms on school grounds. The other state is Kansas.

The class came about a week after the National Rifle Association called for armed police officers in every school, and at least one Utah lawmaker, Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield, asserted that more armed teachers would make classrooms safer.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de3lmAD5kXo