Beyond the violence -Tom Knighton

308 thoughts on “Beyond the violence -Tom Knighton”

1. Sarah,

   Thanks for letting me do this. It was kind of cathartic to talk about Kim. I haven’t really done that publicly since her murder, and I’d been afraid to “politicize” her murder. I really don’t think that’s what I did, either. Instead, I’m trying to say I know what it’s like to lose someone you care about to something like this, but it doesn’t change the facts.

   1. you’re very welcome.

   2. It is hard not to politicize it when others immediately jump upon the corpses and start using them as a soap box instead of in anyway honoring them. I know of a kid who got stupid, was using a few too many drugs, and broke into a house he knew had some guns, and decided to try for an attack.
      Girlfriend had just left him, and his job just fired him because all his thieving druggy buddies hung around scaring the customers off and lifting a few items here and there, so he went, got the pistol and luckily practiced with it first … Ruger 9mm … luckily he’d not paid attention so he fired all but one round left in the chamber, and reloaded the magazine … with .40 S&W.
      When he got to the store he had worked at and pulled the pistol, one girl decided to make a run for it. He fired, the bullet hit the wall she was ducking behind, and the resulting jam allowed a black guy to beat the everliving snot out of him and hold him for the police.
      His Dad gets the call and traveled the 6-7 hours to get from one part of the state to the old home town and wondered just what do you say?
      When he got there and they brought his kid out, a good bit black and blue from his ordeal, the two just sat there for a bit, then the Dad said “What would have happened if Uncle Gary or someone like him was there?”
      reply, “I’d be dead”.
      The people I just wrote about are my cousin, and his oldest son. I was almost on the other side of this issue, being related to someone who. fortunately for us, unsuccessfully, was thinking of going for a body count for reasons he even now cannot explain fully. He is a funny kid who is still with us (albeit in prison) who does silly things like send a birthday card to his mom that has been signed by everyone in his wing … some rather infamous folks there … and when his cousin got married sent a card that said “Tried really hard, but just wasn’t able to get away to be there!”. He’s mentioned he seems to be the only person in the place who is actually guilty.
      But, if someone like our Uncle Gary had been there and pulled a concealed gun and shot him, most of us in the family would have understood. We can only be thankful none of that happened, and the kid seems to be straightening himself out. It really hasn’t changed our views on guns either. If anything it only reinforced them.

      1. Sounds like the event really did work out for the best for everyone involved.

         I’m glad we’re not quite two sides of the coin here, and I say that for your whole family. I hope your cousin keeps straightening himself out and isn’t forced to keep paying for his mistake indefinitely (which happens far too often, IMHO).

         1. We can only hope. He was tossed in for a very long time … I’m not certain what his deal is for getting out, but so far he seems to trying to learn something that he can do once out, and is very willing to admit, even joke about being stupid as all get out at that point in his life.

            1. FWIW, if my business was still going, I’d offer to find something for him. Alas, it isn’t.

            2. Back a few mass murders ago I decided that the ancients had a good idea with the concept of demonic possession. It answered fundamental questions and allowed society to move on, eschewing excessive naval-gazing. Which is really all that matters: finding some form of closure for acts so insane even their perpetrators are incapable of explaining them.

               Only a very superficial grasp of what “culture” is can compel anybody to imagine that the ritual expulsion of a totemic object (in this instance, guns) can alleviate the deep-rooted factors driving such expression.

   3. The year after I graduated HS, a girl I knew from where I worked part time, was murdered. She and her boyfriend were shot to death, with a .22 rifle. Their murderer was someone just like Aaron Rodgers. Connie wasn’t a “close” friend, but she didn’t deserve to die that way. She and her BF died, for the same reason so many do. Someone had an exaggerated sense of entitlement. The attacker’s rights/feelings were “more important” than anyone else’s.
      With respect to Canada’s murder rate. Canada and the U.S,., are roughly the same size geographically, with, IIRC, a *10:1* population differential. That means just on statistics alone, we have _ten times_ the Lunatics. (Leaving aside that certain states actively encourage the existence of said lunatics.)

      1. add to that they often classify crimes differently and it is apples compared to hockey pucks

         1. Factor in, as well, that Canada’s population is rather more dispersed than America’s, and somewhat more homogeneous. For one thing, they inherited far more French colonial stock and far fewer Scots-Irish.

            I have not kept up with the Anthropological theories but back when I was a student of that sort of thing the widely accepted premise was that homicide and suicide are two sides of the same coin, aggression either turned outward or inward, according to culturally established norms. Thus the root-stock of a nation’s culture will express itself in such differentials as described.

            1. Also cultural expectation of “honor”– Canadians are kind of famous for Minnesota Nice, several American sub-groups are a bit more chip on the shoulder– and lower rates of gang smuggling through populated areas. My dad’s home valley had a spike in violent crime when other routes got tightened down. (Near a lot of isolated, flat, straight road areas in Nevada.)

               1. Not just expectations of honor but requirements for how it be expressed and defended. G. Gordon Liddy used to cite a French roommate’s explanation for WWII thusly:

                  After WWI, French mothers taught their children to demonstrate their superiority by refusing to fight, by not taking matters to the level of physical confrontation. German mothers taught their children that they were the smartest, toughest people on Earth and that they needed to assert their superiority by not taking guff.

                  So, when push came to shove it was easy to predict who would push and who would get shoved.

   4. You addressed the larger issue and “used” her murder simply as a touchstone to explain why you have thought the matter through to the extent you have. I believe society would be better if more memories were “politicized” so honorably.

      1. Thanks. I really appreciate that.

2. Before we even talk about “are guns necessary” or “are there non-gun strategies that work”, the anti-gun crowd needs to acknowledge that the second amendment was written and passed for the express propose of ensuring that citizens of the United States would have unhindered access to military grade weapons, and that if this is no longer a good idea (or never was) another constitutional amendment must be passed.

   Until they acknowledge this, they are just one more bunch of self-righteous scofflaws. I am FAR more worried about a government that does not allow itself to be limited by the laws laid down in its founding documents tun I am about random gun violence.

   There are too many groups that think that civil rights are a fine idea, until the interfere with some particular political or social agenda. They really need to be chased back under the rocks where they belong.

   No, freedom of speech is not only OK if you aren’t a “lobbyist”, whatever that may mean.

   No, the right to bear arms does not go away if some maniac goes on a shooting spree.

   No, the right to be secure in one’s home is not waved by the existence of a much hyped “war on drugs”.

   I have come to the point where, when somebody wants to argue for Gun Control, I simply say “What is the wording of your proposed Amendment?”. That stops a lot of them. The ones it doesn’t stop usual abandon the field when I ask them “Are you saying you will jettison all the Bill of Rights protections any time some politician gets in a sweat?”.

   Pillocks.

   1. One could suggest some reasonable restrictions on freedom of the press would do much to stem the mass murderers. Most news sources do one story on a murder. Let’s generously give them a chance to regroup in crisis and say that they can do two.

      1. I have slightly less patience for restrictions on the First Amendment than I do for restrictions on the Second. No government in history has been trustworthy where censorship,is concerned.

         1. Self-censorship under the 2nd A has meant, at worst, someone wasn’t able to protect himself or those near him. Self-censorship under the 1st A has meant, at worst, the election of an unexamined & unaccountable government. The historical comparison favors your choice of what to be less patient with.

         2. No government in history has been trustworthy where disarming the population is concerned. Machiavelli observed that disarming even a conquered population is a stupid thing to do — yet they do it.

         3. It’s interesting to note that Harry Reid has proposed a constitutional amendment to limit freedom of speech.

            1. I submit the Republic would be better served by an Amendment mandating open season on any politician who makes such a suggestion, with “He needed killing, Judge.” being considered an affirmative and dispositive defense. Burden of proof rests with the state.

               1. sorta like the Honduran Constitution that states anyone attempting to modify the term limits for President is to be immediately removed from office.

               2. A simpler version would be a Constitutional Amendment making any legislator who proposes or sponsors a bill later found unconstitutional, ineligible to hold office.

                  1. Liberty is frangible. Immediate threats need to be addressed immediately. Why let them live?

            2. I think you used the word “interesting” when you meant “revolting”.

            3. I will consider Reid’s amendment if he will include excision of politicians’ immunity from slander suits for statements made on the legislative floor, The entertainment value of him having to stand in the dock and defend his libels against Mitt Romney for non-payment of taxes or his many calumnies against the Koch brothers might validate the First Amendment’s diminution.

               Probably not. Weasels such as Reid have a knack of implying far more than they actually say.

   2. C’mon now — you know that their preferred method of rewriting the Constitution relies upon revision, inversion, subversion and reinterpretation. Their living Constitution theory allows amendment through linguistic sleight of hand, such as declaring that equal treatment under the law mandates affirmative action. Their entire agenda is predicated upon allowing “the better classes of people” (as measured by their yardstick) make decisions for the greater benefit of all society, even the lower orders who don’t effin’ know what is good for them and should shut-up and be thankful they are allowed to live in this country.

      It ain’t as if your average brake maintenance technician has the same understanding of important matters as a gender studies assistant professor, after all. Anybody whose work can be measured by objective standards is just too plebeian to understand that the beauty of a good theory is irrelevant to whether it works in practice.

3. Some will be bigger and stronger than their prey (and that includes both men and women, for the record). Others will just know how to beat someone down.

   And remember that the criminal gets to pick who to attack. He can selectively look for someone smaller and weaker than himself. Indeed, he does do so.

   He’s not looking for a fight. He’s looking to take your stuff. If he habitually attacks people his own size or who are armed, he’ll have a short career. And he knows it.

   So he looks for small, weak, distracted or otherwise harmless-seeming victims.

   Guns change the equation. Especially concealed guns. They make it impossible for him to know who is or isn’t safe to attack.

   So where guns are common, crimes of violence tend to diminish, crimes of stealth to be favored.

   1. I wish we could get people to stop declaring places to be gun free zones.

      1. translated as Free Fire, Target Rich Environments

      2. Why is knowing that we’re fish in a barrel supposed to be comforting?

         On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:26 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:

         > emily61 commented: “I wish we could get people to stop declaring > places to be gun free zones.” >

         1. This is a form of scriptomancia. the writing is supposed to compel magical obedience. Bad guys, law breakers and suicidal people won’t bring guns in because the writing won’t let them.

            1. Reminds me of a cartoon that showed up on the internet a while back. Two men, their faces covered and heavily armed approach a building. A “No Guns” sign is on the door.

               The two men are like, “Well damn. Now what?”

               1. Someone did a funny video on that very subject a while back:

                  or search for “Gun Free Zone” on Youtube.

                  1. That is awesome!

               2. Interesting fact of Missouri CCW law: A property owner may post their property as off-limits to concealed carry, the sign must be at least 11 x 14 inches with letters not less than one inch in height. So if the sign is smaller than 11 x 14, or has letters less than an inch tall (or no letters at all), it’s not a “legal” sign and can be ignored with impunity. My favorite example is of a county courthouse (though courthouses are banned under a different provision, so it’s also a bad example) that has a 8 x 8 sign with a picture of a pistol with a circle around it with a slash through it, and no letters of any kind on it.

                  1. Here in Georgia, a sign is a waste of money. If you don’t want guns in your business, you have to physically ask them to leave. Failure for them to do so gets them charged with criminal trespass.

                     Three are places you can’t carry, but they’re specified under current law.

                     1. Mr. Gun, if you don’t leave the premises immediately, I’ll have you arrested . . .

                        1. Something like that.

                           FWIW, I’m actually OK with a change in the laws permitting signs to have some legal force. Property rights and all that.

                           However, until they do change, I’ll keep right on carrying into places otherwise. 🙂

                           1. When property owners have the same right to exclude hippies, progressives, muslims &&etc. then sure.

                           2. And I honestly don’t see why they shouldn’t have that.

                           3. I agree with William, I do believe in private property rights, and that a private property owner should be able to bar anyone he chooses from his property. But there have been numerous supreme court decisions to the effect that this isn’t so; unless of course you are either/or a gun owner or a white male.

                           4. Which is, of course, total BS. Not what you say, but that people are forced to do business with those they don’t want to.

                              Yes, I know the law. Yes, I remember the recent case of the person who argued gay marriage was against their faith but was successfully sued by a gay couple. I know all this.

                              And it’s all ridiculous.

                           5. I read an article last night (at PJ Media’s The Tatler: Cake Shop Owner Defiant After Ruling Forces Him to Serve Gay Couples) about a baker on the short end of such a suit — required to bake a celebratory wedding cake for a couple of gay men whose marriage was not permitted under state law — who simply decided to stop offering wedding cakes for sale. Public endorsement of his rights has resulted in such increase of sales of other baked goods that he is suffering no loss.

                           6. As it should be.

                              I may disagree with him on his particular views, but I’m going to defend his right to those views to the death if need be.

                     2. Texas has very specific language for no gun signs. Without meeting the requirements, the sign is not valid. A lot of businesses (that have signs) have invalid signs (like the Edwards Cinema chain.)

                        And since the antis would hold a CHL licensee to absolutely strict understanding of the law, most CHL holders I’ve talked to or read online hold the antis to the same strict standard and ignore their invalid signs. There is also the belief (perhaps simply wishful thinking) that the non-compliant signs are a sop to the antis, without banning the CHLs, sort of a nod and wink approach.

                        Mostly I would avoid giving the businesses that are serious about it my money, but there are a couple of exceptions I’m forced (by circumstance) to make, and one I make for overwhelming monetary reasons.

                        What I don’t understand (and maybe someone with a broader understanding of liability law here can comment) is why there aren’t a flurry of lawsuits after something like Sandy Hook, or any incident that takes place in a ‘gun free zone.’ By actively making the area gun free, and thereby taking away my right to protect myself, (or a teacher’s right) don’t these organizations then take upon themselves a real actual increased OBLIGATION to provide for my safety or the safety of my loved ones? Why isn’t it actionable when they fail in that, after specifically taking it upon themselves? I know that if my child was killed or injured in a gun free zone, I would be looking to punish whoever failed in their duty to protect them (and argue that they HAVE that duty BECAUSE they have acted to limit others ability to protect themselves.) If they don’t assume a legal duty, they have certainly assumed a moral one.

                        zuk

                     3. The sign is pretty useless in Missouri as well. If you have a sign and someone comes in with a concealed weapon and you discover it, you are supposed to ask them to leave. If the permit holder refuses and law enforcement is summoned, then the permittee may be fined for trespass ($35), and may be cited for carrying in a prohibited location (Up to $100 fine 1st time; 2nd offense within 6 months of the first is up $200 fine and suspension of permit for a year; 3rd offense within 1 year of 1st is a fine of up to $500, permit is revoked, and not allowed to reapply for a permit for 3 years). That also applies to places that weapons are otherwise banned by law, such as schools, hospitals, prisons, courthouses, government buildings/offices, etc.

                        1. Yeah, that’s actually not too much worse than we’ve got it here in Georgia.

                           1. There are places that have posted legally invalid no gun signs with a wink and a nod to legal carriers. The greater issue to me is having to park across the street in order to stash a gun in the car rather than park in the dedicated parking lot that is part of e.g. the post office premises to avoid possession in the target zone.

                           2. Are you talking about Georgia? Because I’m pretty sure that part (which was actually case law) was changed a few years back. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

                              Not that anyone says they’re sure, but they think they’re wrong. 😉

                        2. “…and you discover it”. So actually, No-Gun signs punish failure to conceal.

                           1. Nope, federal law applies at the post office and it prohibits ANY gun, even in your car on the lot. Tx law allows carry in the car without permit, even on school parking lots, and at employer parking lots. Federales trump state at the post office and court house.

                              I’ve stopped going to the Post Office, and drop off my shipping at the UPS store instead (they take USPS Priority Mail there too.) That’s how I deal with the issue.

                              zuk

                  2. I was in Arizona recently, a bunch of businesses all bought a “no guns” sign for their establishments from the same vendor evidently, because they all use a silhouette of what looks like a 1911 pistol with a compensator on the end.

                     So I said to my friends as we entered, “No Open Class guns allowed”.

                     (In USPSA practical pistol matches, a gun with a compensator on the end puts the competitor in “Open Class”)

            2. Ahhh . . . my daughter went through that stage four or five years ago. She got mad at us for not doing things she wrote down for us to do.

               On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:45 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:

               > accordingtohoyt commented: “This is a form of scriptomancia. the > writing is supposed to compel magical obedience. Bad guys, law breakers and > suicidal people won’t bring guns in because the writing won’t let them.” > Respond to this comment by replying above this line > New comment on *According To Hoyt * > > > > *accordingtohoyt* commented > > on Beyond the violence -Tom Knighton > . > > in response to *Jasini*: > > Why is knowing that we’re fish in a barrel supposed to be comforting?

               1. Yep. These people never get past it.

               2. Solution: Write down, “Daughter does not get angry when we do not do what she wrote down for us to do.”

                  1. Much shorter version: “Daughter, kiss my butt.”

                     1. The advantage of the former is that it catches her in her own contradiction, rather than uses force.

               3. Say, are you using that post comment via e-mail function? Because I notice the threaded quotations at the bottom of each comment you make, and they come out really badly formatted (and unnecessary). Could you try cutting off anything below your comment when you send it and see if that works better?

                  1. I’ve tried that twice, and gotten this error each time:

                     Howdy!

                     We ran into a problem with your recent comment reply by email. Specifically, we weren’t able to find your comment in the email.

                     We’ll do our best to get this fixed up. In the meantime, you may want to comment directly on the post:

            3. law breaker

               I can live with that.

            4. It is an inversion of the natural progression of culture: custom, mores, laws, taboos.

               Laws that are in conflict with customs and mores will mostly be observed in the breach. See: marijuana. See: speed limits. See: Prohibition.

               Those seeking to fundamentally transform society typically attempt to do so via such “top-down” prescriptions which only serve to drive customary moral behavior underground while delegitimizing political authority.

               This is the fundamental insight of Libertarian philosophy and the antithesis of Progressive ideology. (You see what I did there, contrasting philosophy and ideology when they are contextually identical.)

            5. I became horrified, in my thirties and forties, when I started to realize just what a huge percentage of society really believes that you can abolish behavior merely by outlawing it. Or that it makes no difference which subset of the behavior gets abolished or impeded first or most.

               “Keep guns out of the hands of people!”

               “But it will disarm the honest people first.”

               “That’s okay, every disarmed person is a victory!”

               That kind of reasoning.

               Most people don’t consciously model situations. They do so subconsciously. They are sapient only rarely and under pressure.

               That’s sad.

      3. I want a sign that says something like:
         WE’RE ALWAYS HIRING!
         BENEFITS INCLUDE BUYING YOUR CC LICENSE AND RANGE TIME, INQUIRE WITHIN.
         GUN FRIENDLY ZONE; PLEASE DO NOT BRING MODIFIED TOYS WHICH CAN BE CONFUSED WITH A WEAPON

         1. A local shop has a sign announcing “Due to the ongoing ammunition shortage, we no longer fire warning shots.”

            1. When I had a bumper sticker on my truck that read: “Driver carries only $20 worth of ammo” my friends would laugh and say ‘So only half a magazine?’

            2. A couple of our local businesses must get their signs from the same place, because they have that exact sign.

               1. I suspect they were popular.

         2. “Please remove mask and leave gun holstered while doing business in this establishment. Should the need arise, precision shooting is appreciated”.

      4. Never seen a sign that stopped a free person from doing what they felt was right.

         Concealed means concealed.

4. Thanks Tom– a good post. Very articulate. It always surprises me when the gun is blamed and not the person who was using the gun even when the guy was “mentally ill.” We had a similar incident in Carson City at the Ihop in 2011. Some guy (Eduardo Sencion) walked into the IHOP and started shooting. He shot military guys first btw. Guns aren’t allowed in the building and the place was so packed together with tables that no one could move. The shooter had a strangely clean record. We didn’t even know where he came from. Supposedly he had family in Lake Tahoe (Mexican restauranteurs). They said he was in a mental institution before the shooting– except he wasn’t in the US. We never did get any info about the man and no one knows who he is still. Except the immigrant Mexican family claim him as a cousin. — strange. Also there are some reports that he was schizophrenic although he was NOT on his meds.

   The point is that the gun wouldn’t have gone off without the proper trigger pressure.

   1. I don’t have definitive proof– but when the press and others were scrambling for information on this guy, they couldn’t find anything about with the name he gave them. He just appeared in the US two years before the shooting.

      1. That is creepy.

         1. Um, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of Mexicans (and folks of other ethnicities) who just appear in the US with no background to support their papers. Because the papers are fake and they’re really illegals; or they’re American citizens but wanted under other names.

            OTOH, it’s also possible to not be an Internet user or be from towns that share their records online.

            Admittedly, it’s more fun to imagine he was summoned from another dimension.

            1. It’s possible, but someone that far gone would usually have prints in a couple of places already– that’s how the criminals in my home area are usually identified after someone kills them while attempting nastiness.

               1. …that’s how the criminals in my home area are usually identified after someone kills them …

                  At first I read this as “that’s how the criminals in my home are usually identified after someone kills them” and I imagined you leading a much more exciting life than is likely the case.

                  1. From your lips to God’s ears. I never wanna have to defend me and mine….

            2. I’m picturing more along the lines of “He was a terrorist recruit on a test run.”

               1. I had the same thought afterwards Foxfier– although an alien from another dimension would suffice.

                  Or came to the US two years before the shooting. And no, his fingerprints were not in the system at least for criminal pursuits.

         2. Yep– very

5. I will point out self-defense is a good backup in case you find yourself in a dangerous situation either unarmed or having been disarmed.

   1. I wouldn’t say it’s a good backup, but its better than harsh language.

      When I talk about self defense classes, I’m generally referring to one of those classes that lasts a few week where the student learns a handful of techniques but not really any instruction on how to actually fight.

      Something like Brazilian jiu jitsu or Krav Maga (maybe…just know what I’ve seen, not how much is hype), for example, is a whole other ballgame.

      1. I will agree that they’re better than nothing, however.

      2. Any sort of martial art is good, not because it turns someone like me into a bad*ss, but because it trains and conditions situational awareness. A person is safer because they’re paying attention, not because they can beat up a big guy.

         I should get back to that one of these days.

         1. True, and no martial art will really turn most of us into a badass.

            However, I do tend to argue that it’s better to learn something with more practical real world use. But it’s also a lot like a gun. It’s better to have a .22 on you than a .45 at the house. In the same vein, it’s better you have some tae kwon do than to have been meaning to take that BJJ class the next town over.

            1. I think that what I meant was that it *won’t* turn me into a bad*ss. 🙂

               I’m not sure why this made me think of this, but after 9-11 people were talking about what could anyone *do* if they were on the planes (tackle the bad guys… throw shoes or luggage…) there were some people who just got *mad* because they said it was wrong to tell grandma that there was anything at all, whatsoever, that she could do. That made me angry because it seemed to me that they wanted me, and grandma, to wallow in our helplessness. And while grandma, or myself, aren’t ever going to be able to take on a bad guy one-to-one, it’s simply not true that we’re helpless. And most of that, helplessness or not, is in your mind. There is a difference, I thought, between understanding what you can do, what the limits are and what the likely outcome will be… and having people who are supposed to be on your side defeating you in your mind-space.

               But anyway, I think that the biggest value for “self-defense” is in training your mind-space not to be a victim.

               1. I understood you, and agree completely. I was just saying you’re no different than the rest of us on that front.

               2. It might take a lot of luck for grandma to make a difference in that situation; but “luck favors the prepared”.

                  1. And a granny with knitting needles is always prepared.

                     1. Those are legal on planes?

                        1. And crochet hooks. Also, small tools under 7″ (my wife’s jewelry making pliers and similar). I often have a wire cable jump-rope and a pair of bamboo chopsticks, as well. And for sheer utility, not much beats a rolled up magazine.

                           1. There is a lot to be said for mono-filament or high-tensile wire. For that matter, a can of spray anything (deodorant, air-freshener, hair spray) and a butane lighter can offer options otherwise not available. For that matter, a decent weight steel ruler has its benefits. There are serious combat uses for a steel-lined attache case or even an umbrella in knowing hands.

                              Seriously – haven’t our enlightened leaders ever watched McGyver?

                           2. Not only is that about a white dude in a mullet, he later played a military member meeting and sometimes killing hostile aliens– totally not their style.

                              Oh, and he almost always fixed stuff himself.
                              “You didn’t make that!”
                              “Uh… yeah, I did, you just watched me.”

                           3. What, actually *watch* that gauche pop-culture stuff they have made to pacify the hoi polloi? How, how common!

                     2. See also Our Beloved Hostess’s notes on the efficacy of hatpins. Sometimes all you need is a momentary, very painful distraction while the gentleman across the aisle grabs his 17″ laptop…

                  2. On the subject of “grandma making a difference”…

                     In Israel, in 1989 I believe, a suicide terrorist decided to try something new. He rode an intercity bus, and, at a particular moment (when the bus was alongside a ravine), he shouted “Allahu Akbar!”, grabbed the steering wheel, and send the bus off a cliff. Sixteen people died.

                     A few weeks later, someone else decided to try it. This time, the shout of “Allahu Akbar” was answered with the Hebrew equivalent of “no you don’t either”… by a five-foot grandfather with a white beard, who happened to be sitting in the front seat of the bus. The grandfather was unarmed, and seemed to prefer the direct approach; he grabbed the terrorist by the testicles and squeezed hard. This proved extremely effective.

                     The most important weapon, by far, is the one between your ears. Keep it armed and ready for use.

               3. One of the principles I have taught in personal defense classes, and a strong lesson from Flight 93, is fight to the end. Win or lose, succeed or fail, fight!

                  Fight for your survival, yes, but also fight for your spirit. Kick, scream, bite, flail, use what’s to hand, grab and yank, claw, buck your hips, do damage. If you’re to die, die leaving a bloody corpse covered in your attacker’s DNA and with a hank of hair clutched in you dead fist. If you’re to live, live knowing you DID NOT SURRENDER!

                  This has to be presented in context and with situational modifiers (you don’t fight like this to save your belongings, you fight harder to save kids), but the underlying principle is not modified, your mindset is one prepared to fight to the death.

               4. I pointed to that movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

                  An office lady took out a terrorist with a coffee cup– not Riddick style, but by screaming, splashing and throwing it at his head.

                  I then pointed out that I never checked my laptop, and a brick on a rope is a pretty decent weapon. 😀

                  1. There was a prominent member of the gun rights community some years ago who was accosted by an intruder with a gun and had to defend himself with a hot cup of coffee, because he couldn’t get to his own gun. I can’t remember who it was now, Tom or SPQR might. But the point remained with me: use what you have.

                     1. Caleb Giddings, perhaps?

                     2. Hmmm, not sure but Caleb rings right. That was awhile ago …

                        1. It was Caleb.
                           http://www.gunnuts.net/2009/10/26/dont-bring-a-knife-to-a-coffee-fight/

                           1. Your Google-fu is superior.

                  2. I knew a guy (he is dead now) who killed a guy with a rock. He had a flat tire and was pulled off the side of the road changing it, when this lunatic came out of his house waving a shotgun and threatening to kill the guy and his family that was in the car. The guy used to be a pitcher in the minors, and he picked up a rock and threw it over the roof of the car, hitting the lunatic in the head and killing him. This kind of the flip side example that shows, a gun is just a tool, and like most tools is only as good as the guy operating it. I’m sure the guy with the rock would have much rather had a 357 in his hands to protect his family with, but you use what you have available to the best of your ability.

                     1. Killing people with rocks is simple enough that it was, and still is, used as a method of execution.

               5. I have a stainless steel ballpoint pen for airplanes. See Grosse Point Blank for techniques.

         2. Plus, you’d be amazed at the number of people who don’t know how to throw a punch. Martial arts will teach that as well, which may be all you need to dissuade a lot of would be attackers.

            After all, tough prey just isn’t worth it for a lot of them.

            1. Heck, even some of the martial arts principles are useable by knowing them. “Don’t punch at somebody, punch through them” is pretty basic sports/physics stuff if you want to transfer force, but it immediately makes your punches more effective if you know that’s the plan (and if you weren’t doing it instinctively already).

               But yeah, women should try to know how to break holds.

               1. That’s one of those things a lot of people don’t know (punching through the body). I made it a point to teach that to my son.

                  He credits that piece of advice for curing a bully of the desire to pick on him a couple months back. 😀

               2. That, and “elbows hurt more than fists” and also “don’t punch someone in the face; you’ll only hurt your hand.”

                  1. And “don’t aim for the body part they expect you to aim for.”

                     1. Kidneys, if exposed, make an excellent target, as does the adam’s apple.

                  2. If you’re small enough, letting out some variation of a rebel yell– or just shrieking– and going for their eyes, nose and ears works pretty well.

                     Also, bite.

                  3. A headbutt to the face works really well, and all you get is a slight headache later.

                  4. Hit the soft parts with your fist. Hit the hard parts with an implement.

               3. Nose

               4. “faint”.

                  Even a small woman is really hard to hold if she’s dead-weight. Holding your body rigid is helping them by holding up your own weight.

                  1. If they can pick you up, they just brought you closer to their throat– and if they drag you, wrap your lefs around theirs.

                     If they want to move you somewhere, you really don’t want to go there.

                     1. If they want to move you somewhere, you really don’t want to go there.

                        This, with emphasis added. Whatever your attacker is planning to do to you, it’s something he thinks he can do better over there than over here. So YOU are much better off here than there, and should fight as hard as you can to resist his attempts to move you.

         3. Good point. I lived and worked in the worst parts of CIncinnati — including the neighborhood whose crime problems were the cause behind our police department’s being crammed into a “consent” decree (more decree than consent) with the DOJ — for 20 years and never even got so much as approached by trouble. Of course, I’m 6’3″ and 300+lbs, with my head on a swivel. That last point being the key, I’d warrant. I see so many people wandering around in Condition White — earbuds on, bopping to the music, utterly oblivious to the most mundane threats — never mind muggers. I am always amazed they can survive a stroll across the zebra walk.

            M

            1. For those who walk with:
               just keep your head on a swivel. Assume that there is someone who is willing to drive up on the sidewalk to hit you, and you’re watching for them, and have a plan on what to do if they stop and jump out.

               Sure, it’s almost as silly as planning for an invasion by Boy Scouts of America, but the tactics are still sound and the action of looking around means you will be a less appealing target.

               I also like having my nice little knife for a really nasty surprise to anybody who grabs me…..

               1. My second born liked to wander around on her own. I told her to walk with someone. I told her that there are very few predators in the world, that almost everyone is helpful and safe, but that the predators are *predators*… they’re looking for prey, so it’s important not to look like prey.

               2. yep. And yep.

            2. I was recently in a major US metropolitan area doing something for the Army in civilian clothes. Having grown up in a pretty scuzzy/White trash area as a kid, blending in with scum is not a problem. What WAS a problem was when I witnessed a drug deal go down. I found myself surrounded by four non-English speakers looking for trouble, and I had a very sore foot that day. I was hobbling everywhere.

               I can’t recommend this approach, but it worked for me. I hobbled up to the biggest one with an “I’m going to enjoy mopping the floor with you” smile on my face, with a “I’m crazy enough to kill you and eat you, not necessarily in that order” look of crazy in my eye that I picked up in Afghanistan, and I looked him in the eye and stopped to see what he’d do. It unnerved him to the point that he stepped backward into the street and turned around to blow his nose because he couldn’t hold my gaze. His other thugs stepped back. I hobbled on by, smiling and looking each in the eye as I passed.

               Always remember, if you can pull off confidence bordering on insanity, most people will leave you alone. It either means you’re really good, or really crazy, and either way, people DO NOT want to mess with you.

               That said, Colt-fu is more powerful medicine. By far.

               I’ll tell you, though, you should have seen the look on my LT’s face that day. It made for a fun story to tell. 😀

      3. Something like Brazilian jiu jitsu or Krav Maga (maybe…just know what I’ve seen, not how much is hype), for example, is a whole other ballgame.

         Krav Maga is a very good system for getting useful tools right away. It’s a great class for people who want to be able to defend themselves but do not want to invest 5 or 20 years to do it.

         BJJ is not a good system for self defense because it makes people really comfortable with ground fighting. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to fight someone moderately good at BJJ. Well, unless I have a reasonably agressive friend around. Which is why BJJ is bad for self defense. Bad guys usually have friends, and if you take me to the ground while one of my friends is around, I’ll just tie you up and let my buddy kick you in the head. Or the kidneys. Or whatever.

         Akido is also good, though that’s mostly because the teach falling and rolling pretty well. You will probably won’t get in a fight, but you WILL fall down.

         Martial arts are good because a gun is a binary weapon. You’re either not using it, or you’re killing someone (there’s a “threatening” space too, but that only works with sane && sober people). With sufficient martial arts training (a) you recognize when things are getting worse than you can really handle (back off and go to guns) and (b) when Aunt Tilly has too much sherry at the family reunion and goes after Uncle Fred for some imagined slight you have the option of restraining her rather than shooting her in the leg or the head. While headshots might be appealing in this circumstance, it’s legally much cheaper to just knock her the hell out and let her liver sort it out.

         1. I warned a friend about BJJ. A former commander teaches Jiu Jitsu, but instead of “Every fight goes to the ground,” he prefers “Every fight CAN go to the ground.” That’s a much healthier attitude if you’re worried about a back alley brawl where your opponent may have friends who’d love to stomp on your ribs, stomach or head.

6. The one thing that gets me in this case is they’re not really pushing the needed more mental health side of things. Course the fact that he’d been seeing a therapist for most of his life doesn’t help the we can solve it all through therapy crowd on this one.

   I’ve seen a lot of arguments that we (gun owners) shouldn’t politicize things like this, especially when it first happens. Why not? The father sure wants to blame everything but his parenting for it.

   Oh, wait, he has no responsibility here – just the NRA and loose gun laws.

   1. My hesitation was only because it was Kim, and concern for her family (whose views on gun control are unknown to me).

   2. Of course, there’s the little fact that Leftists have a history of declaring opponents to be insane and imprisoning them in mental wards.
      Or that the anti-gunners declare gun owners to be insane.
      And the vets with PTSD who have had their right to own firearms summarily revoked.

      I’m a bit leery of the mental health side of the equation, too.

      1. The mental health problem is indeed a problem because false negatives and false positives can be disasters.

         “A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description.”

         ― G.K. Chesterton

      2. Me too.

      3. Far too commonly, “mental health” translates as “shares my biases.”

         Charlatans and superficial application have done much to undermine the field.

7. I think the thing that the anti-gun folks are most determined to try to prevent, because it’s what they’re most afraid of — and this is despite the fact that very few of them ever characterize it this way — is something that this horrific tragedy appears to exemplify. It’s also something very seldom, if ever, addressed by the otherwise very cogent arguments of gun responsibility advocates (arguments that have, in fact, over time changed me from my own original anti-gun stance). And it is simply this: the impulse decision.

   The people mature enough to be trusted with guns are not the problem, in this viewpoint. The people criminal enough that the gun laws are irrelevant are also irrelevant, in this sense, because they would not change regardless. What this mindset fears, and wants to forestall, are people like what Ian Stalwicki appeared to be, up to the moment he opened fire: people who seem to be calm and responsible gun owners, who may even sincerely think themselves to be so, and yet when the critical moment strikes — when a sudden, unpredictable moment of rage overtakes them, as it can in principle overtake anyone put under sufficient stress — the fact of whether they are actually carrying a weapon at that moment or not makes the only difference that can be made in whether people die or not. Guns, in this viewpoint, are like the candy bars put right by the checkout counter: people who really don’t want to use them won’t wherever they are, people who really want to use them will do so however they have to find them, but it’s the attempt to prevent that imagined fatal random confluence of temporary impulse, momentary opportunity, and physical capability that I think is really driving much anti-gun advocacy. (This is also part of what anti-gun advocates fear in practice, which is a scenario they have addressed: the fact that drawing a gun on an assailant may make an otherwise horrible but survivable experience into a fatal one when an assailant proves strong, quick and vicious enough to take the gun away from someone before she can nerve herself up to actually using it.)

   Ian Stalwicki, of course, was probably nothing of the sort; the fact that he was carrying two guns and provoked the confrontation that ended in his violence rather suggests criminal premeditation. And it would not surprise me at all to find such cases being far rarer than the anti-gun advocates fear (most fear, by definition, is an overreaction to evidence because it is designed to err on the side of not needing certainty first). But if this understanding is true, it might help gun responsibility advocacy to address what people are really afraid of, and how to deal with it.

   1. That’s certainly part of it. Like you, I was once an anti-gun guy (believe it or not). What swayed me? *shrugs* Honestly, the answer depends on what kind of mood I’m in when I try to answer it, so I probably don’t have a real answer.

      However, is this thinking prevalent enough to warrant a change in tactic, so to speak? I don’t know. While the concern itself is present and something most gun control advocates will agree with if pressed, I’m not sure it’s enough of a factor to sway their opinions. Most seem to believe that gun control will prevent a significant amount of crime.

      1. Most seem to believe that gun control will prevent a significant amount of crime.
         and pointing out that places with higher levels of gun control tend to have more crime never sways them.

         1. No, it doesn’t.

            It is, however, amusing to watch the mental gymnastics they engage in to justify their position in the face of the numbers.

            1. facts? Facts? We don’t need no stinkin’ facts!

               1. Remember that “fact” is a four letter word. 🙂

                  1. Isn’t “fact” just teh past tense of fu-?

                     1. No. that’s “Facted”

                     2. Something like that. 🙂

            2. How is one more law supposed to deter a man who is prepared to break the law anyway. If he’s determined to rob or rape, I’d say that he’d break the gun control laws too.

            3. I don’t see much in the way of mental gymnastics, they just ignore you and scream about UK and Japan.

               1. ….the places where you’re incredibly likely to be stabbed to death or only the Mob has guns?

                  If someone ever tried the Japan example with me, I’d suggest we could start on stricter gun laws after they get the jails changed so they’re at least half as unpleasant as Japanese ones, and punishment as swift!

                  1. I never claimed it was a good argument, just that’s what they do. Then you point out Switzerland (or the majority of the US with a similar crime rate) and they accuse you of being racist.

                     My shipyard sends teams over to Japan to work on the carrier there and part of the training they give before you leave is to show a video featuring some Americans who are doing time in Japanese prisons. They are rather persuasive.

               2. That’s the start. When you point out the difference between how the UK compiles murder statistics as opposed to the US, that’s when things get interesting.

                  1. Great minds.

                     Alright, Odd ones. 😉

                     1. Odd works for me 🙂

                  2. These are progressives we’re talking about. If they didn’t have fallacious arguments, they wouldn’t have any arguments at all. And what kind of world would that be?

                  3. What is the difference between how the murder statistics are compiled? I don’t know this one, and it would be a useful tool in my debate toolbox.

                     1. The one I know of is that the local police department determines if it’s counted as a “murder” for the local stats, and if you make it to the hospital it’s not a murder. (in the US, if you die because someone attacked you, that’s counted as a murder– even if it’s a year later when your’e taken off life support)

                        If you’re found stabbed and there are no suspects, it’s not a murder. (“suspected homicide”)

                        If you fought back, it’s not a murder.

                        And, per, Draven, if there’s no conviction it’s not a murder.

                        1. Well, sure — if there is no conviction it might have just been negligent homicide, manslaughter or even suicide. You should not oughtta jump to conclusions like murder.

                     2. Apparently, the UK only counts something like a homicide after there is an arrest and (I think) conviction, while we count them the moment they happen.

                        What people miss is that each country compiles their numbers themselves, with no uniform way of compiling them.

                        In addition, I seem to remember most of those numbers are for gun related murders. They conveniently leave out all the other murders, arguing they’re irrelevant. They’re not, since people who could have defended themselves weren’t allowed to by the powers that be. Meanwhile, we have an estimated 2.5 million cases each year of people defending themselves with a gun. It’s estimated because, unless a shot is fired, there’s often no police report made.

                        Something else that gets missed a lot is the difference in culture. All of these nations are different culturally than the US. While we may enjoy many of the same aspects of culture, things like movies, music, and video games, those things don’t make us alike culturally.

               3. *darkly* Heheh, just remembered– the UK is the place where they figured out police departments were classifying hate crimes against Brits as “accidental deaths” if the citizen wasn’t dead when they arrived. Survive long enough to get to the hospital, it’s not a violent death…..

                  And the police are the ones providing the homicide stats.

                  1. And it’s not a murder unless someone is convicted of it/

                     1. Oh, gads, I hadn’t heard of that aspect.

               4. Even though the UK gets their numbers by cooking the books a bit.

         2. …and pointing out that by restricting violence to muscle and muscle-powered weapons, you automatically give the advantage to youth, body mass, and numbers.

            In short, the very young (children), the infirm, the aged, the smaller (generally female) are simply screwed when life or death, getting mugged or not, it comes down to raw muscle power. Sure, a crook, as was noted, is usually a career criminal, and won’t give you a choice if he can help it, but SOME chance is better than none.

            1. They generally spend their whole life learning how to be a bad guy. Unless I want to spend my whole life learning how to not be a victim, they have yet another advantage over me.

               Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not in favor of these turdnuggets having any more advantages over me than possible.

            2. but, but … the Police will still have them and magically be everywhere to protect us!!!
               Ever notice the people who are so fast to call us Fascists for wanting Liberty are the ones working towards a locked-down police state?

               1. Yes. It’s yet another data point supporting the theory that everything that comes out of a vileprogs’s mouth is projection.

   2. If you mean Rodgers, his case was NOT an impulse decision. He spent weeks AT LEAST writing and proofing his diary and shooting his cheesy videos. Also, he intended to do it April 29 but postponed it because he got a cold. THAT is the epitome of NOT an impulse decision.
      Also, what we’ve found — and by we I mean places where gun ownership is all but banned — is that the people crazy enough to want to do this have ways of getting them. And when they don’t they use other things.

      1. the largest school killing is still non-gun related. A bomb was used in an era that guns were readily available and even easier to get than today.

      2. The other thing about Rodgers is that the cops had chances to stop him beforehand – his own family had reported him to the police as a potential threat – and didn’t do anything about it other than a brief interview. And California has all kinds of draconian gun laws on the books, including one in which the cops can basically take a suspect in for a mental evaluation, based solely on the judgement of the officer, and that person loses his gun rights for five years even if the evaluation is negative. But nothing was done about him, regardless. So what good would more laws do, other than further eroding the civil liberties of the law-abiding and non-threatening citizens?

         It’s like Virginia Tech, in which the shooter was legally barred from owning guns, but thanks to a clerical error his name wasn’t entered into the NICS.

         Lastly: In the safety-uber-alles, bubble-wrap culture that has largely replaced American childhood, where grade schoolers are dragged out of classrooms by police for nibbling their Pop-Tarts into a vague pistol shape; where high-school and even university courses come with mandated “trigger warnings” because they might talk about something exciting; and normal expressions of childhood are treated as signs of criminality or mental illness to be treated with “therapy” and medication, it’s amazing that more youths aren’t going on rampages.

         Rodgers grew up in a fashionably-liberal, wealthy family and had been not only spoiled rotten, but subjected to medication and therapy from the time he was eight years old. I submit that if he wasn’t crazy to begin with, fourteen years of psychiactric care, on top of being basically given everything he wanted would have been enough to do the trick…as we saw last weekend.

         1. And California has all kinds of draconian gun laws on the books, including one in which the cops can basically take a suspect in for a mental evaluation, based solely on the judgement of the officer, and that person loses his gun rights for five years even if the evaluation is negative. But nothing was done about him, regardless.

            He seems to have been evil, not insane. Evidence, the plan and delaying it because of his cold.

            Hard to spot the difference between “creepy because creepy” and “creepy because evil as crud.”

            1. It’s “hard to spot the difference between creepy and evil” if you can’t even be arsed to look. Which the cops apparently weren’t.

               http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/05/robert-farago/breaking-police-knew-didnt-view-elliot-rodgers-videos/#more-320793

               The cops had not only been alerted to Special Snowflake Elliott by his own family, but they also knew of at least some of his threatening videos…and didn’t bother to even look at them.

               (From the link: “Rodger fell through the net. The cops should have watched the video and made him the subject of a 5150 order – taking Rodger off the streets, enabling a search of his premises and removing his guns and gun rights for five years. AND making it possible to incarcerate him for an extended period.”)

               Nor did they check California’s database of firearm purchases to see if he’d been buying guns; a justification for which, when it was signed into law, was allegedly so authorities could learn if potentially dangerous people like Special Snowflake Elliott were buying guns.

               But hey, let’s pass even more useless and selectively-enforced laws that will only criminalize or harass the law-abiding and sane, and blame everything on the NRA. That’ll work!

               1. Heck with the link, Bryan Suits show bothered to directly contact the department that did the check.

                  The cops were told that the guy had made “social media” posts that made his parents worried he was a risk, they didn’t send them a video saying “our son is making elaborate plans to kill a bunch of people.”

                  They also weren’t told “Hey, my son has been under mental health care for most of his life.”

                  When his divorced parents got the “I’m going to go shoot up girls for turning me down” video, they didn’t call the police, they started driving to visit him.

                  1. I’m not going to argue that he didn’t hate women – especially those he desired who wouldn’t sleep with him. Entitled to a malignant and narcissistic degree barely begins to cover it. Like the other spree killings, the common factors are long-term psychological problems and all too often, brain candy.

                     Let’s not forget that he reserved at least as much hate, and possibly deeper hate, for the men who got even a taste of what he was missing in his own life. Four of the 6 dead were men, three of them roommates he killed with a knife – generally considered a far more personal and vicious attack because it’s more difficult to kill given the physical proximity, etc..

                     1. He was just evil and wanted to kill people he envied or hated, for having what he wanted or not giving him what he wanted.

                        The knifing of his roommates is what makes me figure on evil– tactically, that was dumb. Just one of them surviving enough to yell would have ended it then and there…but he hated them enough to kill them, and had enough tactical sense to identify a knife as a silent killer.

                        I’d guess he went for the throat while they were sleeping, God rest their souls.

                        That is not “crazy.” That’s evil.

               2. Especially since , at the beginning of last year, the DoJ supposedly cleaned up said database and went around collecting people’s guns

      3. And too, this occurred in California with some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. They have mandatory background checks for all firearms transfers, limits on magazine capacity, a waiting period for purchase, and all the other little details high on the anti gunners’ wish list.
         That’s the thing, not only do the gun banning crowd dance in the blood of innocent victims, but they always propose the same set list of “solutions” that would not have done squat to prevent the tragedy in question.

      4. Not at all. No, Rodger was clear premeditation, as were Harris and Klebold of Columbine, Maj. Hasan, and the Virginia Tech shooter (and anybody else who deliberately goes to a gun-free zone in expectation of non-resistance). Adam Lanza… may have been the kind of case this mindset is afraid of — I say “may” because lack of warning does not prove lack of premeditation, but it seems plausible to me that had guns simply not been available to Lanza that morning that the Newtown shootings would not have happened. That a plausible hypothesis makes a bad basis for case law is self-evident, of course, but to people blinded by grief, shock, pain and fury that can be very hard to see.

         At a higher level what I’m looking at is the excluded middle of Ben Franklin’s famous saying, “Where men are pure, laws are useless; where men are corrupt, laws are broken.” Taken at face value this suggests not having laws at all, yet very few seriously argue for this interpretation. Rephrased, this could be, “For sufficiently sane and mature users, gun control is unnecessary; for sufficiently crazy or evil users, gun control is ineffective” — but what the advocates really seem to fear is the idea that guns made easily available will statistically increase both accidents and impulse crimes on the part of those who would not otherwise commit them, in the same way that where cars are easily available car accident deaths and irresponsible abuse increase.

         The only response to this may be, “That excluded middle is real, but it is simply not large enough or controllable enough to be ameliorable by cost-effective solutions” — but this is neither emotionally consoling to the bereaved, nor measurably proveable (since we can never know what crimes have been prevented short of somebody admitting what they would have done, had they been able to). So this is one reason why firearms responsibility arguments continue to fail to gain traction; the dispassion is intolerable and the alternative is unfalsifiable.

         1. Lanza was very premeditated. The problem is the cops sat on all the evidence for a long time, not sure why. He had a spread sheet detailing all the mass killings around the world, not just here. He intended to exceed the Norway total (72 dead?). Apparently, his mother never entered his room, as it was huge.

            1. Don’t forget she’d tried to get help with his violence before, and basically been told to buzz off; that’s why she was trying to move the Sandyhook Gradeschool Shooter to a state that allowed involuntary commitment before they commit a crime.

               Possibly she had entered, and thought he didn’t know.

      5. I have run across a woman online having vapors about the people who say we don’t know why he did it. He said that it was because of women not sleeping with him, and we all know what marvels of honesty mass murderers are, so it’s wrong to notice a little thing like — killing more men than women.

         1. I’ve looked at part of his manifesto (I’ve read a little over 40 pages of it), and it seems pretty clear why he did it. Much of his ranting focuses on women, but I suspect that’s only because he was as sex obsessed as you’d expect a male of his age to be (mind you, I only got to his late high school years, so it’s possible that something changes dramatically in the next 100 or so pages; I doubt it, though). And he wasn’t getting any attention from the women. But while he doesn’t rant about the men, his hatred seems to have been equal opportunity. The ultimate impetus for his actions seems to have been a high degree of narcissism and self-absorption, coupled with an inability to socially interact with people (seemingly due to crippling shyness). Instead of figuring out how to deal with it, or some similar coping mechanism, he stewed over it year after year (according to his manifesto, the first time he discussed his ideas about women was in junior high, with a childhood friend of his). Finally, without a proper outlet, the frustration reached the point where he took the course he did.

   3. Let’s take that premise to its logical conclusion.
      Will otherwise outwardly appearing normal people suddenly go off their nut and strike out with whatever lethal means are close to hand? To fully test the premise we would have to arm everyone and see what happens, not hardly likely. Luckily, we have a similar situation already in existence.
      Every day that you venture out in your vehicle you encounter thousands if not tens of thousands of other folk with the means to instantly take your life from you with the smallest twitch of their hands. Yet the cases of cars veering into oncoming traffic are fairly limited, and those that do occur are invariably traced back to impaired operators, not malicious intent.

      1. One problem with that is that using a car as a weapon – at least against other cars, usually a two-way street.

         That said, where it’s easy to take out a pedestrian and get away, that sort of thing IS rare.

      2. A good analogy, but it’s worth pointing out that adolescent drivers always have higher insurance premiums than mature drivers precisely because the level of presumed trust in safe usage is not the same.

         (Which leads me to wonder if there could be such a thing as “firearm insurance” — interested gun owners regularly pay into a pooled fund from which reparation payments are made to victims of any accident or crime that can be shown to have happened with a gun owned by a member of that pool, and anyone whose firearms storage and use fails company inspection or whose weapon is so used gets hit with higher premiums. Make it private and voluntary, and the issue of government weapon registration is avoided.)

         1. Except, sticking with the analogy, teens insurance premiums are higher due to carelessness, not maliciousness.

            1. Granted; but there are levels of carelessness which legally amount to the effective equivalent of malice, which is why we consider drunk drivers criminally responsible and will charge people with reckless negligence. And if that happens with cars (goes the thinking), it can happen with guns, and the likelihood of fatal consequences is much higher with guns. And people have been documented to commit assault using cars, in paroxysms of road rage, so it only seems sensible that someone in a similar state carrying a gun might use it the same way.

               As noted, of course, the problem is that this is all fear-based thinking, which is understandable but simply not arguable with on the level of rational evaluation. For all that I find the gun responsibility argument more convincing, in the end, than the alternative, I still find guns terrifying myself; the difference is that I recognize that as my difficulty, not necessarily society’s. But the notion of a culture of responsibility generally has been in decline for some time now.

               1. Granted; but there are levels of carelessness which legally amount to the effective equivalent of malice, which is why we consider drunk drivers criminally responsible and will charge people with reckless negligence. And if that happens with cars (goes the thinking), it can happen with guns, and the likelihood of fatal consequences is much higher with guns.

                  Problem:
                  There’s only about a thousand accidental gun deaths on the high end in a year, and there’s ten times that many fatal car accidents. (Call it 30k deaths; yes, the average fatalities is a bit over three.)

                  Between a third and two thirds of all households have firearms, so even if we assume 100% of households have access to a vehicle then automotive carelessness is still massively overrepresented compared to guns..

                  Let’s add in gun homicides– 11k last year. (Can’t use gun deaths, because there are commonly occurring reasons to shoot someone, but not for killing them with a motor vehicle.) That makes for 12k gun deaths, compared to 30k automotive deaths. If cars are only twice as common as guns, and even including MURDER there’s two and a half times the deaths from cars…..

                  1. Let us also remove career criminals and gang activity from the equation. I don’t have the numbers at hand, but that tends to eliminate a GREAT many firearm related homocides.

                     1. So many that the anti-gunners add “gang members under 20 killed by other gang members or during crimes” to massively inflate the “kids killed by guns” numbers.

                     2. I’m inclined to consider almost all males over age 14 and females over age 16 within certain demographic and geographic groups as “adults,” since they have gone through the proper tribal initiations to be act as “adults” (conduct commercial exchanges, fight irregular “warfare” to defend honor/turf, sire/bear offspring).

                        1. Yes, the sixteen year old gangbanger killed in a drug deal is NOT a “child victim of gun violence.”

                           1. I’d attribute that to “they are an aggressor,” not anything about age.

                              IIRC, Mexican gangs are having single-digit hitmen, and some African terror groups mostly “recruit” by wiping out villages except for the young-enough-to-brainwash boys and the sex slave-able.

                  2. Another problem with comparing gun accidents to car accidents — or perhaps a cause of the problem you cite — is that it’s simple to avoid gun accidents. There are four simple rules, easily memorized, that if followed will prevent almost ANY gun accident (barring severe manufacturing defects); it takes violating multiple gun safety rules to end up with the gun going off when you didn’t intend it to.

                     Compare that with cars, which are advanced pieces of machinery, complex enough to operate that we mandate training for everyone, and a test to see if the training has “taken”, before they’re allowed to operate the machine in public. There are hundreds more ways to have a car accident than to have a gun accident. Even in the hands of a skilled operator, a car accident is still possible; but someone who knows what he’s doing with a gun is just NOT going to have an accident.

                     1. “but someone who knows what he’s doing with a gun is just NOT going to have an accident.”

                        Sure but that implies a strict definition of accident and calling an unintended consequence with a firearm negligence. See e.g. Bill Jordan for a very skilled gun handler and a negligent discharge. Any number of well known gun writers have written of unintended discharges with bullet holes sometimes left around as reminders. Jack O’Connor did the shooting himself in the foot bit literally.

                     2. Please tell that to the idiots who are sure if I set my bag down hard the revolver will go off…..

         2. I’m not paying into a pool to provide ‘reparations’ to the victims of some idiot/goblin because I am not responsible for said i/g simply because he chose a tool similar to mine.

            It’s an unsavory principle. Regardless of the effective reality of commercial insurance disbursements, I’m not buying insurance so that the money might be used to assuage my guilt over drunk drivers.

            1. “I am not responsible for said i/g simply because he chose a tool similar to mine.”

               A reasonable point, but that’s the whole point of the insurance pool: it applies only to the specific weapons owned by its members, not merely to any similar weapon used nearby. The idea is to give gun owners a private financial incentive to work harder at keeping their guns from being stolen for use in crime or abused by family members; they can’t be criminally charged for the violence, but they can take collective financial responsibility for the consequences if they want to (hence the need for it to be a private voluntary organization).

               I don’t doubt there may well be practical problems or philosophical antipathy towards the idea. I’m just floating a thought for consideration.

               1. Hm. Misread the ‘owned by a member of the pool’ section. Apologies.

            2. Not to mention, as soon as a pool was started, the lawyers would be all over it. Deep pockets, you know. The price of the insurance would inevitably skyrocket.

   4. When an anti-gunner declares himself to be too emotionally unstable to handle a firearm responsibly, I’m inclined to believe him.
      I object to him projecting his failings onto me and the vast majority of other persons who do not share his defect, but I believe him.

      That said, what seems to actually keep them up nights, is the thought of the urban underclass rising up in violent revolution. This is difficult to productively address because of Marx, because race is a touchy topic, and because doublethink is an intrinsic part of the Leftist worldview..
      (Of course, it is fun to drop something like “You’re scared of blacks having weapons” and watch them deal with it. Just not very productive.)

      1. “When an anti-gunner declares himself to be too emotionally unstable to handle a firearm responsibly, I’m inclined to believe him. I object to him projecting his failings onto me and the vast majority of other persons who do not share his defect, but I believe him.”

         True, but remember, you don’t have to believe that kind of emotional instability is common in itself; you just have to believe that it’s common enough that when combined with common firearm ownership, more people die than would otherwise happen. The great appeal of doomcrying is that you only have to be right once.

         But that is one of the great differences in perspective I’ve seen between gun responsibility advocates and gun control advocates: just how much do we trust our fellow man to be responsible, when the consequences of error or abuse are deadly? Most gun control advocates tend to have a much lower level of opinion of people this way, and — the philosophical goal of control notwithstanding — quite a lot of them have earned that opinion through personal bad experience. For every T.L. Knighton who can come to terms with loss, there are many who can’t. Arguments about principle will always have trouble making an impact on people in pain.

         1. I don’t expect my fellow man to behave responsibly. I expect the court system to hold them accountable for their actions. Unfortunately, the legislatures have hamstrung the courts in many cases, or the executive branches have gifted us activist judges. THAT’S the problem.

   5. I really don’t believe in the “impulse” killer. When does that ever actually happen? I think you’re right that this is what people are afraid of, but I’ve heard people say things like… I’d worry that if *I* had a gun that someone would piss me off and *bam*. And I’m sort of… really? You worry about that? Have you had other episodes where you *bam* just on an impulse hurt someone?

      1. But some people *do* impulsively lash out and hurt others. Happens all the time. Wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, kids… Guns just up the ante, but other possible weapons are generally available. It’s a coldblooded cost/benefit analysis on my part. The likelihood of me being the the victim of that sort of impulse violence is much smaller than me being the deliberate target of a criminal.

         1. I think that those violent people are pretty much always lashing out, though, aren’t they? And sure, they might lash out more disastrously if they’ve got a hammer in their hand. But it’s these “normal” people making this argument as if they’re being all rational about what “normal” people might do, people like them… because it’s always in the first person. They explain why *they* cannot be trusted with a gun… they might impulsively shoot someone! (This is my “I’m not impressed” face.)

         2. Sure, but if I were to impulsively lash out at someone, it would be to hurt them, not kill them. If you want to *hurt* someone and you’re reaching for a firearm, you’ve already failed you sanity roll (SAN Check!).

         3. I occasionally have a flash of temper – but there’s always some degree of choice made as to how to express it. This time – do I repress it, say something cutting, kick something harmless, strike out, scream? My values lead me to hurt myself rather than someone else, if necessary, but the point is there is always a decision taken.
            I do not believe that, if a gun were concealed in my waistband, that I would ever include it as an option for expressing myself. As we project ourselves onto others, I similarly don’t believe that many others, even those who feel flashes of rage, would choose to express it with their firearm IF they thought about the range of behaviors acceptable to themselves, in advance. Thus I don’t have a problem with requiring some degree of training that includes learning and thinking about consequences as well as tactics.

         4. Guns lower the incidence of not-intended-to-be-attacks, too.

            I remember a defense of a random beating of… I believe it was an older Jewish man, where the victim died of the beating and someone was defending the attacker because it was “just an ass whuppin, like Trayvon was doin to that (can’t remember, but insult to Zimmerman) before he was murdered, so (the guy who beat the older man to death) shouldn’t be charged with murder. Just an ass whuppin, supposed to take it like a man.”

            There are seriously people who think that me dying as an “accidental” side effect of being beaten is not as bad as me shooting the SOB who decides to start beating me.

            1. Weird things can happen in a fist-fight and someone ends up dying and no one would really expect it… A couple of guys go at it and one wins and they *quit* …That’s not the case when it’s someone beating someone. An “ass whuppin” isn’t a fight, it’s punishment where it goes on instead of stopping and someone is getting hit over and over without them diving back in to the fray.

               And if someone doesn’t understand that people die from fists and feet, well, just how stupid would you have to be not to know that?

               1. Dumb enough to come out of the public school system, apparently.

                  Neither instance was a fist fight, they were both attacks because the attacker felt it was a defense of honor of some sort.

               2. Stupid or an entitled if collateral member of the Chicago nobility?

   6. I know I don’t have horse in this race, but I’d like to think that I support it in spirit, so here is my two cents, if I may. It sounds to me like those who want to take your guns are arguing that people aren’t responsible enough to handle firearms and therefor should not have control over such deadly things, or they are arguing for extremely restrictive licensing terms. However, we know criminals don’t care for laws. Never have. If people were not allowed to carry or own firearms, criminals would find other ways to obtain them or get more creative with edged weapons. Here is a link to an article about DIY guns in Australia. I thought it might be interesting to see what people can do when gun laws are strict. (Sorry, I don’t know how to make the link look pretty): http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/04/04/australian-motorcycle-gang-diy-firearms-surface/

      The point is, taking away guns only puts law-abiding citizens at risk.

      1. “The point is, taking away guns only puts law-abiding citizens at risk.”

         But does it put them at more risk than free, easy and unregulated access to guns does, when through sheer statistical frequency the latter (a) makes fatal accidents more frequent, (b) makes getting hold of guns for criminal purposes easier, facilitating impulse crimes and more frequent crimes, and (c) the supply of guns exceeds the level of personal and cultural responsibility needed to control the first two problems?

         On a purely statistical level the answer to this might well be “Yes”: I haven’t crunched the numbers myself. But most gun control advocates, especially the really passionate ones, aren’t thinking statistically (and humans in general are bad at evaluating risk and probability). They have never personally been victims of gainful firearm crime like assault, mugging or robbery, or of urban-gang crimes like drive-by shootings, where simply knowing one might get return fire tends to deter attack, and which can also be avoided by staying out of bad parts of town; the only crimes they’re thinking about are crimes like Newtown where the violence is for the violence’s sake alone, the shooters don’t care about profit, their own lives or who their targets are, and which can arise in what “should be” the safest of environments. Firearm availability can certainly make it easier to stop such shooters with fewer deaths, but the goal is to prevent such incidents with no deaths by taking away the weapons needed to make them shooters in the first place, so to talk about statistics at all is simply to miss the control advocates’ point.

         This is one reason why, like all the really passionate and divisive issues, compromise on this topic is so difficult; the sides are to one degree or another talking past each other about what they see as the most important or dangerous part of it. (I should note that I am not myself attempting to change anybody’s mind here, merely attempting to illuminate some of the opposing viewpoint for purposes of mutual comprehension.)

         1. This is one reason why, like all the really passionate and divisive issues, compromise on this topic is so difficult; the sides are to one degree or another talking past each other about what they see as the most important or dangerous part of it.

            If you are correct about what they think, then in this case the “talking past” is because one side is not saying what they think. They claim they want X, when they want Y.

         2. This is all beside the point. We must stay armed to control OUR GOVENMENT.

            1. Yep.

            2. Exactly!

            3. We must stay armed to control OUR GOVENMENT.

               Indeed. Time to post the Battle of Athens video again:

               WHY don’t more people know about this? Never mind, I know the answer to that question. The real question is, WHY aren’t more pro-2nd Amendment people talking about Athens, TN, over and over and over again, until even the anti-gunners know about it?

               1. Because not enough of us know about it. I only learned from hanging out here. I never heard of it in all the years I’ve been lurking around gun blogs.

                  1. Which is why I post it every time the subject comes up. Hopefully one of these days I’ll see that someone else has beaten me to the punch and posted it before I saw the comments thread.

         3. On a purely statistical level the answer to this might well be “Yes”: I haven’t crunched the numbers myself.

            Maybe so, but I am very much inclined to doubt it. There are a myriad of examples where a gun law has not reduced crime.

            Where, to your knowledge, has a gun law reduced crime?

            1. See also Joe Huffman’s Just one question. RTWT, but here’s the question itself:

               Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?

               There are several responses added as updates at the bottom. Only one of them is in the affirmative, and I don’t think folks like Bloomberg or the SPLC are going to like that one.

               1. One of the things Jeff told me was that his dad, Neal Knox, had put something similar to my Just One Question on bumper stickers in the late ’70s:

                  Posted on June 27, 2008 by Joe

                  The theme of everything I will say this afternoon is Where has a gun law reduced crime?….Neither [Pete] Shields nor Chief McNamara, during the entire debate answered the question

                  1977 Field & Stream

            2. Sorry, my fault for writing too verbosely: I meant to say that on a statistical level, it seems quite plausible that gun-control laws wind up increasing risk rather than reducing it — the problem is that they increase risk in ways, and for groups, that most gun-control advocates don’t personally belong to, and so they don’t grasp the reality of that increased risk.

               I know of no instance where a gun law has reduced crime once imposed, although I know of several locations where despite much more stringent ownership protocols, crime is lower than it is in gun-access regions (several locations in Canada come to mind), suggesting that they may have played a role in keeping crime and violence from developing — but that is post hoc ergo propter hoc on its own.

               1. Extraordinary claims – at least some evidence.

                  Vancouver BC compared to Vancouver WA?

                  I lived in the Back of Yards in Chicago for a while. A long time ago when the gun registry was still open so Chicago laws were strict but less strict than today.

                  [David Brin once did a column for Science Fiction Chronicle suggesting that as good progressive agents of change SFF writers should explore the idea of a Firearms Owners Identification Card – ignoring the fact that Illinois had run the experiment in real life]

                  The year before we left there were as many shooting deaths within a one block radius of our front porch as there ever were in any one of the Kansas cow towns in any one year during the cattle drive days – that is 5 – a total reached once in Dodge and once in Ellsworth. Gun deaths in Chicago have fluctuated since but have not tracked down with increasingly strict laws.

                  Speaking in generalities either side of the western Canadian border be it with Alaska or with Idaho and Montana is pretty crime free. And again I haven’t seen it tracking down on either side of the border as laws have been stricter on both sides of the border – though of course not equally stricter. Salmon Idaho folks have handguns, Dawson folks have rifles; neither has a lot of crime.

         4. Part of the gun-controllers’ problem is that they are elevating one priority — safety — over all others, denying agency to people who disagree. History tends to strongly argue that there are values which ought rank at least as high as safety, and that safety cannot be assured without so doing. Limiting gun-ownership decisions to just the police helps foster the corruption of police. The issue is which type of error we can best tolerate — Type I or Type II, and what are the consequences of those collateral effects?

         5. “This is one reason why, like all the really passionate and divisive issues, compromise on this topic is so difficult;”

            You are assuming compromise is acceptable. As far as I am concerned compromise of any sort that violates the constitution is completely unacceptable. You want to change something that the constitution states? You need to change the constitution, not ignore it, twist it, and try to ‘re-interpret’ it.

            I am very much ticked off that people before I was born let progressives so undermine the 2nd Amendment that Class III weapons, armed merchantships, tanks, artillery and such are not readily acceptable for private citizens to own.

            1. Grabbed a book at Goodwill– “A mathematician reads the newspaper.”

               Didn’t get very far, but he told a little story that fits:

               Two brothers are arguing.

               One says he should get all the cake, the other says they should split it 50/50.

               Mom comes in and compromises… by giving the one that wanted it all 3/4 of the cake.

               1. For an excellent treatment of that exact analogy, see LawDog’s Gun Rights Cake.

                  1. Reading that, I’m reminded of the response when I suddenly stopped agreeing to be the one who “volunteered” to say late at the shop all the time, or bring in cookies, or do the other’s paperwork on top of my own job, or whatever.

                  2. Thank you, Lawdog is much more eloquent than I.

8. Thank you Tom.

   Two relevant links:

   http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com

   it contains a LOT about the psychology of street rats, criminals, thugs, etc., from someone who used to run in that crowd. Focuses on situational awareness and attitude over “I know self defense” – and why you never promise to get to someone later when they’re letting you walk away.

   and

   http://www.catb.org/esr/guns/gun-ethics.html (equally applicable to the “Most Dangerous Catch” lifestyle or any where consequential danger is a part of day to day life)

9. Amen.
   So mote it be.
   I can’t remember any other ways of saying this right now it being before my coffee.

10. Great article, but you have a false assumption towards the end. The goal of the leftists pushing the gun control agenda has nothing to do with preventing one of these tragedies from occurring again. Their goal is control. Disarmament is simply one of the steps towards complete control over us, not that the Soviet Union was successful, but they will be THIS time because they’ll do it RIGHT.

    Sure, the rank and file non-thinkers supporting the cause may/probably want to see these incidents eliminated. Don’t blame them at all, I’d like to see them eliminated too, but you don’t do that from a position of weakness. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction worked because we were able to convince the Soviets, the entire world really, that the US would be able to do unto Them in equal or greater amount before we were wiped out. The doctrine was successful because of our strength, not weakness. You do not stop a bully or thug from a position of weakness, you do it from a position of strength. Period, dot, end of sentence.

    1. It’s not a “false assumption”. It’s based on my experiences, since I used to be one of those people. Wrong, misguided, blinded to reality? I’ll agree with you on each. Say that these people (and by that, I’m assuming we’re going to talk about the majority), and I’m forced to disagree.

       Your second paragraph, I take zero issue with. It’s part of the reason I’m not one of those people anymore.

       1. Break it into two groups, you have the Bloombergs, Feinsteins, and the Sarah Brady’s that are pushing/leading the gun control agenda, and then you have the people, the rank and file if you will, that follow along behind them and support the cause. Those leading the charge, crime reduction is not the goal; those that are following, crime reduction is their desire. My first paragraph applies to those leading the charge, the second to those that follow.

          From what you’ve said, I’d have thrown you in the “rank and file” group (back when you were part of that group), not part of the Bloomberg group (no offense, I’d just never heard of you before I started following this blog). So part of the misguided/ignorant/naive group, not the actively evil group. Then again, my definition of evil may be skewed, I am a fan of at least one half of the most evil woman ever and the international lord of hate. 🙂

          Sorry for any misunderstanding.

          1. Oh, I freely admit I was a nobody, particularly back then. Most of my achievements have been in the last few years…after I saw the error of my ways. 😀

          2. Lenin, IIRC* had a technical term for such rank and file supporters: Useful Idiots.

             *And assuming that translation/attribution are even marginally accurate.

11. I do not accept the assertion that ANY of the gun-grabbers are well-meaning, only concerned about safety, etc. Listen to them long enough and every one of them will go into a rant about “rednecks” and “crackers” and, eventually, how everything would be perfect if “those people” we’re disarmed.

    The casual, “pressed like on Facebook” types? Maybe. The ones who actually show up for a march, how organize? No way. They have plans, and the ability of their targets to resist is a major impediment.

    1. I didn’t say they weren’t jerks, did I? I base my comments off of my own experiences. Yes, plenty of them are arrogant and think those who disagree with them are backwards and unsophisticated. It doesn’t negate the fact that they think they’re doing God’s work.

       Are there exceptions? Oh, abso-freaking-lutely. Loud ones too.

       Maybe the issue is what you’re considering a “pressed like on Facebook” type. A lot of those take part in marches too though. They just don’t travel to them, which sounds like the kind you’re talking about.

       However, I’m going to say that my experiences indicate that those people are in the minority. They’re just a loud one.

       1. These people issues are complex and perhaps worth discussing in the appropriate forum. At least I’d like to understand them better.

          Speaking of red-necks as “those people” I am reminded of a couple Georgia crackers from a tobacco farming family who frequently use ain’t and such in speech – when they feel a draft so to speak – in normal speech it’s pretty obvious that having been to seminary they have English appropriate to public speaking, Koine Greek, Latin, Hebrew and such.

          I’ve known hoplophobes who allowed that some of their friends might be allowed guns but better to confiscate all guns than allow general possession. Some of these people are academics who can speak with authority in their own fields and have too much respect for other authorities speaking without authority on guns. Issues of the Overton Window I suppose – when the New York Times says it’s a sensible gun law (as it did today) the proposal must be sensible not may be after examination.

          Maybe the decline of free will as a religious issue has eroded belief in freedom as a good thing?

          1. It is a character of elitist thinking (and modern intellectualism, which many aspire to, is elitist thinking) to assume base behaviors of all those not in your class.

             Thus the frequently heard “I trust you it’s those other people that scare me.”

             Complicated by the fact they’re teaching this casual elitism in college…

             1. “I distrust everybody but you and me … and some days I’m not so sure about you”.

12. Thanks, Tom. I grew up around firearms, but it wasn’t until I became the target-de-jour in Junior High and High School that I decided I needed to be the one to take care of me, either by avoiding trouble (when possible) or being able to fend off trouble long enough to get help or get away, which became “able to use level of force necessary” once I was old enough.

    I sympathize with people who do not feel capable of taking the steps necessary to defend themselves, for whatever reason, but they can’t persuade me that I need to depend on someone else for protection. Tried that, failed miserably, not again.

13. I have a qualm about barring people with mental health diagnoses from obtaining firearms. How many people who might otherwise seek out help will be discouraged from doing so because of the risk of losing their right to self defense?
    I’m not sure there’s any good answer, but I know that I’d think twice about seeing any psychologist or answering any questions about mental health from anything but the Pollyanna viewpoint.

    1. I can confidently assure you that the responses to several questions on the standard VA healthcare forms are skewed for this very reason. To compound, frequently those dodging the question are not in need of mental health care, they could just use someone to talk to. VA has taken themselves out of offering that service quite effectively.

       From here you can assume foul language and spiting rage.

    2. It’ll have the same effect that the FAA saying you could lose your medical for seeking any kind of counseling did (in this case for temporary mild depression and anxiety following the death of the pilot’s son.) 1) People lie and risk the federal felony. 2) People stop getting help and try to gut through all sorts of trouble.

       1. Seriously? The FAA decided that pilots historically didn’t fear doctors, physicals, and medical records enough?? What’s next, encouraging pilots to gnaw off limbs and treat them with Band-Aids, or penalizing pilots for having pimples larger than .5 mm in diameter?

          1. Seriously. Led to lawsuits. We (the flight school where I was working at the time) started a small, quiet list of local and regional clergy and non-medical councilors for other folks at Podunk Field who might need to talk to someone off-the-record. And you are not far off. Back when I flew full time, I knew a double-handful of people who took St. John’s Wort and other herbs for suspected mild depression and associated things, rather than risk getting a full evaluation and losing their medicals.

    3. Do not give the State the power to exempt some people from having Basic Civil Rights. I don’t care how obvious an exception it seems to be, the State will find a way to sbuse it. No deranged gunman is a bigger threat to life and limb than the State.

       1. YES! YES! YES! Oh, my goodness, YES!

          (That’s EMPHATIC agreement, not a flashback to When Harry Met Sally!)

       2. To paraphrase Gerald Ford – any government big enough to give you everything you want, is powerful enough to take it away.

          1. I have that quote on a T-shirt. Unfortunately, the T-shirt misattributes it to Thomas Jefferson, who never wrote those words. He would have agreed with the sentiment if anyone had expressed it to him, and he wrote paragraphs that could be summed up in those words, but Jefferson never wrote those words. Which is why I almost never wear the T-shirt, even though I agree 100% with the quote — because misattribution is just WRONG, dammit.

             1. “Hear, hear!” – Frederic Bastiat

       3. Given the weekly – almost daily! – horror stories about unbelievably wrongful arrests and wrong-house, no-knock SWAT raids for petty crimes, I’m beginning to think that most of the “deranged gunmen” already WORK for the State.

          Is that harsh? I don’t think so, given how we’ve created a “justice” system where the laws have metastatized to the point that literally *anybody* can be arrested and prosecuted for *something*…and the cops, judges, bureaucrats and prosecutors not only can pick and choose which laws they want to enforce at any given time, but are virtually exempt from prosecution or sanction for any mistakes, or outright criminality/abuse, that they might commit along the way.

          The big news this morning is the no-knock raid in Georgia where sheriff’s deputies blew up a baby with a flashbang grenade, after executing a no-knock raid over a petty drug arrest (the suspect was out of the house at the time). The kid’s in intensive care, in an induced coma with horrible burns. The cops are blaming the suspect, of course, even though they could always have picked him up on the street in broad daylight rather than kicking the door down in the middle of the night.

          1. Right, because it was absolutely wrong of the worthless, no-account druggy (suspect only, remember) to have a baby in his house. I mean it should be perfectly obvious that the police might likely start tossing hand grenades through doors and windows at any time. So it was neglectful and abusive to permit a child to live in such a dangerous environment. I mean if they would have had the child aborted as is proper, it never would have been burnt and had to go through such torturous trauma.

             1. Nobody’s saying that. But there is a valid point to be made about how our ever-more militarized police force is working more aggressively rather than smarter. Some cops absolutely live to kick down doors. David Koresh was the poster child for this. The ATF could have staked a couple of agents in downtown Waco, or even left a warrant with the local cops. Two or three months later they could have picked him up in a Food-4-Less parking lot rather than politicizing the event in an effort to intimidate free-thinking Americans with a show of (idiotic) force.

                Ultimately, IMHO, our government is a reflection of ourselves. Since the 60’s we’ve had certain elements of our society (union-teachers, militant feminists, race panderers, pro-druggies, etc.) teaching kids that unmerited self-esteem is king, that anything goes, that the government is responsible for assuring that we all have jobs and houses and whatnot, and that all cops and soldiers are baby killers, and that to strike a blow against said baby killers in any way, shape or form is noble, even if it involves impoverishing your neighbor by destroying his private property or committing murder, and that people are a plague on the planet and that there’s nothing special about them and that there is no God except the state (the ultimate irony). Stop-and-frisk in New York is a result of all that mixed with crony capitalism that keeps the people illiterate and impoverished.

                A literate, God-fearing, independent-minded, civics-minded people with a sense of responsibility and consideration works with Andy Taylor as the Sheriff, because largely they police themselves.

                A hedonistic, selfish, illiterate, dependent-minded people with an overinflated ego and a sense of entitlement has to have a militarized police force to maintain order. And the more we become one, the more we get one.

                1. Eh, apparently I should have attached a sarc/ tag to that. I thought I laid it on heavy enough to be obvious to everybody, but sarcasm doesn’t always come across well in text.

                2. … all cops and soldiers are baby killers …

                   But ask them about Kermit Gosnell, and they’ll tell you he was a hero.

                   Nothing more needs to be said, really. The sickness of that mindset is fully evident from that juxtaposition alone.

       4. There already are protocols for this, and they have a legitimate need. There are a few objectively diagnosable conditions (Schizophrenia and Manic Depression as 2 examples) where the person is simply incompetent to handle *anything* that is identifiable as a weapon. These people need to be off the street and in safe, calm surroundings.

          This is why government *must* be transparent, open, auditable and ROUTINELY held to account for it’s actions. (This is also the reason why the person who came up with the “Anti-social personality disorder” label ought to be beaten. Horrible name. That and “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.)

          You can’t build a government like you build a country bridge–build it right and walk away knowing it’ll be safe for a few decades. You HAVE to stay on top of it.

          This is why Progressives win. Government IS their goal, and it’s what they want to do.

          1. “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

             ODD?

             1. That one is with ALL the letters capitalized. Ours here is generally only the first letter capitalized.

                I’m thoroughly familiar with ODD. Second son. Sheesh.

                1. Yes, but is it just an extreme case of “us”?

                   1. No, it’s not.

                      The thing my Aunt never factored into her calculations (because the result was predetermined) was that I had spent 4 years in the Marine Corps, made it through college and a couple go-rounds with the Reserves, had held jobs in the 1 to 4 year duration, had never had any trouble with the law (one arrest, but it was a paperwork timing error), and had (at the time) been married for 12 or 15 years.

                      ODD folks really don’t amass that kind of record. In many cases “You’re not the boss of me” is the entirety of their opposition.

                      1. ah.

             2. indeed!

    4. Exactly. Voluntarily seeking any kind of counseling, for any reason, should not effect any rights, licenses, or permits you hold. And by voluntary I mean seeking it on your own, not deciding to seek it in order to avoid judicial punishment – once the law, or the threat of the law, becomes involved, every decision you make is coerced.

       1. It depends on the diagnosis. Certain objectively verifiable diseases (schizophrenia for example) mean that you really, really shouldn’t own firearms. Not that you can’t–when you’re on your meds and doing well–go for the occasional shoot, but you really, really should NOT be carrying a concealed weapon when having a fist fight with people no one else can see.

          1. Well, it seems to me that if I was routinely “getting into fist-fights with people only I could see”, then I should be in a mental hospital until I stopped “getting into fist-fights with people only I could see”. [Smile]

             IE my right of free movement should be removed even before considering my right to be armed.

             1. *nod* If someone is too dangerous to be trusted around possibly deadly weapons, they’re too dangerous to be trusted free. There are simply too many things that are deadly weapons.

             2. We can quibble over the “mental hospital” part, but basically yes.

                There’s three issues here (at least). One is we want people who are messed up to get help. Two is that we want a sufficiently narrow definition of mentally incompetent such that atheists aren’t in trouble when christians are in power and vice-versa, and that one having moderate emotional ranges isn’t grounds for losing one’s 2nd amendment right. Three is that there MUST be a procedure for restoring both one’s guns AND one’s rights should one “get better” or should the shrink be full of fine, fine fertilizer.

          2. I keep urging folks to apply the same kind of standards of proof for involuntary commitment that are used for criminal cases.

             It’d be a big improvement in every state I know of. 😦

14. Accept it. It’s a lost cause for you. If you couldn’t get a change in gun laws like you wanted after Newtown, you’re not going to get it. It’s just not going to happen. Why not spend that energy and money (I’m talking to YOU, Michael Bloomberg) on something that can actually make a meaningful difference, like something that would look at the real causes.

    Maybe the point isn’t to actually make for more gun control, but to keep us from advancing anything else– and disarming everyone would just be a bonus if we stopped fighting them.

15. I think there is only one thing that I’d quibble with, Tom:
    What your average Leftist misses is that criminals aren’t hobbyists. They’re in it for the career. That means they’re not as stupid as some might prefer to believe. Many have spent their entire lives working towards their criminal behavior. They’re good at it.

    There are all kinds of criminals, of course, but the more violent criminals are really not “good” at crime. They are mentally deficient people, psychopaths and sociopaths, who have no impulse control and less discipline. They may spend some time in association with criminal friends in practicing some forms of violence and some minor skills like hotwiring cars, or some burglary skills, but they are not “good” at crime.

    However, their lack of impulse control, lack of conscience and other sociopathic/psychopathic behaviors give them great advantages against normal people.

    1. I disagree, though as with either case (what you’re saying or what I’m saying), there are exceptions. Also, there’s the strong possibility that any disagreement is really a case of quibbling about terms rather than anything.

       I’m saying they’re “good” at it compared to the population as a whole. They are. They know more about how to pick a victim and execute a robbery than I ever will.

       What I suspect you’re saying, and please let me know if I’m wrong here, is that most criminals aren’t good compared to the criminal population, which is a much smaller sample size and likely to have a much higher percentage of people with relevant skills. If this is where you’re coming from, no arguments at all. Let’s face it, the guy pulling a knife on someone for their wallet ain’t exactly the inspiration for Ocean’s Eleven, you know?

       1. Indeed. TV and film have created a myth of a ‘professional’ criminal that probably exists in fewer numbers than the count of actors playing them.

          1. True. Those guys exist, but they’re very careful about what they do, and if they ever get caught, it’s a BIG take on the line, because they don’t risk it for chump change.

          2. Not a lot of story in “he’s a greedy SOB who knows he’s strong enough to take what he wants, but to dumb to realize he won’t always get away with it.”

          3. Ditto dirty cops, noble cops, gun fights, prostitutes. etc. etc.

             1. 3 out of 4, William, 3 out of 4.

                Strong evidence exists for an abundance of prostitutes working in the Film & TV industry as well as the MSM. Even a few hookers.

                I don’t notice anyone decrying the over-representation of corrupt politicians or dishonest journalists.

       2. Just for contrast, I was reading a short column in a magazine on a plane flight yesterday, about the James-Younger gang raid on Northfield. An example of a famous band of outlaws not being “good at crime”.

          1. The James-Younger gang read too many of their own press clippings and forgot that part of why they’d been so successful was that their people would protect them. Northfield, Minnesota wasn’t exactly eaten up with Jessie James fans in those days.

             1. A few years back, Massad Ayoob in his column wrote up the raid by using terms like “ride” for horse, and such, to make it sound like a modern motorcycle gang doing a bank robbery. It was an amusing take.

                1. I’ll have to see if I can dig that one out. Love reading Mass’s stuff.

                   1. Ayoob has columns in a couple of different places. There’s a print selection The Ayoob Files and a complete collection PDF only of American Handgunner to buy in parts or whole. I liked his treatment of Sodom and Gomorrah, Uncle Abe was connected and there were a couple visitors from out of town packing heavy iron.

             2. Add to that losing their local guide – you gotta know the territory. See e.g. A Dynasty of Western Outlaws for the passage of criminal knowledge from generation to generation..

       3. I think the distinction here is between being good at something — meaning very competent at it — and being interested in that thing. Criminals are very interested in the perceived benefits of crime, most non-criminals are not at all interested in the hazards of victimization by criminals. I am considering an analogy based on folk who are interested in smut as opposed to being good at sex, but that opens a can of what we’d likely prefer remain shut.

    2. Semantics and a “let us define your terms” moment I suppose. It is likely true that people who are really good at crime will miss the chance to share and learn from their prison mates. Gangbangers not so much.

       Perhaps in the present context it might be appropriate to exclude criminals such as Michael Milliken from the universe of discourse. Limiting the discussion to what some call the V(iolent) C(riminal) A(ctor) and other such may remind us the criminal is not successful by many standards but is certainly violent by any standards. Some of the body builders in California went on to success and some are violent criminals bulked up in prison (should weight lifting be encouraged in prison as promoting health and self discipline or discouraged as arming the criminal?) exhibiting perhaps roid rage. Gabe Suarez and other equally unusual training in the use of violence types themselves have interesting tales of the folks they deal (dealt) with.

16. I’d rather find a “Free Gun Zone” but there aren’t any around here. 🙂

    1. You and me both, Doc. You and me both. 🙂

       1. OK, this was me. Not sure why it went to an old WordPress account.

    2. If you find one, don’t forget your good buddy, here.

17. They think things like rape whistles, pepper spray, and self defense classes are effective alternatives.

    Last weekend I spent doing this: http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/force-on-force-gunfighting.aspx

    By Sunday evening I was a little bruised and bleeding a very little bit, and my knees, elbows and feet hurt.

    On the plus side I got to shoot a federal LEO a few times :). Dude was hell on wheels though.

    One of the guys there related a story from his younger days. His GF had taken one of those “Self Defense” seminars. Somehow he arranged to be the guy in the red suit for the last day.

    It didn’t go well. After taking 5 girls to the ground && making them cry despite their best efforts, he felt bad and wanted to leave.

    If you’re going to rely on Pepper Spray, get the biggest can you can find. Then you have something to beat them with.

    You wanna be safe? Take (and practice) a real martial art, and carry a f*king gun that you are prepared to use.

    As one of the guys in the class said “Staple them to the ground”.

    1. If you’re going to rely on Pepper Spray, get the biggest can you can find. Then you have something to beat them with.

       Note: this is not some sort of “you’ll miss” thing.

       My husband was ship’s defense force, and they had to be sprayed, yearly, with military grade pepper spray to be allowed to carry it. (Stronger than what civilians are allowed, and IIRC illegal in the area we were in. But they had to be qualified to use it, so anyways…..)

       “Spraying” means you stand there, with your eyes open, and they get a heavy dose at point-blank range in your eyes.

       One of the guys was totally immune, off the bat. They sprayed him, may have been water. Got another, fresh bottle and did a double dose– nope, no go.

       The guys doing the test said that they get maybe one in a hundred tested that have automatic immunity on some level. That’s an impression estimate rather than anything precise– but it was common enough that it happened every couple of weeks during heavy quals, and they had an established test for it.

       1. And something like ten percent are “functionally immune” as in all it really does is p*ss them off, it doesn’t noticeably impair any of their functions except their restraint on how they treat you.

          1. There is a similar deal with “Pain Belts” (essentially a hopped up variable power extra strong taser attached to a belt to “ensure compliance” of people the police are having issues with and cuffs with shackles don’t render them harmless enough). They were demonstrating it to officers and one large black guy was quite skeptical. They had a remote with a variable knob to adjust the strength. and the guys were put in the belt and told to rush the controller.
             All the cops would start out and then suddenly start flopping about like a fish, and screaming in pain before he got half way to full power and a few step into the exercise.
             They put it on the big fella and he simply walked up to the controller, who was twisting the knob for all he was worth and even took a step or two back, put his hand on his shoulder, and then as he fell to his knees was pulling him down with him. Once they got the belt off him, and he recovered his breath he looked at the guy and said “And I aint hopped up on drugs or gone insane” and felt that it was still not the be-all end-all to control unruly arrestees. I’ve seen a few guys who can take a regular taser hit and pull the electrodes out before it disables them.

          2. Yet somehow they always pick the guys who probably puked in the confidence chamber as their example of what happens with pepper spray.

             Notes:
             Confidence chamber- where the Navy teaches you that gas masks work. You put one on, and are put in a room where they put basically an incense form of pepper spray in the air. Eventually you take it off and have to answer a question.
             The puking- three of our people did it, one girl and two boys. It’s a physical reaction, nothing to do with being “tough.” May as well try toughing out being unable to talk after having the wind knocked out of you.

             1. For those who may have to go through this in the future do not shave, especially your ENTIRE HEAD right before going in.

                I didn’t puke, but it wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been.

                Also it’s not a great idea to look the instructor in the eye while you’re reciting whatever. It did sort of impress him though.

             2. yup had one guy in my army basic unit who was immune, they made him go thru twice

       2. My sister’s boyfriend is an RAF CBRN specialist. Apparently every guy in the unit is functionally immune to CS gas just due to repeated exposure – the first time is hell but by round 20 or so you just get a pleasant warm feeling.

          1. Back in 1986 when I went through the gas chamber at my first duty station there was this crusty old Master Sergeant who had first entered service in 1950. Smoked unfiltered Pall Malls.

             We trooped into the chamber, and they started burning the CS/CN/Whatever. He takes his mask off, puts it in the carrier, pulls out a cigarette and lights up.

             Yeah, dude was tougher than real boot leather.

             1. Tougher than real boot leather *and* showing off to scare the piss out of you.

                1. Oddly enough it didn’t do that.

                   It just told me that you COULD beat it. It never really bothered me much after that. Yeah, it was unpleasant, but frankly so much of the Marine Corps was that the gas chamber was just a bit annoying.

       3. From time to time I tangle with a gun control loon who is convinced that the various forms of less-than-lethal weapons are universally effective.

          Not the reality.

          1. In fairness, that is what we’re told.

             1. More important less than lethal is too often confused with non-lethal and even thought like say Tylenol perfectly safe at least in the circumstances.

             2. In fairness, it is indeed effective, for certain values of effective … most of which are defined by the attacker, not the defender.

                1. *shrug* I have a lot less trouble blaming folks who were lied to than the folks doing the lying, especially when there’s no good way for folks to know they’re being lied to.

18. “They think things like rape whistles, pepper spray, and self defense classes are effective alternatives.”

    What is a whistle going to accomplish, unless you’re hoping to summon someone to do violence on your behalf, preferably with a gun?

    1. Pre-zactly. Unless you think the sound could interrupt the bad guy’s OODA loop enough to give you time to draw, duck, or run, or yes.

    2. Turn your rape and/or murder into a musical.

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