Your Most Basic Right

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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Your most basic right is the ability to defend yourself.  The ability in fact, to preserve your life.

Every animal fights to preserve itself.  And every human does too, whether it’s legal or illegal.

Any society that violates that right is prioritizing savagery over civilization, and lawlessness over law.

Why?  Because criminals don’t obey the law.  So while it’s illegal to attack you, the criminal will still do it, and if you don’t have the right to defend yourself (as is true in many places in Europe) then you’re devolving to the criminals having power of life and death over law abiding citizens.  This is a recipe for the law to become dead letter and for everyone ignoring it.

I know this is not the reason that the founders gave us the second amendment.  Or it mostly isn’t. So much of the Constitution is defined as “protecting yourself from the government” and of course, that’s just one form of protecting yourself from the government.  The horror-regimes of the 20th century would have fared very differently with an armed populace.  Which is why the first act of any would be tyrant is to grab the guns.

So, you say, what do we do about things like school shootings?  You already know what you do.  Mostly, you stop warehousing kids all together like sitting ducks.  Also, persecuting violent people who are known wolves would help.

But how do we prevent them?

Well, preventing them is much to ask for.  Kind of like the idiot women who want to make sure there is never rape.  Men can’t make sure one man somewhere isn’t a wrongun.  They’re not a hive entity.  In the same way, even the best police force in the world can’t make sure there are no crazy people who want to shoot up schools.

This is particularly difficult if you include in it gang warfare that happens to take place in schools.

So, if you can’t prevent school shootings, how can you prevent their being mass shootings with a lot of casualties?

There’s only one way. Let people defend themselves.  Sure you might not want to arm every student, because teen hormones and stuff…. but then again, if everyone is armed, what is the payoff in a shooting?  You’ll just get nailed by your classmates.  Sure, some people will do that, to kill the ex boyfriend/girlfriend, but you know… that would happen anyway, by poison or bomb, or whatever, if they’re that determined to die for it.  The fact that they would DIE for it will deter any number of them. Even teens have a self-preservation instinct.

“But then people will just shoot at each other every day.”  Yeah, I know the left will say that.  That’s because the left has never met an actual, living human being.  They’ve met human beings that live ONLY in their own heads.  Hence trying to tell #yesallmen they’re responsible for every single crazy person who happens to have a penis, as though they could somehow send out penis-mind-rays and control every male on the planet.  Or you know, the charming idea that if there only are some more laws, people will stop committing violence.  Because, you know, we’ve had laws against murder since… ever… and that’s why there is none.

No, of course, people wouldn’t just shoot each other every day over minor stuff.  That has never happened in any armed group, or even in shall issue states.  This, btw, is a big problem with your movies, leftists, when people get a gun and just can’t help shooting people left and right, like it’s some kid of magical weapon.

A gun is a tool.  You can kill people with a dozen different tools.  I can kill you with a shoe, my handbag, or the handle to my office door.

A gun just makes it easier.  At least if you see clearly more than about two feet away.

Because it makes killing easier, criminals and psychopaths will have it.  They will have guns, regardless of what the law says.

The only people who believe that the way to prevent violence is to disarm the law abiding people and leave them at the mercy of psychopaths are children and idiots.  The ones using this to disarm the populace are neither, but would-be totalitarians like the disgusting Soros who is a Nazi collaborator and quite literally a race traitor. (The left caviled at Pope Benedict having belonged to the more or less obligatory Hitler’s Youth, but they’re okay with Soros selling out innocent Jews for a cut of their fortune.  Go figure.  It’s almost like they have no moral compass, and only standards of convenience.)

I’m not about to let a coalition of would-be totalitarians chomping at the bit to repeat Stalin’s body count, and the idiots who think if only there’s laws against it, it will never happen, strip me of my natural right to self-defense.

You can’t force people to stop defending themselves.  The most you can do is destroy the rule of law.  So you can stop the histrionics.  We’re onto you.  And you cannot have us this time.

If you get rid of the rule of law, I doubt it will go the way you expect, either.  So whether you’re an idiot or a would be Stalin, ask yourself what you’re likely to get from this nonsense.

It’s not what you expect.  We have had enough.  You got to make the 20th century a vast grave.  You’ll have no more from us.

You shall not pass.

598 thoughts on “Your Most Basic Right”

  1. “A gun is a tool. You can kill people with a dozen different tools. I can kill you with a shoe, my handbag, or the handle to my office door.”

    We need Stiletto Control, now! There should be height limits — nobody needs a six-inch heel! — and rules covering who can buy high heels, where they can be worn — schools ought be heel-free zones! — and perhaps even no-heel lists t prevent the wrong people from wearing them.

    After that we can take on the challenge of assault handbags.

    1. Have you seen what can happen when a horse throws a shoe? No heels there.

      Though I am amused by the idea of a No-Heel list. There are few heels I’d rather not have to deal with…

    3. After an incident with a four-inch spike heeled shoe, a student, and a slick floor, my Day Job is a spike-heel-free zone. She was lucky to only break one ankle.

      1. At prom, I had a stiletto heel get stuck in the lawn of the venue. Sunk right in all three inches. Soft ground and narrow point of pressure don’t mix well. My date had to use both hands to get it free. Don’t wear heels these days usually, but yeah, they can make a decent weapon in a pinch.

        I’d still rather have a firearm to defend myself with over a shoe. =)

        1. I heard a story once of a professional dancer who wore stilettos—and of the time a guy groped her on the dance floor.

          You can apparently punch through leather with a properly-aimed stiletto, FWIW. And the foot inside presents no difficulty at all after that.

          1. Cobblestones. I got stuck a couple of times back when I still wore stilettos. There are several places paved with them where I live, like around the cathedral.

              1. Men put up with a lot of nonsense from ourselves, but rarely over comfortable clothes. Sure, a lot of us dress like slobs. But these old jeans and flannel shirts don’t pinch or rub me the wrong way. These old boots are waterproof still, and pretty warm in the winter.

                Now don’t get me wrong, I like the look of those nice dresses and heels, how they accentuate the feminine curves on a woman. I’m just glad *I* don’t have to wear such things to keep up with some sort of fashion.

                On the plus side, though, I’ve gotten no end of compliments for giving foot rubs after parties from the gals I’ve dated. *chuckle* Making your partner comfortable is always worthwhile.

                1. Dude, you even get vicarious brownie points for giving your past dates foot rubs! 😀

                  I love heels, I love cute shoes like that…but my feet do not. I can make it a couple of hours, tops, in a pair of even rather chunky heels.

                  1. *grin* Thanks, lass. I don’t think any woman has feet made for heels. *chuckle*

                    I started doing that because one of my first dates plunked her feet in my lap and said “Footrub!” after the dance. Then she gave me the sad puppy eyes when I looked at her stupidly. What can I say, I’m a sucker for the sad puppy eyes.

      2. I read once that one of the most challenging design problems faced by aeronautics engineers was to come up with an airliner floor that could stand up to the enormous pressure exerted at the tip of a metal spiked heel.

        1. That’s why composite floor panels were invented… because there was no way the airlines at the time were going to order their stewardesses not to sear uniform-issue spike heels. *facepaw* Learned about it in structures and composites class at A&P school from a guy who’d worked for Boeing “back when.”

      3. After I managed to nearly maim myself in front of an officer I didn’t know was there, our uniform inspections at A-school suddenly changed to where females could wear the dress blues that have pants.

        The heels on those shoes are…maybe an inch? If you include the entire sole?

    4. A shoe?! Pfft, how about just a thumb?

      (Though, honestly, he does cheat here, several times. He hits him with the left hand, trips him with his right foot, and then gigs him with his left thumb at the end. Tsk, tsk.)

      1. I allow as I do like me some Sean Connery – he’s my favorite Sean (although Bean is a close second.)

        Mark Harmon do sweeten the package, don’t he?

          1. Oops! I meant my favorite film Seans.

            I don’t much like any real-life Seans. Nothing personal – I don’t much like any real-life anybodies.

    6. Now now now let’s be reasonable. Properly trained and licensed dommes certainly can be trus…
      I’ll be in my bunk.

  2. After the last decade I think we’re only at about 60% for actual rule of law. If you’ve got the right last name or work for a Government Agency (that is not the VA) then you can get away with anything.

      1. That image of the second group of children is freaky. Look at the hand on the girl in the center front (wearing the shirt that says, “Thing 10”). It doesn’t look like it’s really part of the same picture.

      1. Good point! I excluded the VA because they seem to be about the only GA that the media seems fine to beat up on. Not excusing their screw-ups because they’ve had so so very many, but I doubt that other agencies face the same scrutiny when screwing up.

  3. Immune system. People still get sick… but a healthy immune system can mean that that is all that happens, followed by recovery. Screw that system up (immunosuppressive drugs, immune deficiency afflictions) and prognosis is not so good. And, to balance, if things get overstimmulated there is also a decrease in health. The analog of an overstimulated immune system? A “police” force that knows it has or should have zero opposition and is… overly “enthusiastic” about dealing with any perceived problem, real or not.

  4. It’s a bit heartening to see that more than one jurisdiction has decided that allowing concealed carry by teachers and other school staff after passing a training course is the best method of ensuring the protection of their students.

    1. Indeed – I favor the Israeli model. Which a couple of districts in Texas are already doing. Armed teachers and volunteers on staff, student drills which teach the kids to do more than just cower in place.

      My daughter had a job delivering gift fresh fruit assortments, locally – and she noted that our local schools are very, very difficult — almost impossible to get into, if you are not staff or a student. Which is a relief for me, as I have had nightmares about a Beslan-type incident here. She says that local hospitals are pretty secure as well – OB wards/nurseries especially. (No wonder about that, seeing the numbers of deranged women trying to steal babies.)

      2. After Texas started allowing CCW for teachers, Step-niece was one of the many who were delayed by 0bama’s foot dragging nics ( well they were swamped as well), then once her check finally happened, nothing she was able to shoot was available for purchase, then ammo was scarce then too. But finally she got what she needed. Her hubby already had a suitable pistol, so he was ready to go.

      3. Day Job has made some serious security shifts over the past 8 years or so. It is now much, much harder for someone who is not on the approved list to enter the building. And we have different procedures for worst-case scenarios.

        1. I’m still trying to wrap my head around a school without secured entrances. At my high school we had crashouts and often did have the lunchroom doors open but without help your only means of ingress was to be buzzed in.

          1. Most prep school campuses of the 90’s were largely unsecured during the day, much like much of the college campuses. A few buildings here and there, some rooms, some entrances might normally be locked, but in general most campuses were open. There was typically some roving security, on foot or in some type of vehicle.

            1. Yeah, I the 80s at my boarding school, you could drive in park your car and walk into the school. Go to the entrence to dorm, open it with the iron latch. walk up the stairs, push open the door to the hall. All the room doors which were not floor to ceiling had a wood bar you could close from the inside only. That is to say there was nothing to prevent a stranger from walking into my unoccupied room.

            2. The theoretically secured buildings usually aren’t.

              Look for the places that folks sneak out for a smoke, or 30 seconds of quiet, or (since the folks making the secured paths are usually morons who don’t have to live with it) taking a short-cut.

              Or just look like a student, walk up to the door, and knock.

              Social engineering.

            3. Local district schools have been full open campus up until this school year. Neighborhood school they didn’t fence the grounds off, but they did fence in the school buildings. Gates open in the morning, during lunch (I think), & when school lets out. Otherwise they are locked down. Can be opened from the inside, not from the outside. Everyone entering the school must use the front gate by the office. Neighborhood was not happy. It prevents walking in the covered, but otherwise open walkways during inclement weather. Especially those with animals. One of the louder grouching neighbors have been here as long as or longer than the school. Schools response – “new legal requirement.” Don’t know how true or not, but shuts everyone up.

            1. ’70’s for me. But I noticed at my 30th reunion all the breeze way accesses were walled off interior gardens now. Does not stop the smokers, etc., from opening a door & blocking it open so they can come & go. Although with correct security in place, even that can be stopped by triggering an alarm.

      4. I was shocked and revolted to learn that in some areas, school pupils are TOLD rom ower in place.

        The quiz show QI once had a biologist contestant who said “In science, we have a word for an animal who will neither fight its predator nor flee it, amd that word is ‘lunch’.

        I hope and pray that if I am ever in a ‘school shooting’ like situation I will have the courage to grab a fire extinguisher and try to brain the shooter.

        1. Use the contents first. If you can get close enough to give him a face full of foam it’ll be harder for him to see where you are.

          1. Heck, it will work the same as obscuring smoke on the battlefield, too. Even if you don’t hit him in the face with it, it might make *everyone* harder to see.

            1. Yep 🙂 If I remember right, most of the CO2 based extinguishers are pretty good at dispersal, you still have to be within 5′ to 10′. (Haven’t used one in a while). I’m also pretty sure that getting a face-full of that is NOT going to be healthy.

          2. If it’s water-only, better to brain. If it’s an ABC (non-CO2), the powder is an irritant. Those are 2 pound (kitchen type) and 5 pounders (with a hose). Did some training with those, and the powder wasn’t pleasant. Our dorms (circa 1970) had pressurized water extinguishers. I’m pretty sure the soda-acid type is obsolete.

            I think CO2 extinguishers would be rare in a school environment; more common in auto shops and such. If it has the cone nozzle, it’d be CO2.

            1. Many years ago, I had a Purple K extinguisher fall and jam under the driver’s seat in the tractor I drove long haul. Cleaned that powder up for months.

      6. The OB wards around here are not on the ground floor, have keyed/intercom entry, and when you’re admitted, they have you list who is and who is not allowed entry. IIRC, the elevators there aren’t even labeled—you have to *know* that’s the elevator to get there.

    2. This is why I share Sarah’s general optimism. It used to be that every time something like this happened we got new gun control laws. Now the results are that gun control efforts go nowhere while a few more schools stop being target warehouses gun-free zones.

        1. We get those signs and areas around Oregon. I’m sure it will stop at least 0.000001% of the likely killers.

          I’m waiting for a lawsuit against a gun-free establishment; if I can’t be armed, you should be obligated to provide armed security. And I suppose ineffective armed security would still leave the establishment at risk. On the other hand, we’re in the Ninth Circus, so such a suit probably won’t happen here.

      2. Hopefully it continues. Keep getting idiots like Flake who think just this one time the scorpion won’t sting them. And hundreds of legislators and bureaucrats who will not enforce the law.

        1. Problem is potus also says to change background checks and age requirements. We’ll get four month long background checks (budget cuts dontchano) and no minors may even touch firearms until mid 30’s unless they are in process of using them to kill the undesireables as proper government drones. The actual mental health and security reforms will never happen. Yanno, the stuff that would actually stop these things.

  5. I also saw more than one column that posited that school staffers would now start to concealed carry in defiance of any local laws rather than submit to the possibility of such incidents as the left continually rails about.

  6. Luke 22:36 – “He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.”

    The modern day sword is the gun. We must have a means to defend ourselves, our families, and our societies. Without that God-given right, we are at the mercy of the world. And last time I took a look at history, the world wasn’t very merciful.

    1. Swords were the assault weapon of their era. A knife or axe has other uses, but a sword is meant solely for attack or defense.

  7. Been wanting to think this thru some, and Sarah has given me a good opportunity.
    Back when I was young and dumb, learning the ropes of an academic career, we were taught that early English/British culture was “shame-based.” This wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but a measure of a more tribal, more violent, less developed time. Beowulf was shamed into action. King John was “legislated” into action, i.e. he had “rule of law” imposed on him. V different things.

    With gun control as with way too many other contemporary memes, we’re returning to a shame-based culture and revisiting the “violence of the tribe” where a leader can be shamed into an action, driven by his emotional tribe. And nothing is more emotional than school shootings …

    It’s not as if Grendel’s Dam is out there waiting to be attacked … or something. I wish people were adult enough to understand that they aren’t living in Beowulf, the sequel.

    1. Actually, this is part and parcel of republics and democracies. It’s the politician who goes whichever way he thinks the wind blows. The question is whether we will tolerate it to the point of voting the rascals back in a second time. If, for example, Dallas re-elects Mike “NRA Stay Away” Rawlings, then Dallas has precisely the sort of mayor it deserves.

      1. t’s the politician who goes whichever way he thinks the wind blows.

        This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.
        “Some people have the great misconception that they way we fix things is by electing the right people. It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way we fix things. No, the way we fix things is by creating a climate of opinion such that it’s politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.” Milton Friedmann (paraphrased from memory of one of the several expressions of that sentiment he made)

        The problem isn’t the office holders doing the wrong things. It’s that what they’re doing is politically profitable for them. Change that and they’ll either switch to doing the new politically profitable things or be replaced. Either way, we get the benefit of the right things being done.

        Don’t change that and if you manage to get a “right person” in he won’t be there long enough to do much without being replaced by someone who does do what’s politically profitable. And, in the end, nothing positive is accomplished.

    2. Have you read Theodore Dalrymple’s _Spoilt Rotton: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality_? He really digs into the rise of emotion-based law and the demands for overwrought emotion that society seems to be developing.

      1. Developing? Fiddlesticks! We have suffered under emotionally based Law since the Victorian era at latest. What else was Prohibition (and the Volstead Act was the climax of that idiocy, not the start).

      2. I have read most of Dalrymple. This is why I love Sarah’s! Hanging out with people who have read what you’ve read. A meeting of like minds. My people I have finally found you!!

    3. I think that it is inaccurate to say that the Anglo-Saxon culture was based on shame. Beowulf could only be shamed if his culture also had standards of honor and virtue which his accuser could demonstrate he was not meeting. Shame, in context, is the negative form of exhortation. To use the carrot and stick analogy: in a honor culture, public glory and open admiration are the carrot; shame and vocal disapproval are the stick.

  8. An armed society is a (mostly) polite society.

    I’m thinking it’s about time to join the NRA.

    1. Life member.
      Occasional member of National Gun Rights Association too, but they tend to be even more take no prisoners than the NRA.

    2. I’ll see your joining the NRA and raises you the ‘National Mandatory Firearms Ownership and Training Act’. (I just made that up in case you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of it before).

      Basically those not deemed unfit for firearms (mentally ill and felons) will be required to a) own at least one firearm b) participate in an annual firearms training day. Failure to comply with either will result in a $100 ‘tax’ with each year of failure incrementing an additional $100 (so year 10 would be $1000). The ‘tax’ will be used to subsidize ammo, firearms, and additional training for those not financially able to afford them.

      A week will be added at the end of high school for required firearms training. Topics will include first aid, firearms safety, including safe storage, effects of various caliber rounds on tissue, and firearms maintenance.

      I know this is over the top, but it would help demystify firearms so that the only knowledge people possess isn’t what they learn from TV, the media, and the MSM.

      The Progressives gave us the ACA so I think this is the perfect way to tahnk them for that 🙂

              1. Well, they would want to be able to swipe left or right on orders – “I’ll obey this one, not that one. Oooh, that one sounds much too hard. *left* Oh, a parade! *right*”
                But yeah, also “I wonder if that tank commander is in Tinder?” *right*

                1. Yah, I don’t think ‘that order is racist/sexist’ whatever is really going to fly. I wonder how long it would take before boot camp went back to being more ‘hands on’.

                  Hmm, I wonder if being exposed to actual manliness would be the end of hipsters?

                  1. That, and living in actual rather than simulated poverty. “Chic Poor” is how I’ve had hipsterism described to me, and explained that I was therefore likely immune to it, having lived if not the real thing, at least close enough to know it’s not at all “chic.”

                    1. Lol. I totally understand. I was actually technically homeless for a month and managed to get by crashing on people’s couches until I was able to get a job.

                      I even had plans on if something happened how I could survive with a combination of camping and gym showers.

        2. It already is. All male US citizens and legal residents between the ages of 17 and 45 who aren’t in the military or National Guard are members of the unorganized militia. That’s why AdamPM’s plan doesn’t even need to rely on the “tax” dodge. The Constitution gives Congress the power to organize and regulate the militia, which includes mandating weapons ownership and training (see the Militia Act of 1792).

          BTW, that last bit is why the argument that the Second Amendment refers only to militias falls on its face. Congress already had the power to regulate the militia, why would an amendment to grant it that power be necessary?

          1. Heh, ok, I mostly threw in the ‘tax dodge’ to annoy Progressives and as a big FU over the Obamacare ‘tax’. Basically an example of ‘if you pass stupid crap and bend the rules then don’t act surprised when your rules are crammed down your throat’.

            With the societal changes since the 70’s is it safe to assume that now it would be all citizens and not just men?

            1. Nope, not exactly:

              10 U.S.C. § 311 – U.S. Code – Unannotated Title 10. Armed Forces § 311. Militia:  composition and classes

              (a)  The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32 , under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

              For it to apply to females they have to have joined the National Guard. For males, they just have to be between the ages of 17 and 45 (or if veterans, under the age of 64).

              1. Yep. Making 10USC311a apply to males and females both would be my first bill introduced were I ever to befall the foul fate of being elected to Congress.

                I’d pay good money to watch the committee and floor debates on that change if it could ever advance.

              2. certain parties claim to want equality, but i don’t see them clamoring to change ‘all able-bodied males’ to ‘all able-bodied persons’

                1. I seriously do not get why them being biologically ignorant twits (or desiring suicide on a national scale) means we should play along, just because it annoys them.

              3. But since that was passed, we’ve had further acts prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sex and age. I think it’s arguable now that *every* able-bodied adult is a member of the militia.

              4. Huh. That’s different. Used to be just female officers of the National Guard. I wonder when it changed.

          2. In fact it has long been my belief that the infamous “militia clause” in the Second Amendment was put there precisely to give the new government the authority to REQUIRE citizens to own and maintain such arms as militia service would require. In this it is counter to the rest of the Bill of Rights as it specifies something the government can do as what we insist it not be allowed to do to us.

            1. That rule had been in effect under the British, before the Revolution.

              One of the triggering (sorry) events of the revolt was the Virginia governor’s attempt to seize the Williamsburg armory.

              https://www.c-span.org/video/?437886-1/1774-dunmores-war-battle-point-pleasant
              Nice explanation of the organizing principle in this presentation at (about) the 22-minute mark.

              From closed captioning transcript:
              The governor has the power of the sword in the county of Virginia. He can arm, muster, train, bring into service militia and others. He is the duty to suppress rebellions, repel invasions, order militia to go where he wants. He can issue letters of mark and reprisal to privateers. He can impose martial law during wartime and anything else i commander can do in the colony — a commander can do in the colony during wartime.

              The legislature has the power of the purse. They enact the law that governs the militia. The court martial system and everything else. During wartime, they can make rules for everything how you treat deserters. Additional laws, the acts for making provisions against invasions and insurrections. The operational guidelines for the militia. Most of all, they are the ones that pass the law that raises taxes to pay for troops.

              How many of her that Americans did not want to be for tax and that was the reason for the American revolution? No. : is paid taxes to the province, county, king. The problem was — colonists pay taxes to the province, county, king. The problem was they did not want to pay taxes to the general assembly.

              Then, these are the guys that run the bullish on the day-to-day operations. Commanders of the militia within their county. In the duty like the governor to command, arm, levy, muster, equip. They can raise and march anywhere and the county and they can help neighboring counties. The ones that make sure their soldiers have the proper arms and ammunition of the time and it is always in good order. They exercise a certain amount of discipline.

              This is one that a lot of people are surprised to hear because we’re used to hearing about the Massachusetts militia where officers are elected. In Virginia, that was not the case. When it they established a new county, it was divided into 10 geographic areas called companies. Then the chief militia officer selected the commanders of those companies. Every able-bodied military age male was in that company. A 50-man county could up 300 guys. It was military, not tactical.

              He would get together with captains of those 10 companies said they would select the lieutenants and intense. Then they selected the corporals and the captains and the malicious — musicians. They elected their own officers. What did the militia law say? By law, the militia included all able-bodied white males between the ages of 18 and 60.

              You hear about joining the militia. No. You did not join. The only time they joined was when they needed volunteers and if they did not get enough, they drafted them. They were all given a fire log, bayonet, something they kept that their home. A bayonet. You have heard Americans did not know how to use bayonets. A cartridge box, if you lived on the frontier you could substitute a rifle. And a tomahawk for a bayonet.

              Some were exempt. The clergy of the church of england and if you others. That was the biggest class of people that do not have to belong to the militia. Others did not have to participate by the usually had to do something. Like do buying of five sets of equipment for the poor men in the company.

              They had to do drills on a regular basis. They were called together at least once he or for general muster, usually at the county courthouse. Usually in the springtime. They county commanders, private musters, usually have their own home and they mustered usually four times a year. Once is a company, one says a battalion.

              The important thing was it was not a part-time job. They did not get paid. They did not have paid unless they were called up for at least six days. If they were called to active duty they did get paid and that was at the discretion of the general assembly.

              When it came to fighting, a lot of companies in the tidewater area had to follow doctrine. The further you got to the frontier, they brought out and developed bush fighting. That was not just adopting Indian methods and techniques. That included following the laws in Europe for small unit warfare and they combined them with some techniques and methods they might’ve learned from Indian allies war while fighting Indian enemies and they developed something entirely new which they called bush fighting or skirmishing.

      2. I like the idea, but I’m afraid that it would be found to be unconstitutional. Yes, for the militia (you and me) to be well-regulated (properly trained in handling firearms) something like this would be quite useful, but I suspect the “shall not be infringed” injunction vis-a-vis the right to keep and bear arms would be interpreted to allow individuals the right to refrain from keeping or bearing arms entirely. As it probably should be, actually. The government has no right to tell us what to do about keeping and bearing arms.

        1. Since the requirement to own private health insurance is still standing then I think we can push this. The Left opened the door with Obamacare, so while it’s open we might as well hit them in the head with it a few times. I think we could make a better case for this than the Left made for Obamacare. (And be able to use FACTS instead of fantasy).

          I’m also seeing this as a way around any potential serious attempt to repeal the 2nd by any means. Once we’ve all be inducted into the ‘militia’ then a big chunk of the Left’s arguments about the 2nd go away. We’re ALL the militia and as such we’ve had minimum training and we need to be armed.

          The biggest take away I keep getting after these shootings is that Progressives know nothing about firearms(that and they want us de-fanged). They’ve never touched one, never known anyone that touched one, and as such they view firearms almost like a magical device.

          1. I hadn’t thought about that aspect. If you can be required to purchase government-mandated health insurance, you can be required to purchase a government-mandated assault rifle. 🙂 Now, I think you can’t be required to do either, but I don’t think they can be separated legally…

            1. Heh, I’m feeling a little evil this morning and this whole idea just kinda hit me while I was enjoying my morning coffee. Today’s post also seemed the perfect time to bring up the idea. (Today’s post might have inspired the idea).

              I agree, I don’t think we should be required to own/do either. The Progressives opened the door and made the new rules and as Kurt Schlichter is always saying ‘The Left is going to hate the new rules they made’.

            2. The way is clear, as defined by Chief Justice Roberts via his legal yoga moves: Congress can assess a tax on any US citizen or green card holder in the militia age who does not buy appropriate weaponry, and also annually buy enough ammunition to maintain a minimum proficiency.

      3. One week will not be enough time. First you have to unlearn those special snowflakes all the myths and Hollywood memes they have learned from the movies, TV, and first shooter games. That will take several weeks all by itself.

        1. Most of those get dispelled the very first day you actually put a firearm in their hands. The rest you can work on over time.

          1. Yes. You can do a lot in a week. The week is just the mandatory training. There’s nothing saying you can’t offer additional training for those that are interested.

            I’d be willing to be that once exposed to firearms and getting a chance to use them in a ‘safe’ environment that there will be significant interest in learning more.

      4. Leave out the bit about the ‘mentally ill’, amd allow felons to apply for the rstoration of their gun rights just as they are allowed to apply for restoration of their franchise (in most jurisdictions). And do away with ‘gun free’ zones off of private property.

        The definition of who is ‘unfit for firearms’ is going to be in the hands of politicians, and their motivation is going to be to NEVER have allowed somebody who goes on a shooting spree to legally own a gun.

        1. This one I am biased against. I worked with that population and they’re part of the original reason I owned firearms. (At least after I got out of the service, civilian arms are really tame once you’ve shot a 60, a SAW, or a grenade launcher).

          Our ‘corrections’ system is a horrible misnomer. If you’ve never read it, “Inside the Criminal Mind” by Stanton Samenow is an excellent laymen reference to criminal psychology. His advanced works are amazing if you have an interest in that topic and are willing to tackle 600 page books. (Psychology background helps).

          1. That’s all fine….if you trust the system. I NEVER trust the system.

            There are too many cases where a conviction has been overturned because it developed that the State prosecutor was so intent in racking up convictions that evidence was supressed. There are too many ‘felons’ whose crime against society was cultivating pot.

            So long as the State defines what a felony is, and it always will, there must bena way for a ‘felon’ to regain civil rights.

            And in any case, the best deterrent for crime is always going to be the lively possibility that the victim will shoot the predator.

            1. I don’t trust the system. I want to make the system weaker so when it does go rogue it’s going to have a limited ability to do damage of any type, except to itself.

              The only way the Progressives are going to learn that making Government to big is if we rub their noses in big Government.

              Growing pot is a felony. I don’t think it merits one, but until/unless the law is changed I don’t have sympathy for those busted for that crime. If the law changes and it is no longer a felony, providing they haven’t committed another crime while growing pot, then I would support a review of their case and potentially restoration of all rights.

              1. Growing pot may be a felony, but that it is is absurd. I don’t even LIKE pot, amd I think it’s absurd. But then, I think the laws about heroin and cocaine are wrong,too. And if the laws about opiates keep even ONE chronic pain patient from getting the relief he needs, they are barbaric, and I don’t give a fat damn how many drug addicts they are proported to save.

                Too goddamned many perfectly reasonable acts are felonies. And if we allow the Statists to say that the mentally ill may not have guns, pretty soon desiring a gun will be the leading symptom of State recognized mental illness.

                1. I agree with you! Pretty much on all your points. (I think I made the mental illness one someplace else with the exact same point).

                  I’m all for allowing adults to make their own decisions as long as their decisions do not intentionally harm others and if there are negative consequences to their actions that the payment to correct that harm comes from that person and not the tax-payer via Government financed programs.

            2. There are too many ‘felons’ whose crime against society was cultivating pot.

              You really need to do in-depth research on that; usually the pot conviction is after it’s plea-bargained down for speed and ease of conviction.

              1. It’s one of the many things Samenow covers in his works. Out of the 1000’s of felonies most of them commit, they will only be caught and prosecuted for a few.

                1. The guys who were running a car-radio-and-identity-theft-ring, as well as dealing pot and other hard drugs, who stole my tire (but not my identity!) were eventually found guilty of… I think it was simple possession of pot, and given suspended community service.

                  One of their members got pissy about not getting a big enough cut from the harder drugs, called the cops, and they were busted with stolen property, stolen identities and a large amount of pot in the process of being bagged for sale.
                  (The detective brought back my tire, though.)

                  1. Part of it is where you’re at and what the lead prosecutor’s priorities are. PIma County, Arizona (of which Tucson is the county seat) leads Arizona on cases which go to trial, I think less 10% go through plea bargaining. Which is partly why property taxes in Tucson are the highest in the state, even higher than Scottsdale.

        2. “And do away with ‘gun free’ zones off of private property.”
          If and ONLY IF the private property owner assumes 100% liability for injuries caused by someone else disregarding security.

          “their motivation is going to be to NEVER have allowed somebody who goes on a shooting spree doesn’t slavishly follow the state to legally own a gun.”

          FTFY.

      5. Sorry, I’m not buying… I’ve known WAY too many people who definitely should never own a firearm. Thankfully, most of them self-selected against firearms ownership.

        Now, none of that means I’m for gun control. Not even a little bit. It’s one thing for a person to look inside and say “I’m just not personally responsible enough to own a firearm”, and entirely another thing for the government to step in and take rights away from someone.

        1. Think of it as ‘forced growth’. Looking at the lives of some of these Progressives, this would be the most responsible thing ever required of them.

          The people I know who I wouldn’t be comfortable owning a firearm are already included under “mental health” or felon.

          1. Sigh.

            I have a friend who is terrified of guns. Yea, his parents were some of those “Progressives” that you seem to dislike (and probably the root of his firearm phobia), but he’s a card carrying Libertarian. He accepts that people have a right to own, and even carry, firearms. He was fine with being around me knowing that I was carrying. He just can’t bring himself to touch one.

            So how would you go about enforcing your “forced growth” on this guy? Arrest him? Send him to boot camp? Jail? FIRING SQUAD?

            What about another friend of mine who’s father was killed in Vietnam. He’s a pacifist. In high school, when the bullies had their fun with him (because hey neat, a punching bag that doesn’t fight back), myself and another large friend would rescue him, he would be mad at us cause we had to get a little rough “on his behalf”, and being his friends we knew how he felt about violence. Hell, we did it anyway because it was a pain in the ass getting him cleaned up afterwards. Just tap him and dude’s nose would bleed like forever. Shouldn’t he be allowed the freedom to be a pacifist if that is what he believes in? And more confusing to me… In this case, would he be mad at me for fighting for his freedom to NOT have to be part of your “forced growth” militia? Yea, the draft. He signed up for that because it was the law back then. Luckily, we didn’t get into any wars while he was eligible to be drafted, but what you are talking about isn’t the draft. You just want to “Force some growth” on people.

            Sorry, the idea sucks. You as a person are probably all right, this isn’t a judgement on you as a person. I just have to say though, this “force growth” idea stinks.

            1. That’s fine 🙂 Like I said in the original post, this was something I thought of this morning and with today’s topic I decided to throw it out to the wolves for critique.

              This isn’t anything I would ever expect to be discussed outside of this forum. It’s a mix of what I think might help reduce some of the problems associated with school shootings and a really big FU to Progressives. Am I willing to force Progressives to do things they don’t like or don’t want to do? Yes. I’m even using the exact same method of coercion they used when they passed Obamacare. A ‘tax’ that increases every year if you don’t comply.

              The entire ‘militia’ thing is nothing more than an attempt to derail Progressive arguments that the 2nd only applies to a militia. I’d be happy if kids were just taught the basics of gun safety and shot 20 rounds through a .22 rifle. (In addition to learning first aid and enough about ballistics to not freak out that a itty bitty .223 round is ‘the most powerful cartridge EVER!’)

              I like a few individual Leftists. But no, as a general rule I don’t like people that insult me, threaten me, and try to disarm me. I typically avoid them because spending time around them reminds me of traversing a minefield.

              See earlier post, I’m fine with people thinking I’m an asshole.

              1. I lost the last liberal I had any personal respect for this morning, when he retweeted something vile about Billy Graham. I hate it, but these days I am coming around more and more to Kurt Schlichter’s “They want you dead” theory.

                1. I’ve kind of been there for a while. The whole threatening death thing (then claiming “It was a joke”). The reactions of the to the DC shooting last year ‘That guy should have shot better’. Vegas ‘It was only Conservatives at the concert’. Today ‘NRA member should be shot’. Antifa riots and property destruction, BLM calling for dead white people, hell, college professors calling for dead white people. When people say they want you dead then it’s best to assume that they aren’t joking.

                  I don’t hate them but it’s exhausting. I have family on that side of the camp and family meals are an exercise in ‘Who’s going to start shit this year’. (99% of the time them, as they say things they ‘think’ are going to go over the head of their ‘hick’ relatives. Doesn’t matter that my sister and I tested within 2 IQ points of each other).

                  1. My family has a long-standing tradition that responding is “starting” something.

                    I broke it.

                    I am done with giving free shots to those who want to be rude.

                    What happened?

                    …. well, they started choosing even more outrageous times to get a free shot in, when they knew there would be no response, but other than that they stopped doing it at all. A few of them don’t show up when I’ll be there…but some of the other young cousins have started hitting back, too. And it’s working.

                    1. Why is it responding instead of the initial statement? That gives someone the ability to do exactly what you’re saying, take their shot and then sit their like smug a jack-ass knowing there won’t be a reprisal.

                      What I’m finding rather humorous is that after years of making family events uncomfortable, the culprits are now having the audacity to whine because nobody attends.

                      Btw, great job last week dealing with the troll on PJM 🙂

                    2. Because if nobody resists, it’s not a fight.

                      It’s a variation on the “it’s more rude to point out someone’s bad manners than it is to be rude in the first place” thing.

                      The rule is from basic charity– sometimes, folks will say something stupid and/or offensive and not mean anything by it. Heaven knows that I manage that quite often. (Although, oddly enough, nobody ever seemed to feel the need to restrain themselves from telling me as much….)

                      Human beings, even ones that love each other, aren’t going to agree on everything. Some of those disagreements are not going to be reconcilable, and frequently the starting assumptions contradict each other.

                      Unfortunately, one side of the political spectrum weaponized what was supposed to be charity, and now feel entitled to not have anybody say anything no matter what they say.

                      ********

                      Thank you.

                    3. “Unfortunately, one side of the political spectrum weaponized what was supposed to be charity”

                      ….That sums up an awful lot of their approach on several subjects, doesn’t it.

              2. “I’m fine with people thinking I’m an asshole.”

                LOL. You sound like my husband. We’re not sure what happened, except she went to Standford for college, & her hubby who grew up in DC area.

                We grew up with rifles & hand guns readily available (no gun safe in the home either, at least until after mom & dad got robbed well after we were all out of the house; FYI, robbers missed the guns & ammo, but it was a wake up call). If hunting & fishing did not bring in the meat, our family didn’t eat meat. Hunting & fishing was not limited to the boys, weren’t any, all girls (well except dad).

                Anyway sis & family is as left liberal as you can get. They got a shock when their oldest went hunting & shot & killed something. Then their youngest requested for 16th birthday to go to a shooting range & shoot rifles & handguns. When both activities were mentioned on Facebook, their friends & his family down right discouraged the activities.

                1. Her and her husband are both that way. Though oddly, her husband is a fanatical bow hunter. They spent. . .I don’t even know how many years at UNL and after that they’ve been well, what they are now.

                  For me, I’m blaming this on the last 10 years. I’ve tried to be reasonable, tried to have rational and logical debates. They all have pretty much ended the same way, with some overly emotional Progressive screaming something *ist at me. Even if they have known me long enough to know better. My patience is as gone as the polite guy that used to wear these shoes about a decade ago.

      6. I’ve wondered if, using the 9th/10th amendments, a state could establish militia requirements and issue standard select-fire service rifles to militia members who met those requirements (or allow such members to buy a rifle from the state) without going through the federal full-auto background checks. Something like the Swiss model, done locally.

    3. Life member, and owner of things that make progressives fuss and cry.
      We welcome all manner of bitterly clinging, Freudianly compensating *ist and *phobic gundementalist ammosexuals. We’re also terrorists, I hear.

    1. Ah, but that lesson has been right in front of their eyes ever since first Lenin and then Stalin went to work liquidating the Intellectual class. And they STILL won’t look at it.

  10. You might want to think about GOA (Gun Owners of America) instead. NRA supports pols no matter how leftist, so long as they spout the right rhetoric about the 2nd Amendment.

    1. I’d suggest Second Amendment Foundation over the GOA. SAF was the driving force behind the court cases that led to the Heller and McDonald rulings. So far as I can tell, GOA doesn’t seem to do much beyond fear-mongering and fundraising (for themselves).

      1. Thanks for the recommendation. It’s always best to support organizations that are actually doing something more than lining their own pockets.

      2. The SAF absorbed the JPFO a while back; though their web site is still up (hello, 1995!) they’re just another fundraising arm of the SAF now.

        SAF has been far more effective at actually getting obstructive laws repealed than the NRA. I don’t care for Alan Gottleib, who has some positions I would characterize as “soft”, but at least he hasn’t been on national TV advocating a National Mental Health Card like Crazykakes LaPierre did after Sandy Hook.

    2. Yeah, but that’s a good thing for our most basic right. That’s part of why our self-defense rights have improved over time rather than been slowly taken into the state. Politicians on both the left and the right know both the carrot and the stick.

    3. These are not mutually exclusive; your memberships are limited only by your discretionary income. NRA’s effectiveness comes from its narrow targeting focus.

      As the Blue Dogs demonstrated with Obamacare their individual positions don’t matter when the party whips the vote.

  11. as though they could somehow send out penis-mind-rays and control every male on the planet
    Wow, if that were true, I could have made the dating field much more open for me. Might not have made me any more attractive to the girls, but maybe a few, just out of desperation…….

  12. Given yesterday’s comments about this strip’s author, it is nice to see he’s not climbed all the way out on that Left ledge:


    Although I may be reading too much into this.

    1. Now this is where I have my reservations, for the one thing that makes me fantasize about doing wanton destruction of my fellow man is traffic. I have passing desires to have a front mounted disintegratetor ray … or at least a time and space displacement field which would allow me to move through the area unhindered.

        1. ‘Dozer blade has too much curve, and is too vertical. You want a low center of gravity, a gentle slope, and about two tons. Blade angle about thirty degrees left and right (a ‘V’ centerline). Press gas pedal. Watch slowpokes get flipped out of the way…

      2. I’m fairly certain we *all* have those fantasies.

        Only in Utah, though, have I ever come close to acting upon them. (Because good *grief*, but Utah drivers are awful.)

        1. The cities could probably solve the “Turning right from the parking lane” thing, by extending the kerbed corners of the cross-walks to the outside edge of the actual turning lane,

      3. I believe it was Jay of [formerly] Stuck in Massatucets who opined that everyone needs a .50 on their hood and a lifetime option to shoot one (1) other driver. Since no other drivers would be aware if the person they are going to cut off has hit that limit or not, it might improve manners in all 50 states.

        2. We want to think that, but there are some who are a special kind of stupid, or have that ” it’s all about me ” mindset. One tried to run over me this morning. My vehicle was only 2/3 the size of his.

          1. It’s as bad the other way around. When I was driving a straight truck, some idjit in a blue Mercedes almost missed her turn off. Swept in from the left lane, slammed on brakes… And two eyes the size of fifty cent pieces looked into the rearview, as the seventeen tons she just cut off locked up at seventy miles an hour…

            Nobody was hurt, but I guarantee pants were messed. Darn near gave me a heart attack, too.

        3. I had considered that and other aforementioned solutions, but I don’t want to leave obstacles along road to hinder others — and madden them — or have others leaving obstacles for me to negotiate. I also don’t really want anyone shooting at me, risking me or mine. Thus I decided upon the options of a disintegrateror ray or the time-space displacement.

          Yes, you could say I spend way too much time and thought on such matters.

          1. You sound like somebody who’s spent a week one afternoon on the Blue Ridge Parkway stuck behind a car with Florida plates.

      4. What we were able to find out about this thing is that it’s a laser weapon with output energies (that’s output, not total power in the system) ranging from 75 kilowatts all the way up to 300 kilowatts. To put that in perspective, about a year ago we wrote about how Lockheed was using a portable fiber laser to shoot down rockets at a range of 1.5 kilometers using just 10 kilowatts of power. Suffice it to say, 300 kilowatts is rather a lot.

        https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/military/tactical-laser-weapon-module-can-laserify-almost-anything

    2. Except can he see outside the “government controlled car” (Think any self driving car will not have some sort of RF kill for things such as emergency apparatus? Just a small step to control) that he is referring to in this one. Too often the exact same argument will be allowed and disallowed based on the desired want as opposed to reality.

    3. ???

      But that DOES happen right now. Usually just basic mistakes, or slow road work, or similar.

      Human drivers will look at the old stripes on the road after drifting a little, laugh, and fix themselves.

      Self-driving cars?

  13. Personally, I’ve had a bellyful of traumatized kids being used as human shields by political hacks and presstitutes.

    2. They are right here where I work. I’m intentionally avoiding them because I would have a hard time not responding to… what they say. It’s offensive to me on a lot of levels, and I not only respect the trauma they’ve been through, but also I don’t want to put the organization I work for in a negative light.

      There’s no polite way to say that their experience gives them absolutely no right to tell me what to do.

    3. When, in elementary school, one of our teachers and her husband were murdered, our thoughts weren’t “How can we ban guns?” but “Can we handle a shotgun if it comes down to it?”

      1. When I was a kid, I took a nature walk class at the Natural History Museum. The naturalist was smart, knowledgeable, pretty, and young.

        Later that year, she was raped and murdered in the nature trail, while going to work one morning. If she had had concealed carry, or even a good knife, I doubt that would have happened.

        1. Well, it might have been somewhat less likely to have happened, but as some firearms trainers I’ve read have pointed out, simply carrying a weapon is not an ironclad guarantee of safety — if you don’t have the reflexes to draw it in time when surprised, the will to use it, or the strength to hold onto it if a larger, stronger and more determined adversary manages to close and grapple, it can actually make your situation more dangerous by making you overconfident or reckless, or by enraging an attacker or giving him a weapon he didn’t have. (And if you happen to know your attacker and are emotionally entangled with him, all those other difficulties immediately bump up by several further orders of magnitude.)

          Gavin de Becker once wrote a book called The Gift of Fear, talking about how simply learning to be aware of our environment, alert to its risks, and ready to respond by avoiding potential threats before they can become dangerous is a better safeguard than any weapon or fighting skill. The problem with our society is not just that too many of us (quite reasonably) find it very difficult to live that way on a sustained basis, but that even acknowledging certain danger signals has come to be seen as somehow an immoral act of prejudice in and of itself.

          1. “if you don’t have the reflexes to draw it in time when surprised, the will to use it, or the strength to hold onto it if a larger, stronger and more determined adversary manages to close and grapple, it can actually make your situation more dangerous”

            NEVER forget the 21-foot rule!

            1. I guess the rule is “an assailant armed with a knife can kill someone armed with a gun before they can draw and fire, assuming they don’t trip and stab themselves while closing the distance” or similar?

              2. What kind of idiot is going to draw the knife 21′ away and THEN charge? Especially if they think/suspect the other person has a gun?

                1. The idea is that 21 feet is close enough to be within the shooter’s reaction time, allowing the knife wielder to strike before the gun can be drawn, cocked, aimed and fired.

                  Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.

                  1. Understood. Even Justified had a bit of it in one of the later episodes.

                    I’ve even seen people drill for this. Count out 21 feet, one guy with a plastic gun, and one with a rubber knife. The guy 20 feet away charges while the other guy tries to draw and present the firearm before getting ‘stabbed’.

                    I’d like to think I’d be able to be a little more flexible in my response, even taking the stab wound to the arm while completing the draw would be better. A few stitches there are much preferable to getting my intestines sown back together. . .

                    1. I gather the point of the drill is to make it clear to you that you are in danger i from a knife-wielder that far away. You can tell somebody that till you’re blue in the face, but many of them won’t really believe it until they experience it.

                      Presumably that is the point at which you discuss other responses. Now that he *knows* he should be at Condition Red…

                  2. It does not prevent the attacker from getting pistol whipped. Have told that story before and won’t bore you with it again, but it did cause the attacker to flee – and run right into her husband.

                2. Usually comes up when someone already has the knife out and is waiving it around.

                  They charged a cop who shot a crazy (and high) drunk up in Seattle when he shot the guy who was coming at him at about 10 feet, waiving the knife he used to carve totem poles.
                  (Imagine the quality of knife that takes chunks out of logs. Now imagine you’ve been yelling at the guy to put it down, and then he comes at you.)

                  1. Yes – or when cops have to respond to reports of somebody acting crazy and waving knife about.

                    It also usually entails spectator criticism abut “disproportionate use of force,” “the guy was a good ten feet away, the cop didn’t have to shoot him” and “the cop should’ve just shot the knife out of his hand.”

                    It’s always amazing how much insight and wisdom is held by those not at the knife’s pointy part.

                    1. Gee. I always thought the response to “should have shot the knife out of his hands” was “oops, missed.” YMMV 🙂

              3. Yup. Or, if you prefer–

                “No, Mr. Prosecutor. The man with a knife 20 feet away *was* a lethal threat to me, and my drawing a gun before he charged was *not* an unjustified provocation.”

  14. Here’s my rather disjointed thoughts:

    A gun is only a tool, and is as effective (or not) as the user. Talking about banning guns misses the point entirely; to cite a well-worn trope, guns don’t kill people. Given enough determination, just about anything can be used as a weapon and to kill another person.

    In this most recent shooting, I understand that a number of processes either were not followed (FBI tip) or were deliberately circumvented (preventing “troubled” students from being arrested). So, if existing processes aren’t being followed, how will more processes make a difference?

    Something that I just started looking into is how many of the mass killers have been on SSRIs/antidepressants. Without digging too deeply, I understand that these sorts of drugs can increase suicidal tendencies, cause paranoia and delusions. So, why are these drugs (I’m lookin’ at you, Ritalin!) being handed out like candy? Why are we — as a society — drugging our children, especially boys? Can SSRIs help people? Probably, but tinkering with brain chemistry (*especially in developing minds*) is not without consequences.

    We, as a society, need to engage in a root cause analysis to determine *why* these shootings are happening, and how to prevent them. I’m willing to wager that guns become the focal point because that’s much easier than looking at deeper social issues.

    1. Yeah, the whole “side effects may include” bit on drug ads is always … disturbingly funny. An anti-depressant with a possible side effect of “suicidal ideation” sounds like… ummm… bass-ackwards?
      (“This asthma medicine may cause breathing difficulties in some people.” WTF?!? Yes, I’ve seen that one.)
      (“People who are allergic to psychohypernol should not take psychohypernol.” Well, no s* Sherlock.)

      1. because we’re all complex and different, some things that affect certain people one way, may have a different effect on others. Ringo talked about how his wife is one of those people that seems to always get the side effect rather than the intended effect.

        I agree some of those side effect disclaimers are rather funny, though.

        1. I agree some of those side effect disclaimers are rather funny, though.

          For values of funny, way back when drug ads started listing side effects, I joked, “Side effects include death.” That is no joke nowadays. “If you die, stop taking drug-du-jour immediately and notify your doctor.”

        2. If it weren’t for the “Better living through chemicals!” and “Your life will be perfect!” sort of selling technique, then I wouldn’t be quite so dismayed. But when you advertise your drug as being the savior of, particularly, those with depression, and a side-effect is the exact opposite of helping the problem, I question your salvific claims.
          And, “possible” is such a broad term, statistically speaking. You’re implying it’s not “frequent” or “common”, but you’re not actually saying so (though a few do – but even there, please define “common”).

        3. On the long ago PBS series <IThe Body In Question, host British physician and television producer Jonathan Miller noted that the phrase “side effects” was a misnomer as all effects of a drug are “side effects” — it is merely that some of them are desired side effects. For example, if you were taking Rogaine’s main ingredient for blood pressure the excess hair growth would constitute a side effect.

          Miller also pointed out that the primary driver of positive health trends at the time (late Seventies) was less likely to be your physician than your plumber.

      3. When I was put on a drug whose side effects included “broken arm”, I asked my doctor. He said that during testing any adverse medical event had to be included in the side effects, so if someone was in a crash as a passenger while in a drug test program, the side effects of that drug might include whiplash. Gives a whole new perspective on side effects.

        1. I dated a woman who was on a medical trial. They were told to follow a procedure that included; When ready to go to bed, go use the bathroom directly before taking medication. Sit on side of bed, take medication, then lay down immediately after taking medicine. Do not leave bed for any reason until at least four hours have passed.

          I thought it was funny. She said that they were kicking anyone who they found out wasn’t following the procedure exactly out of the program because if anyone were to fall down and hurt themselves during the trial, they would have to put it on the bottle as a side effect, and the drug in question was controversial enough that it might just be enough to get final approval pulled (apparently, the FDA was looking for any excuse).

          1. Were her symptoms that bad that it was worth the potential risk? I can see it if I’m going to die soon but otherwise. . .

            1. Well, the medication totally changed her life. Because of the meds, she was able to hold down a “real” job for about the first time in her life. And, unfortunately (for me anyway) I think it also made her feel like she could do much better than my sorry, hard to live with, self. Sigh… oh well. I hope she found happiness wherever she ended up (I didn’t keep in touch)

              1. I knew a woman a few years ago who was severely bi-polar to the point that at times she would appear more schizophrenic then bi-polar. She would regularly spend a week under supervised psychiatric care several times a year making it almost impossible for her to hold down a regular job.

                If your previous friends situation was like that I can understand her desire to risk the drugs!

                If it helps at all I’m pretty much in your shoes. I know I’m difficult to live with. Especially if I think of a new project or research topic.

      4. And then being prescribed sulfa (which can crystallize in the kidneys if one doesn’t keep truly flush[ed] with water)… in the aftermath of – you guessed it – kidney stones. Uhmmmm.

      5. John Ringo has an open post about what anti-depressants did to his wife, and how slowly it happened. He had no idea until she asked him to take her to the psychiatric hospital and checked herself in.

        1. The thing is, those samemdrugs can also have an enormously POSITIVE effect. My Lady has been on a number of them (the body builds upma tolerance to most), and they have been a HUGE help. But each one is a chance , and she’s been in Hospital more than once.

      6. All medicines are poisons.

        Toxicity is in the dose.

        Expanding. First assume that magical concepts like the panacea do not exist, and are not applicable. Medicines have efficacy because they change the operation of some system in the body. How do meds know what system, the current and ideal states of the system, and how far to change? They don’t. The doctors guesstimate based on previous experience, and see what happens.

        If the illness is mild, you want to treat it, if at all, with substances that tend to have more mild, controlled effects.

        Untreated psychiatric medical conditions often enough cause suicide or a condition of being otherwise severely non-functional. That justifies harsher, riskier meds. Many of which screw around with the brain’s neurochemistry. Folks who aren’t psychiatric patients tend to have a bunch of different systems in their brain chemistry naturally well regulated. A psychiatric patient may have one system badly out of wack, that could be chemically adjusted into a well regulated state. Maybe there is a drug that does that, and for an ill person, all sorts of nasty side effects, like stomach and liver issues, may be worth it. If the sick person takes that drug, but not enough of it, they may still be sick in the same way. If they take too much, they may be sick from having the system badly regulated but in the other direction. If a healthy person takes it, it may throw that system out of wack. Perhaps the system no longer balances at the same point while they are on it, and they are sick while they are under the influence. Perhaps it changes the natural balance point of the system, and they get a permanent sickness, even after going off.

        SSRIs are apparently a particularly bad class of psychiatric drug.

        1. Untreated psychiatric medical conditions often enough cause suicide or a condition of being otherwise severely non-functional.
          With the problem being that they are often prescribed for conditions NOT really leading to those extreme conditions. Blame the patients, blame the doctors, blame the industry, whatever. But it’s very true that they are over-prescribed.

          And when you prescribe something that has radical enough effects to possibly cause suicidal tendencies to folks who weren’t that bad off to start with, you might be actually inducing a problem.

          A lot of the problem is a desire to live forever (in *this* world? oy) and a lot is hubris.

      8. OTC motrin hits my dad like oxy hits me– he gets loopy, loses coordination and can’t think straight.

        The depression one sounds like the gals who get uncontrollable bleeding from the Pill. (which is supposed to stop that from happening entirely)

        1. Everyone handles drugs, OTC, prescription, or street, differently. The notices about effectiveness and side effects are based on the averages of trials.

          Personally, OTC pain meds do nothing for me unless I take about two to three times the recommended dose; codeine plus Tylenol is pretty much a non-starter; but morphine seemed to work “normally” the one time I had it. (Of course that one time I was already loopy from the flu and O2 sats in the mid-80s)

          1. Part of it is exposure, too; I use baby Tylenol for pretty much everything, and the “five year old” dose works fine. That includes when I had a very infected tooth– the dentist actually looked at the scan and said “Oh. Yes, that tooth is infected. That is…a big pocket. WHAT did you take?”

            Post c-section, the same Motrin pills the Navy use to give out for “minor aches” works.

            Part of this might just be not much exposure, and a high pain tolerance.

            1. Because of the dosages I take, I don’t reach for the analgesics until pain reaches the “being hit with a 5lb sledge” level.

    2. Ritalin isn’t an SSRI/antidepressant. Pharmacologically ritalin is no different than cocaine, it’s a stimulant.

      The reason why antidepressants have a disclaimer about suicidal thought has more to do with how depression plays with your energy and motivation levels. When you’re recovering from depression your energy and motivation recover before you lose the suicidal ideation or depressed mood. So in that initial portion of the recovery you’re still feeling worthless, but you’ve recovered enough motivation to do something about it.

  15. You know, it’s a darn good thing I’m NOT a monster. Otherwise, I could kill a heck of a lot of people without ever picking up a gun. And I know a lot of other people just as capable of doing so. Which goes to say that we were all successfully domesticated-socialized as children.

    1. That’s what scares me. Part of my job is putting myself into the position of ‘bad guy’ and then asking myself ‘What would I do if I was going to do this’.

      By this process I’ve determined that I’m really glad I’m not a sociopath and that wreaking mayhem and chaos is not difficult if you possess the will to carry out an atrocity and sufficient imagination.

    2. Alright, by this measure, I am not a monster. But I have thought about how things could be… mis-purposed… and I can but wonder what those more knowledgeable, or more determined, or just plain desperate might do with ‘available materials’.

      1. I was much happier when I was primarily thinking about IT related threats and risks. Antifa, BLM, and BAMN. . .as well as the various terrorist attacks that seem to be a weekly occurrence, have caused me to. . .expand my thought process

      2. The problem with Bovidae is most of them are already weaponized.
        Horns, hooves, and backed with 500 to a couple thousand pounds, multiplied by the entire herd.

  16. “But then people will just shoot at each other every day.”

    Before we moved into Center City Philadelphia Daddy had quite a nice collection of rifles.  He never shot at anyone.  Nor has anyone else in the family.  Well, not outside of military service…

    (The Spouse notes that some of my family was here before there was a nation and that at some time they may well have exercised self-defense.)

    1. “But then people will just shoot at each other every day.”

      But that is how they think. After the ’16 election when the local liberals were having a meltdown about how Trump (or his lackeys) was going to go around terrorizing people I pointed out they could arm themselves in case such did happen. Their response? Then if we feel unsafe, we can get our gun, shoot the person that makes us feel unsafe, & — oops, now I’ve committed murder and will go to jail!! She makes me feel unsafe. I hope I’m never in the same room with her, because I don’t trust her after she said that.

      https://westfargomusings.wordpress.com/2016/11/10/this-is-why-liberals-cant-have-nice-things/

      1. I think it’s the standard leftist projection–they think that because they lack self-control and are entirely emotion-driven, everyone else must be also, since they are clearly the best people that could possibly exist…

        1. Obviously. Such marvelously marvelous and wonderfully wonderful people are capable of anything possible.

      2. I have a good gaming friend who *flipped her lid* a few days ago because her neighbor 1) had an open carry permit and 2) was openly carrying. “He bent over to pick something up and the barrel was pointing RIGHT AT ME!!” “Damn, he should’ve known better than th-” “I mean, it was strapped in the holster but it was POINTING RIGHT AT ME!”

        I leave the resulting stunned silence to your collective imagination.

        1. *blink*
          *blink*
          *blink*
          *blink*

          Fundamental logic error. Please re-start.

        2. I’v seen some pro-gun people go nuts about that.

          Apparently their teachers drummed in the “you should never see the barrel of a gun unless you’re about to die” thing.

          Kind of like the guys who go ape over people having their fingers on the triggers of fake guns.

          1. I have taught Kid “do not point even an empty gun at anything unless you don’t care if it dies” because it’s reasonably simple. But a *holstered* gun *with the safety on* and *not a single finger touching it*…!

            1. Yep. Even a gun you just emptied isn’t “empty,” same way that you stop at a stop sign even if you can’t see anybody for miles.

              But some folks just go insane.

              (Don’t get me started on the d***-measuring on Facebook from guys who apparently spend 8 hours a week shooting, 8 hours in kung-fu class, and at least 8 hours lifting weights. And if you don’t, you’re not “really” an OK gun user. *eye roll*)

            2. I prefer to be hyper-vigilant about rule 3, even with holstered guns, because if you have to draw it, the gun will start out pointed at the same thing as the holster. The best solution to that potential problem is a religious adherence to rule 2, of course, but I don’t think hyper-vigilance is harmful in this case. It reinforces rule 1 and rule 4 situational awareness.

  17. or the handle to my office door

    Heh. I remember Swain in Techniques of the Selling Writer references an exercise of coming up with some number (a dozen maybe) of ways to kill someone using a door handle.

    On the subject of self defense, I have argued before that “Right to life” includes the right to defend that life, and that the right to defend that life includes the right to effective means to defend that life. Denial of the latter denies the former.

    https://thewriterinblack.com/2017/04/23/blast-from-the-past-life-liberty-and-pursuit-of-happiness-part-1-life/

  18. We hear so much rhetoric about Pro-Lifers endangering “Women’s Rights” so perhaps we should start filing law-suits against “gun-grabbers” for endangering our “Right To Self-Defense”. 😈

  19. In re: The Second Amendment:

    Most people don’t really know the purpose of the Second Amendment, historically. Short explanation-the men who put together the Constitution didn’t want the federal government they were creating to have a large standing army in peace time. So they authorized that government to call on the governors of states for the use of militia units when and as needed. The militia being made up of the “people” (i.e., able-bodied men between certain ages) they were the first line of defense locally, within a state and nationally. They thus need to be armed in order to do so. The Second Amendment was never about the “people defending themselves from their government”-they ARE the defense force for the nation as a whole. The Whiskey Rebellion proved that definitively. Self-defense and defending the community on all levels against threats is the point. The ballot box was supposed to be the remedy to bad government, as opposed to the bullet.

    1. I think you’ll find that you’re wrong about, ‘The Second Amendment was never about the “people defending themselves from their government”’. More than one of the founders were quite clear about that. And don’t conflate the nation with the government, as you do here. They are decidedly not the same thing.

    2. I don’t get the impression you’ve entirely thought this through.

      By keeping government as close as possible to the people, the people always had the option of using force equivalent to the government’s. The ballot box could only be the remedy to bad government because the cartridge box was close to hand.

      As Alton Brown was wont to say, any tool that permits only a single usage does not belong in the kitchen.

    3. The US Constitution is an agreement between separate nations to form a centralized government for the benefit of all member nations. We call them states, but states has become confused with provinces in the modern mind, so referring to them as separate nations works better. Keep that in mind.

      Now, one of the things that each of these nations feared was that a strong central government could mistreat them as it so pleased. They’d just fought a war about that. It wasn’t just “No,” but “H*ll no.” Part of that was reserving the means to fight against an oppressive central government. This gave us two things: One, the idea of a small standing army, and two, preventing government confiscation of arms. The latter almost happened one fine April day in 1775, when British soldiers marched to confiscate colonial arms.

      So, how did it all work? Pretty much like a juror’s pool. Were you a citizen that met certain criteria? Congratulations: you’re in the militia. Don’t want to be? To bad, so sad. Local courts drew up lists of men to serve, and states drew up militia districts, placing each one under a captain, with several districts answering to a major, and so on all the way up to the governor, who served as the CINC. Screw up while part of the active militia? Congratulations: You’ve just won a court martial. Yes, that happened.

      The Federal government could federalize a militia unit, and did so during the War of 1812, and it was sort of like a draft. OTOH, I know of a brigadier general who received federalization orders and orders from his governor to respond to a landing of British soldiers, and he opted to follow the latter as he saw that as the more pressing danger. The end of the war made his decision mote, and I’m not aware of anything coming of it.

      What did all this have to do with the Whiskey Rebellion? Nothing and everything. It was a group of people who was in rebellion, rather than a government. So it was that militia units from Pennsylvania itself, along with those from several other states, responded under the command of George Washington. Had the federal government decided to tax whiskey on the whim of George Washington, and nations of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia opted to rebel against the Federal government, that would have made the Whiskey Rebellion something far different.

      Why? Because had the states responded to an attempt by the Federal government to play George III and to seize absolute power, that would have precisely been the citizens bearing arms against the central government. As it happened, the Whiskey Rebellion were people in insurrection against their own elected officials The first would have been the “without representation” thing all over again; the latter was not.

    4. Check the Roman Republic and the Greek Democracies. It looks very much like the entire point of handing out voting rights is in payment for military service. A population builds an army of some sort, which pushes out competition and forms the government, and in certain sorts of armies shares the choice of government among the common soldiers. Firearms were cheap enough to make effectively being a common soldier accessible to any man of military age.

      1. They also allowed someone to have an effective weapon without the lifetime of practice required for swords or even longbows.

    5. You really want to declare that the guys who had just gone through a war for the following did not have the ability to overthrow the gov’t in mind when they wrote the second?

      We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

  20. One of the scenes from 15:17 To Paris really struck me. (I already made this comment on a thread yesterday, I think.)

    When Spencer Stone’s medic class receives an “active shooter” alert, he is asked to push the teacher’s desk in front of the door, then everyone gets under their desks. After a few moments he realizes he can’t go that route, uncaps his ballpoint pen, and moves to beside the door. If anyone comes through it, they’re getting a Bic in the face.

    Because he could NOT simply be a sheep, hiding in hopes the wolf would eat him last.

    1. When did hiding under tables and desks become the way to respond to all emergencies? I expect it works great for emergencies where the roof might fall in. But does it really help for horizontal dangers such as murderers?

      1. Especially since the desks in question were nothing more than small tables – no front or side components to stop anyone from seeing you or shooting you under there.

        Oh, and these were all active duty military personnel, including the instructor.

      2. If it weren’t so deadly serious it would be hilarious that these idiots are advocating “duck and cover” response.

        Let’s just kick litter over the fact that these same folk have been ridiculing “Duck and Cover” for decades.

      3. Because it stops legal liability, and in theory, if the door is locked and the Bad Guys either glance in and see no-one, or can’t open the door, they are less likely to enter and see if there are any targets cowering under desks.

        1. I think part of that is going to depend on what the walls are made out of. In all of the school shootings it’s been a student so they are going to have a pretty good idea whether the classroom is occupied and who is in the room.

          Concrete walls with no way through a ceiling tile? Great! Sheetrock walls? “Lucy, I’m home!”.

            1. 30 people throwing desks, books, pencils, pens, whatever comes to hand is certainly not going to improve the shooter’s odds of hitting anything.

              1. Knives or even clubs I’d be willing to use it as a shield. It would be interesting to see how it holds up to various caliber rounds. Looking at it I’d guess most rounds are going to punch right through.

                It’s also big and heavy enough that I doubt someone is going to be willing to take a hit from it if you can get enough momentum going when you toss it.

                1. Mythbusters 2004, it did not stop the bullets.

                  That said, I’d much rather be hit by a bullet that already had to go through half an inch of lacquered plywood, and an 8th of an inch of even soft steel, where he DOESN’T get to take aim at what exactly he’s hitting.

                  Plus, the “WTF?!?” when a desk comes running at you. 🙂

                  1. The really sad thing is I’ve already actually thought of things like that. I figure if I’m in in Government building (like the one I used to work in) I’ve got a good 30 lb awkward missile with a few more close to hand. I’m not exactly a little guy and if there are enough chairs around I can do some damage while I’m getting close enough to hopefully do some real damage.

                    I’m really hoping I never have to find out how effective or ineffective it would be. Since I mostly work from home now I’m usually not far from something more suited to defense than chairs.

                    Wasn’t able to reply to one of your above responses. Your response makes sense. I tend to look at things like family gatherings with an attitude of ‘Yes, I know I’m supposed to do this because family’ but. . .I’m going to end up in a foul mood. It doesn’t help that I’m fortunate that my best friend’s family adopted me and their family gatherings are much less likely to end up with me wanting to consume large amounts of alcohol.

                    1. “I’m really hoping I never have to find out how effective or ineffective it would be.”

                      It could hardly be more ineffective than what they recommend, could it?

                      At least this way you’ve a chance of getting into Valhalla.

                    2. The depressing thing is that in every school shooting I could find any information on, people did fight back, even though they had no planning for it and only used what was at hand– that Tribal School shooting where the shooter killed his grandfather (a cop) for his gun and vest, then went to shoot up the school, one of the kids STABBED HIM WITH A PENCIL. It was still sticking out of him at the end.

                      Hell, imagine if that Holocaust survivor at that college, I think it was VA Tech, had been allowed to have a gun. Or if their doors actually locked. (I didn’t know the lecture halls didn’t lock, until I read about one of the surviving heroes who went under his desk as he was supposed to…then went “wait, this is stupid!” and flipped a desk against the door. Thankfully, someone else ran up to help, so they were pinning the door on opposite sides when the guy finished slamming his body against it and just shot through the door.

                  3. Romans and Spartans believed their shields were as much weapons as the were defenses, so yeah.

                    In the SCA we were taught not to shield punch because we’re not actually trying to kill each other.

                    1. Hahahaha, oh that makes so much sense now!

                      Back when I still played L2, there was a skill change for the Paladin class (and similar Knight/tank classes, but the Paladin class especially) for being able to spam Shield Strike (it gave a pretty hefty stun, and Paladins had a higher percent chance of success, and with certain buffs, faster skill refresh rate than the skill effect duration.) It did a certain amount of damage too, though ideally the rest of the party was supposed to kill the stunned target; it was possible for a Paladin to effectively bash a target to death, one on one. Our resident Paladin said “Well, crap. I don’t need my sword anymore, I can just kill someone with my shield!” I doodled him leaping toward someone (labeled ‘victim’), shield held over his head, going RAWWWRRRR ~!

                    2. The first thing I learned picking up a shield in the SCA was that D&D has been lying to us for decades. The amount of blows a shield stops just hanging in front of you is worth way more than a simple +1 Armor Class.

              2. It probably says things about me that my first thought on hearing about the 9/11 hijackers intimidating people with box cutters was “Box cutters? when airline seats come with shield straps?”

                1. Too bad the cabin crew safety lecture doesn’t come with the instructions: “In the event of a hijacking, your seat cushion can be used to bludgeon the attacker into oblivion.”

                  I wonder if you could add some kevlar and maybe a ballistic plate to the cushion without giving up too much buoyancy?

    2. I understand the reasoning for shelter in place (unsafe or unsecured egress routes for a mobile threat), but why under desks? Unless you’re in a fish bowl get to the side of the room nearest the door against the wall. If you can do it in such a way that a shooter would have to do a hard swing to target, even better. Not necessarily going to be perfect since someone looking in can still see items left on desk in the rush, but a quick glance may make it seem the room abandoned.

      1. Putting people against the wall either side of the door requires a shooter to expose a side to one or another defender.

        1. That was my tertiary thought. Get one man per limb and control is much more doable. And better than sitting and cowering.

        2. expose a side to one or another defender
          Ah, but there’s the rub: “defender”. TPTB don’t want them being “defenders”, they want them as “potential victims”. They want to retain the power to save people – if you do it yourself, you might become reliant on yourself and not on the State, and get uppity. Can’t have that, so instead they’re taught to cower in fear.

  21. I get so tired of this argument. Every time some fruitbat kills some people, in an entirely preventable shooting spree, the Lefties go berserk in the media for two weeks.

    Here’s the truth about gun control, Lefties. Are you ready?

    When people want to kill you, Big Brother ain’t going to save you. Even if Big Brother is trying as hard as he can to save you, it can’t be done. You are responsible for your own self, because that is the way the universe works.

    I realize that this is not what you want to hear. You want some government agency to take care of it for you, using other people’s money, so that you can get back to getting your freak on with the other pink-haired sea mammals and skinny-ass douchebag beardo-boys.

    That’s why we see stuff like this out there after a highschool murder spree:
    http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2018/02/leftist-solution-to-gun-violence.html

    There’s nothing a lazy, good for nothing Socialist hates more than somebody telling them “no.” Some nut with a gun killed some people? Well then, we gotta round up everybody with a gun and kill them too! That’ll fix it!

    Just remember, when you cowardly, lazy, rent-seeking f*cks finally work up the nerve to dust off the old school socialist Final Solution, we all warned you not to.

    1. “When people want to kill you, Big Brother ain’t going to save you. ”

      Not even if you get a really strongly worded restraining order?

      1. Depends. If the restraining order is printed really tiny, on the tip of some .45 hollowpoints, delivering it personally might just have the desired effect…

        1. I find if you tape the restraining order to a Louisville Slugger, and then serve the intended recipient vigorously, it works a little better.

      2. The proper use of a restraining order:

        Give it to the nice police officers when they eventually show up at your house because you shot the a-hole who wasn’t supposed to get withing 500 yards (or whatever) of you, but still broke into your house in the middle of the night and tried to harm you.

        That is the ONLY time a restraining order does anything worth while.

        1. That’s pretty much what the county sheriff told my parents back in the day when the subject came up: A RO was nice to have when you needed to explain why Joe Perp ended up bleeding out in your front yard when cops responded to the “Shots Fired!” call.

          OTOH, more problematically, Sheriff Green also suggested that it might be a good idea to drag Joe Perp’s corpse back into the house if he somehow made it outside through your defensive gunfire, to reinforce your claim of self-defense. Mind you, that was back in the days when rural judges in Missouri believed in the “Some people just need killin'” doctrine, and before Missouri passed “shall-issue” carry, Castle Doctrine and Stand-Your-Ground laws to make sure even big-city liberal judges got the point . . .

          1. Isn’t dragging the corpse in a bad idea since forensics would probably show that the corpse was moved after death and that might lead to unpleasant questions?

            1. That would be my take as well – Mom and Dad’s as well, for that matter – hence the “more problematically” comment. Old Sheriff Green was quite a character . . .

              1. And I should point out – at the risk of dating myself – that this happened back in the seventies, when I was a child. IIRC those comments were made during the course of a ladies’ self-defense course my mom took at the time. Somehow I doubt the same advice would be given today . . .

                1. It was the 1970s when a sheriff made a similar statement to a grandfather. It was also the early 1970s when a member of law enforcement hinted at burning out some troublesome neighbors. No, they wouldn’t give that advice today.

            3. Probably a better course of action would be to drag the guy outside before checking for vital signs and calling 911. You’re much less likely to get jumped that way, for one thing, and it’s safer for first responders as well.

  23. Could not resist this even though it is Firefly rather than Kipling:

    “It’s not what you expect. We have had enough. You got to make the 20th century a vast grave.”

    Our turn!

  24. “A gun is a tool. You can kill people with a dozen different tools. I can kill you with a shoe, my handbag, or the handle to my office door.”

    The usual sea-lions used to make fun of me for saying you can kill a guy with a pencil. You can, but the mockery was none the less fulsome, as it were.

    So I sent a link of some guy in China who killed his father with a chopstick. The sea-lions did what they always do of course, but the mockery magically ceased.

    So it -is- possible to educate a moronic SJW. It is merely difficult, and thankless.

    But thanks to that educational experience, one of my Strong Female Characters fragged a serial killer with a pencil when she was 13. She’s got a magic power that attracts monsters. Her magic power comes in handy when zombies are out and about. Funny, you never hear her whine about gun control, or teaching men not to rape, or teaching monsters not to monster. All you hear from her is “BANGBANGBANG [tinkle of empty casings]… Next!”

    1. “So it -is- possible to educate a moronic SJW. It is merely difficult, and thankless.” Yup. Don’t try to educate–isolate. Understand that you’re trying to convince reasonable third parties, not make wise the idiots. Make clear the irrationality and non-logical, emotion-driven nature of their whines and dismiss them with prejudice. But judge your third party audience in the decision of whether to show contempt, pity, or just serenity toward the SJWs.

    2. While it is possible to dispatch someone using a writing instrument, the eyes make a better target. They’re soft, vulnerable, can disable the attacker while you get away, and make identification easy for the police.

      1. No pencil needed there. Just thumb, forefinger, elbow…

        A study of human anatomy however reveals a number of places where a nice sharp pencil will bring things to a sudden halt.

        The dreaded “assault pencil” has the nice cushioning eraser on the end.

  25. The irony is that if you say to the left, “But then people will take advantage of being given things for free to consume stuff they don’t need, and avoid doing any work,” they’ll be sure that no human being would ever do that.

  26. BTW – several good, related articles are to be found at http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion

    Selected headlines:
    Wisconsin Senate candidate Leah Vukmir still says ‘the self-esteem movement’ is one factor in school shootings

    The mass shooting cycle continues: More solutions to problems we don’t have

    Maryland school shooting prevented with better policing, not just gun laws

    Gun control is a fantasy. Start a realistic conversation about preventing school massacres

    1. I heard about the Maryland incident from a friend whose kid goes to that school. She heard about it from the official principal’s letter. 😮

      1. The amount of these that get swept under the rug should be jaw dropping.Been dozens of reports of copycats with at least 4 resulting in arrests that I can think of offhand in the last week across the country. But it’s only the presence of guns, not the neigh legend status that is given to these mass murders that attracts people who feel slighted and overlooked.

        Had a college roommate that I had before I got myself my own room who made threats of a columbine (I was not involved and this is not first hand). Was one of the ones that something just seemed off. Was Identified and expelled but no record of it. Last I heard he worked an airport gate.

      2. Yesterday, we got a call from our school district’s superintendent. She was passing on that several schools (and the district, in general) received messages via social media outlets that were threatening attacks on the schools. Evidently, there were a fair number of the neighboring districts that got similar messages (including some from the SAME idiots). Unlike the clowns (and an insult to all upstanding clowns everywhere, at that) in FL, our district and local PD did NOT ignore the messages. Even if the expectation was that they weren’t real, they treated them like they were. Each school already has an SRO and locked doors during the day, but the county PD added additional personnel at each school and increased roving patrols in the area of the schools.

        1. I actually remember a period back when in kindergarten ish over two decades ago (pre Columbine ). Some sorta threat was made so a cruiser followed every bus until dealt with.

  27. If you get rid of the rule of law, I doubt it will go the way you expect, either.

    Many people do not understand that the law, and by extension the police, are there to impose some order and constraint on what used to be “the shopkeepers catch a shoplifter and string him up to warn the others” or “The parents caught up with that fellow who messed with young Mary-Sue and that’s him staked out by the old oak outside of town”.

    To a large extent, the police are there to protect criminals from their victims.

    1. A crim in New Orleans once tossed a 2 year old from a balcony, and the police arriving was the only thing that saved him. It took a long time before he actually went to jail because of the time it took to heal from his injuries.

      1. Intellectually, I am in favor of the rule of (well-instituted, with a priority of safeguarding individual rights) law.

        Emotionally… I would not be eager to testify against the people the police rescued him from.

          1. That happened a few years back in my suburban Silicon Valley neighborhood – local trades contractor parked his work vans on the street in front of his house, and one night he caught Some Dude breaking into said van. And beat the guy quite thoroughly. City PD arrived and booked the well-pummeled Some Dude into custody, and nothing was ever said to my neighbor about what happened to Some Dude before the PD showed up.

        2. as it was Fisher Housing Project, the guy was lucky the police came at all, and yaknow? No charges were brought on anyone other than the oxygen waster.

      2. One of the dads in the Olympic doctor sexual assault case asked the judge for five minutes alone with the guy, and had to be dragged away after she declined and he tried to jump the guy.

        Personally, I think that was the right choice, since I think life in prison is a harsher sentence than the death penalty—and I’m pretty sure five minutes with that angry dad would have resulted in the death penalty.

    2. That said, there’s a number of stories from my old home town, including a shopkeeper who worked over a would-be robber to the point that the deputies didn’t want to cuff him in case he died. Then an old man stopped by and said “Boys, you did good, but when we drag them out, we usually run them over.”

  29. Aside from the usual gun control media fecalstorm, there have been some people questioning the FBI and various Florida LE. Who certainly dropped the ball, but the FIRST line of defense was the school, its district, and the State of Florida, which, operating “in loco parentis”, has a legal obligation to defend its charges.

    They failed. Hard. Yet nobody seems to be calling for the heads of the principal, the school board, or the administrators who blew off school security.

    1. And it is a district that was criticized for expelling too many Hispanics and Blacks, so they stopped, letting the bad apples hang about instead of weeding them out. So all crimes in the schools went up, but they don’t expell the “too high” amounts anymore. So they “fixed” that n

      1. Not just expelling. Law enforcement was also sending the biggest numbers of juvies into the courts. So the county “solved” their image problem by ordering the sheriff not to arrest juveniles.

        I wondered why Jerkface was “connected” enough not to be arrested. But in point of fact, all the juveniles in the county knew they weren’t going to be arrested.

        Now, why this didn’t end for Jerkface on the day he turned 18, I don’t know. Maybe it would have made a difference if it had.

        But the whole situation sounds like the Kipling poem about the consequences of not punishing a puppy….

        2. To my knowledge, if you haven’t graduated and are under 21, and haven’t formally left school, you’re treated as a jivie for crimes. If you’re arrested it MIGHT get changed, but it takes a process first.

  30. I suppose I shouldn’t ask why any of you really need weapons for close-in self defence. If someone is close enough to strike me, I’m close enough to strike him.. And I still know where to use my hands, even if I do now need a stick to walk around.

    2. Respectfully, if your attacker is bigger than you, having a weapon really helps. It usually makes him leave you alone in the first place.

    3. Because I might no longer have the strength to strike effectively. Or I might be slow enough as to not be effective. Or, he might hit me first and remove my ability to respond with direct physical attack. Maybe my thumb just isn’t that powerful (left or right).

      Best defense is to strike to move the attacker out of arm’s reach, then draw a “ranged”* weapon and deliver appropriate warning or constructive force to end the threat.

      Firearms are most effective as they require little strength, speed or stamina to employ effectively in an immediate danger defensive situation. (They do require preparation and coordination.)

      (* Ranged, in this case, being anything that can be employed without being inside the attacker’s reach. It could be a long enough blade or a firearm.)

      1. And, BTW, every decent martial arts/self-defense instructor will teach women to use … their shoes as a weapon to escape the reach of their attacker. If they wear heels or hard-soled shoes, scraping them down the shin of their attacker and driving the heel into the top of the foot is terribly effective at gaining space to maneuver.

        1. Yes. My high school self-defense course taught the shin scrape rather than a crotch shot because it’s too easy to defend against a crotch shot—but nobody’s prepared for the shin scrape. (Note that pretty much all of the defense maneuvers were assuming the guy was going for rape first—which makes a guy vulnerable.)

      2. Even if someone is normally healthy they can have a serious injury or illness that could hamper self-defense.

        Also, I’m an asshole, if I have to defend myself or others, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. I want to end the threat as quickly and with as little risk to myself or people I care about as possible.

          2. Just as Kirk doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario I don’t believe in the fair-fight scenario. If I’m fighting at all it’s because I’m in fear of death or serious bodily injury. In that case, I have not just a right, but a duty to make the fight as unfair in my advantage as possible. I have a little girl waiting at home. She needs her father. She depends on her father for material support, for values education, for a multitude of things. Those things are not just a privilege but a duty. I would be remiss if I did not do everything in my power to come home safely so I can continue living up to that duty.

            If that little girl means more to me than my life (she does) then she certainly means more to me than yours, not because I’m a “tough guy” but because I am not and have no interest in trying to prove how tough I am in some display of fisticuffs.

            My one, my only goal is getting home safely to that little girl.

          3. “This is a truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn.”
            – Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

            If it’s life and death and you’re not “cheating” then you’re not fighting hard enough. Chivalry is only for an SCA tourney field.

    4. I remember reading a claim once that for the average guy, encountering somebody twice his weight and half again his height counts as a bad day. I’m sure this is at least partly a matter of attitude, but the point was it’s apparently unusual.

      For a woman it’s a normal thing. So normal, indeed, that it had never crossed my mind it would be weird for a guy.

      Even without the average difference in upper body strength, yes, I darned well want a weapon.

      1. Jim Butcher wrote a Dresden short from Karrin Murphy’s POV, in which that observation figured prominently. She had to constantly remind herself that the guy she was talking to (whoever it happened to be, in any particular scene) not only didn’t *mean* to threaten and intimidate her, he *didn’t even know he was doing it.* And she’d been so reminding herself most of her life.

        It was a headspace adjustment for me.

        1. I think the line should have been “a foot taller and half again one’s weight” or something like that — 1.5x even my height is more than a bit out of the ordinary.

          I don’t often feel like guys are trying to physically intimidate me, but I don’t go into the kind of situations Murphy does, either!

          1. And she was no doubt exaggerating for effect–just a little bit.

            On the other hand, she routinely told big strong men things that made them angry. And the body language of an angry man, as viewed by someone on the short end of a 1.5-3-to-1weight disparity, can be rather perturbing. Even at my age, I remember being that size.

            1. One of the examples in the story: She had to tell one of Dresden’s werewolf-vigilante buddies that they couldn’t immediately rush out and hunt for his recently-kidnapped wife. She *knew* the hunching shoulders, gritting teeth, growling undertone in his speech, etc., did not mean he was going to attack her for saying it–it was just a visible sign of his frustration and his fear for his wife–but she still had to suppress both the urge to flinch away *and* the desire to take him down for “threatening” her.

    5. A healthy person can respond appropriately. Folk with less than equivalent capabilities need equalizers (viz: Samuel Colt, et all) to reduce or eliminate the threat to their health and/or safety. IMHO.

      1. Frankly, even a healthy person might not be able to react fast enough/whatever, or the attacker could get in a lucky shot. (This is true whether or not one is armed with a gun, but all the same it would likely make things more equal. 😀 )

        I’m healthy. I’m also tall for a woman, and stronger than average (though not in as great a shape as I could be.) Height/weight wise, I’m on par with a goodly number of not-small men. Which I suppose might automatically put me in ‘not an easy target’ territory…in which case any attacker that WOULD go after a woman who is 5’11” and weighs enough that picking her up and carting her off would be a challenging prospect is automatically either bigger than me or crazy. Or both.

        I still want an equalizer. 😀 I don’t want someone THAT loony anywhere close to me!

    6. Because you shouldn’t let your self-defense become close-in. I don’t want a charging opponent to get close enough to strike me, I want to put him down before he has the opportunity. We’re not talking about sporting chances here…

      2. Last time I was tasked for base security and did the refresher, one of the key points was that if someone closes to within 10m, he (or she; equal opportunity, after all) – is too close and is now a threat, especially if you can’t see a weapon. They should either be compliant and stop outside that range, or you should assume a threat and come up on aim.

        (Caveat – context for this also includes threat condition, available response force, etc; e.t., if you have two sentries, one can approach to interdict, check ID, search, etc. while the other moves to the side – OUT of range – to cover. Ideally, three sentries – one for approach/interview, one for cover, one to maintain rout of approach surveillance. If wishes were fishes…)

    7. Because your assailant may be on drugs, and doesn’t notice the pain based strikes or holds you are trying to use.
      It may be that you are facing more than one assailant.
      As said above, they may be themselves armed.

    8. My taekwondo instructor in high school:

      “What do you do if someone pulls a knife or a gun on you?”

      Answer: Run away, or do whatever it takes to run away as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter if you are a black belt–odds are in the favor of the one carrying the weapon. Regardless of what martial arts fantasies/movies claim.

    9. John Prigent said: “I suppose I shouldn’t ask why any of you really need weapons for close-in self defence.”

      The fact that you need to ask indicates you have most likely made up your mind already, and are not going to be swayed by anything anyone here says.

      Get back to me after five teenagers kick the shit out of you in a dark alley. Then we can have a reasonable discussion.

      1. I’m at an age where I have significant aches and pains in my hands from years of self- abuse. Why should I inflict further damage on them just because some [body] thinks its unmanly to carry a weapon?


        Besides, a good stout beer bottle can cause many an assailant to think twice — once when it’s displayed and again when the bottom’s been broken off. Calms the lads down a bit, it does.

    10. In my case, I started carrying when the effects of my RA (and other conditions) got so bad that I couldn’t move quickly nor strike quickly. I’m a big guy – 6′ 2″ 275 (hasn’t been muscle in almost a decade now due to the above). I can’t run. About 7 years ago, I came to the realization that I could not adequately defend myself or my family, anymore. Since then, when I’m not going into a gun free zone (*spit*), I’m armed. Now that the kids are gone or late teens (and trained with firearms), there’s usually a handgun nearby while at home.

      Even before I reached that point, though, I had been giving strong thought to carrying. We’d had firearms in the house.

      1. I’m in a similar situation… I could move fast enough to take care of one opponent already in arm’s reach, but that’s my limit, and I couldn’t run. The lack of ability to carry anything to defend me and mine was another reason i didnt mind leaving CA.

    11. Because I’m below median size, health and strength, and I’ve got a horde of kids I’m responsible for.

      Plus, who the hell expects someone that’s attacking you to try to pick a fair fight? Nobody sane. So if someone is attacking you, they think they have an advantage. One big enough to be overwhelming.

      And that is why guns are awesome.

    12. No, you really, really shouldn’t ask why I need X. I’ll decide what tools are fit for the task at hand, whatever that may be, and I’ll think you kindly to keep out of my business. I’m sick until violence of carpetbaggers.

  31. “penis-mind-rays and control every male on the planet”

    I believe the tool for that is called “boobs”

  32. Heinlein’s “there’s no dangerous weapons, just dangerous men” quote comes to mind right about now.
    Humans are very good at inventing ways to kill other humans- just ask Lawdog or Peter Grant about improvised weapons in prisons.

  33. Attempt 1:
    At 0613 Eastern Standard time, the world cocked itself at a 45 degree angle, spun a full 360 degrees, then righted itself, and Nick was the only one who noticed. What most everyone else noticed was the 0615 train was on time for the first time in recorded history.

    Attempt 2 (different story):
    Most people wouldn’t rejoice at an order to kill a man, but most people hadn’t spent 4,000 years in the service of Hell. He had, and so he rejoiced that this time it was only to be one.

  34. But there’s a bunch of distraught (and suspiciously photogenic and articulate) kids who’ve just seen their friends killed and who are demanding action. What do you say to them?

    Seriously, what do you (by which I mean we) say that doesn’t make you look like a callous SOB?

      1. Okay, lemme put it this way: what’s good optics to get the normies on your side and shift the established narrative?

        Gotta think like the opposition.

        1. At this particular moment, I don’t think there is one. People in pain don’t think, they react, and any response that isn’t driven by pain only looks callous to those whose reactions still are.

          The best approach I can think of might involve trying to evoke a positive counter-image. Something like, “God, I wish there were more real people like John McClane; he’d have stopped that bastard if he’d been there, wouldn’t he?” And carefully never mention that he’d have done it with his own gun.

          1. This whole thing is reminding me of the Charleston church shooting. Show the shooter was an afficianado of the Confederate battle flag, then the next thing you know, the narrative takes off: the flag must go! Then the monuments must go! The reporting was everywhere with all the outlets apparently on the same page.

            I’m detecting the same thing here: the build of momentum, and I’m thinking somebody needs to get to work to counter this thing and shut it down before it gets legs, but the counter efforts have been largely desperate flailing: calling the kids actors, etc.

            1. How soon before someone starts blaming KMFDM? At least one of the Columbine kids listened to them, and this guy had a KMFDM hat…

              Which is about like blaming Levi Strauss, really.

        2. The thing is, I have had good results by being blunt. What needs to be said is “In an era when mass-shooters are made famous, and seldom executed, why is it that when a teen who had no legitimate business at that school turned up with a gun and blood in his eye none of the responsible adults were in a position to stop him?”

          And the cold, hard answer is “Because none of them were armed.”

          Maybe they were unarmed because of the Law (which is, as always, an ass), or maybe they were unarmed by choice. But in the latter case, they were derelict in their duty. Thay had acceoted responsibility for thosemchildren, without taking necessary steps to carry out that responsibility.

          1. In the case of Florida, I believe they were unarmed because of the law. This is the same reason the victims at the Pulse night club were unarmed.

            By contrast, in a number of other states you will find armed school staff. Colorado is an example. But the Florida legislature in fact defeated a bill to fix the defenseless victim zone problem less than a year ago.

    2. Hold the existing authorities to account for their failures before changing anything. “See something, say something” doesn’t do any good if it is ignored.

    3. That’s easy. “If your teachers had had guns, your friends would still be here.” Shock the crap out of the little marxists with some tough truth.

      2. Turned on the TV, caught a brief portion of what was probably a Trump meeting with The Distressed. There was a adult 30-something male tearfully explaining how he had been getting to love teaching but now didn’t know how he’d be able to go into a classroom again.

        Beloved Spouse was startled at my growled, “Grow a pair.”

        When you think about it, there have never been two shootings at the same school, has there? So that should mean the school is much much safer for having had it, right?

        It’s been pre-disastered!

        1. Beloved Spouse was startled at my growled, “Grow a pair.”

          I suspect that your spouse has been doing what I have been — after years of yelling at the TV and being told by The Spouse that ‘they can’t hear you’ I am now doing my best to tune it out before it gives me apoplexy.

    4. If you are on the defensive in this sort of situation, you lose. Nobody comes across well in this situation, no matter what they say.

      So, you don’t answer their question- you go on the offensive.

    5. Bob said: “But there’s a bunch of distraught (and suspiciously photogenic and articulate) kids who’ve just seen their friends killed and who are demanding action. What do you say to them?”

      The same thing you’d say to them if they’d just seen their friends die in a drunken car wreck, or a flood, or a fire. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

      If there’s a camera there, it is a media ambush and the less said the better.

  35. Some of you have misunderstood my point. I wasn’t asking about the mad moron who produces a gun or knife several yards away for a robbery, or the sneak attacker from behind, but the one that, suddenly and close to, decide to hit out at you. Don’t tell me you Yanks don’t have the ‘pushed him (or her) under a train’ type, or the ‘drunk who thinks punching a stranger is funny’ type, they’re universal. With so many UMSC or Army vets, there must be some of you with a basic knowledge of unarmed combat who could handle an attacker of that kind without needing a gun.

    1. There are, but for me the basic issue to date is; will the State be bound by its own laws?

      Because the Second Amendment stands. Weaseling aside, all ‘common sense gun control’ laws that in any way hinder a law abiding citizen from obtaining, keeping, amd carrying arms are unConstitutional. All attempts to get around this endanger all the other restraints on the State. And the 20th Century (not to mention all those preceeding it) proved (at least to me) that an unrestraned State is a hreat deal more dangerous than Godzilla, much less the occasional armed nut.

      1. Every “common sense” gun control law being proposed would result in it being either more difficult and/or more expensive to be a firearm owner. At the same time they would present at most a minor inconvenience for someone bent on committing a serious crime or terrorist act.
        But that is the real goal of those “common sense” restrictions. Chip away at gun ownership bit by bit, and when they fail to prevent the next attack trot out a new shopping list of ever more restrictive regulations.

        2. I’ve been noticng that since the 1970’s, when it was simply the accepted wisdom that hand guns would be effectively banned all over the country in about five to ten years.

          Somehow it didn’t halpen that way.

    2. Not really sure why something along the lines of the classical fistfight-outside-the-pub is supposed to require deadly force as a response, but hey, you go to war with the strawman that you’ve got.

      If the disparity in size and/or infirmity makes that attempted ex-pub battery a life- or serious-bodily-harm-threatening event as far as the legal construct known as “a reasonable person” would assess, it seems to me that common law use of force doctrine would recognize a deadly force response.

      It sounds to me like your narrow case is two physically evenly matched adult males in age, size, and capability, one of which being a belligerent drunk with the advantage of a surprise attack. We can talk about that narrow case if you want to explore it, but it seems pretty straightforward to me as long as you stay within those narrow parameters.

      But if a belligerent drunk 220 lb* male decides to conduct a surprise attack on a 100lb female, I hope you would agree that the female’s response might be more energetic than in the two-dudes case.

      And as to what to do when confronted with deadly force in a close-in situation, the responses above seem pretty much correct: Try not get cut or shot, do what is needed to separate and gain maneuvering room, and if the threat persists, engage with ranged deadly force to end the threat.

      * Sorry, no apologies available for my using English measures instead of that metric system the French dreamed up.

      2. Eh, the metric system is seriously useful when you’re doing science, as it makes unit conversion very straightforward. But when you’re doing arts and crafts, I’d much rather deal with inches and feet than centimeters and meters. Having 12 inches in a foot is seriously useful, as you can divide that evenly by 2, 3, 4 or 6 so there are a LOT more ways to evenly divide things.

        OTOH, the mile being 5280 feet or 1760 yards has never made much sense to me. Why pick 10 * 11 * 16 yards, or 3 * 10 * 11 * 16 feet, as your unit basis? That one has always puzzled me.

        And while I’m on the subject of measurement systems, the one unit that I think the metric system got “wrong” is the gram. It makes more sense for the kilogram to be the “base” unit, and the gram to be the “milli-unit”. The meter’s size makes sense: most things that you would use in daily life are either small numbers of meters (between 1 and 20 meters), or numbers below 1 to about 2 significant digits (e.g., between 0.01 and 0.99 meters). And when you’re dealing with large quantities like distances between cities, you use kilometers. But with the gram, most things you use in daily life are small numbers of kilograms, not grams. In daily life you almost never need to use fractions of a gram; only in medicine, nutrition, and chemistry (all related) do you ever need to write 0.1g (and you’d usually then write 100mg). It would make more sense for the kg to be the basic unit. If the kilogram were the basic unprefixed unit of weight and the gram were the “milli-unit”, then people would weight around 40-100 units on average, amounts you’d use in cooking would be around 0.1 to 0.5 units, and chemists would be measuing 100 micro-units instead 100 mg. Oh, and the “ton” would just be the kilo-unit instead of the mega-unit.

        In other words, the meter is scaled right for normal human use, but the gram is scaled 1000 times too small for normal human use. The standard by which the unit of mass is measured is the kilogram anyway (the reference masses stored in that temperature- and pressure-controlled vault are kilogram masses, not gram masses), so why isn’t the kilogram the unprefixed unit?

        This has been your Mild Science Rant for the day. I have others, but you’ll have to wait until a different day to hear them. 🙂

        1. Nautical miles make sense in navigation, breaking down into degrees, minutes and seconds rather nicely. Inches, feet and yards are easier imho in lots of construction situations as mm are too fiddily when working with timber, ply or sailcloth.
          A nation using English system has been to the Moon, none of the metric users have yet.

          1. I’m torn on angular measurement – as a squid in good standing I love me some degrees & minutes of arc (“OOW, stbd lookout – dhow, bearing green 30, moving left to right, far!”) OTOH, 6400 mils certainly makes for easier figuring probable error on a bearing…

            1. Not having spent time in the Navy myself, “green 30” as a way of specifying a compass bearing was new to me and I had to Google the phrase to figure it out. What I found was red = port and green = starboard, so “green 30” would be what a civilian might refer to as “one o’clock”: 30 degrees to the right of the direction you’re facing. (Or in this context, I assume the baseline is the direction the ship is currently facing). Is that the right way to understand “green 30” here? Or is there some other usage I didn’t find out about?

              1. what a civilian might refer to as “one o’clock”
                Civilian, hell, that’s what a *military* pilot would say. (WTF direction is a COLOR? Damn squids.)

                1. IIRC, there is a angle thing that is red on one side, green on the other.

                  Beats “port” and “starboard” all to heck, especially if you’re conveying it down to someone who can’t see anything. (For talking to someone who can’t see the outside and might not be sitting in a fixed position, it even beats the “one o’clock” thing.)

                2. That red/green division of right and left would work on aircraft too since they inherited the color and placement of navigation lights from ships.

                  1. Yep, except don’t tell pilots ‘port’ or ‘starboard’; tell them ‘red blinky light side’ or ‘green blinky light side’ 😀

                3. @Robin Munn, you are correct. Red (port, or to the left of) and green (starboard, or to the right of) the direction the ship is facing. Caveat – this is Cdn practice; not sure if lookouts in the USN report relative bearings in this manner.

        3. the metric system is seriously useful when you’re doing science, as it makes unit conversion very straightforward.

          I’ve heard a few entertaining rants from the Housemate due to what happens if an American changes certain things in computing from metric to Imperial. (Or the ‘male to female’ plugs and code equivalents.)

        4. “It makes more sense for the kilogram to be the “base” unit, and the gram to be the “milli-unit”.”

          Err… it is? No, seriously. There’s an item that is THE definition of mass in the metric system… and it defines one kilogram. All the derived units, like newtons, joules, and so on use kilograms (ie, a newton is a kg * m / s^2.)

          Presumably they decided that redoing the prefixes for mass had too much potential for confusion.

          1. That’s what I said: “… the reference masses stored in that temperature- and pressure-controlled vault are kilogram masses, not gram masses …”. I’m just complaining that they chose a unit that’s 1/1000th of the reference mass to be the unprefixed unit, instead of choosing the reference mass to be the unprefixed unit. It’s a little inconsistent.

            Good point about the potential for confusion: at this point it’s pretty much locked in, like using – instead of + for the direction of the electrical current with more electrons. Changing it would be more trouble than it’s worth. But back when they were picking which side of a battery would be – or +, they basically had to guess, because they didn’t yet know what charge electrons had — and they guessed wrong. Too late now to change it. Whereas with the gram, there was no actual need for the unprefixed unit to be 1/1000th of the reference mass, and I’m mostly complaining about that decision.

            Ah well, it’s a minor gripe anyway.

    3. My statements still stand:
      Because your assailant may be on drugs, and doesn’t notice the pain based strikes or holds you are trying to use.
      It may be that you are facing more than one assailant.
      As said above, they may be themselves armed.

      1. I’ve seen that shit. The guy doesn’t feel anything at all. Alcohol, downers, uppers, or in some cases a combination of all three at once, they’re like fricking zombies. They can fight on a broken leg.

        Doesn’t have to be drugs either. I know of a case where a young gentleman of leisure (a purveyor of recreational substances I presumed at the time) was shot first through the liver from the front , then side-to-side through the throat as he turned, then through the upper fibula from the back as he was -running- away. 9mm. He ran for blocks, and healed up quite well. Only to later develop a rather nasty case of cocaine-induced psychosis, which is when I met him. Sampling his own wares, very sad.

        (They never seem to fight on weed though. Weed makes people giggly, compliant and stupid. So if I get my choice, I say close all the bars and let the low-life smoke all the weed they can manage. Give the shit away on street corners. The murder rate would drop in half in a year.)

        That’s what makes pistols the bare minimum one can carry with any confidence of winning through. You can literally crack their skull with a 2×4 and still get beaten to death. I have seen the x-rays, it happens. I theorize that a wakizashi or a nice dirk to hamstring the zombies would be pretty good backup. Knives don’t jam, either.

        The above tells me John Pridget is an odious concern troll.

        1. Go to down town Tacoma. (Seattle has too many different things to sample; Tacoma is pretty solidly weed, at least a few years ago.)

          They are not mild. THey drive like suicidal morons and tend to road rage, too, while stinking of pot.
          Maybe it’s just the guys who are first timers or something that go all mild?

          1. I suspect the tales of pot smokers being mellow reflect an earlier time when the THC dosage was much lower.

            1. Possibly on the desired result of smoking, in addition?

              My crazy uncle just wanted to “chill out.”

              These guys want to “unwind.”

              They sort of are the same from the “lose stress” angle, but one does it by not moving, the other does it by release of energy.

              It’s possible I’m over-thinking it, too.

          2. Personal experience. Drinkers fight, smokers smoke. They remain @$$h*les, just less violent than drunk @$$h*les.

            Drunk or stoned is pretty much the same behind the wheel, although I’d give the edge on aggression to the drinkers. As I said below, drunks and stoners are out there every day, and that’s why I drive a diesel crew-cab. Biggest thing I can get. As Mr. Scott says, “the right tool for the right job!”

            The THC thing, increased THC count just makes them more wasted, quicker. I do not smoke weed, at all, but I’ve been researching medical weed. (I don’t drink either. Makes me cranky.) There’s no reliable evidence that increased THC leads to increased aggression. Quite the reverse, if anything. It makes you docile and stupid. Useful for treating PTSD and anxiety disorders, in prescribed and controlled doses, under the supervision of a competent physician. Key words there being prescribed and competent.

            Where the aggression thing comes in is that this is -black market- weed, right? It isn’t always just weed. Around here, the local pot dealers often mix in a little PCP, ecstasy or artificial cocaine, which changes the results drastically. Often, people that end up in Emergency with Reefer Madness got themselves a buttload of not-weed with their weed.

            Criminals do stuff like that. That’s why we don’t like them.

            Pot and teenagers? There’s no reliable research. Just anecdotal crap and propaganda for or against. Best idea, don’t let any teen you care about use weed. By age 25 it probably can’t hurt them much, as long as they don’t go the full Up In Smoke route. Same as booze, we don’t let teenagers drink either.

            1. Where the aggression thing comes in is that this is -black market- weed, right?

              Washington.

              State pot stores.

              At least in theory.

              *****
              I wouldn’t trust the “medical pot” studies, honestly; they know they’ve got to get the “right” answers to keep people coming.

              I just had to know who would be likely to act flatly, violently insane.

              1. Medical pot studies, good ones are few and far between. In Canada of course it has been -illegal- to do pot studies until recently. So there are zero long term Canadian studies. However it is being legalized in July, come Hell or high water. The Boomers are old, they’ve got arthritis, PTSD and anxiety all over the place, and they all want their weed.

                There are factions in the medical research community too. One side, full-on Reefer Madness. Pot is Eeeevile and must be destroyed! The other side has their eyes fill of dollar signs, and they don’t see much else.

                1. IIRC Speaker To Lab Animals has said that there’s some research in the US on one of the substances of pot for medical use.

                  One of the problems (from what I remember him saying) is that too many of the pro-medical use folks give the impression (to skeptics) of being pot-heads.

                  1. If you are serious about using marijuana for medical purpose, smoking is a terrible delivery system, with too many side effects, too variable a dosage. So if you are talking about smoking pot I am going to find your purported medical purpose dubious.

                  2. There’s at least three currently for sale, and I seem to remember a couple others that are in process– they’re synthetic versions of stuff in pot.

                    I’m not sure if it’s one or two different synthetics for nausea, there’s an anti-psychotic, and then of course there’s cannabidiol. (Which is actually better gotten from hemp, but you’ll see it sold as “CBD oil” in the pseudo-pot shops; it’s also federally legal if made from industrial hemp, not that the medical pot supporters like to mention that.)

            2. Pot and teenagers? There’s no reliable research. Just anecdotal crap and propaganda for or against

              Hasn’t been true for years– either the Dutch or the Netherland’s health department did that study, years ago, side-effect of their national system and no consequences for admitting to use.

              Definite connection between at least once a month use and mental breaks, even after correcting for other possibilities (like family history); question becomes if the stuff that makes you likely to want to use pot are indicating you’re going to have a mental break, or if the known psycho-active substance has an effect.

              1. Yeah, this is what I mean when I say “not reliable.” Some studies say it’ll give you schizophrenia with just one puff, other say there’s no connection and stop harshing my mellow, duuuude. The Dutch studies have issues depending on who did them and when. And who paid for them.

                Kinda like gun control studies done by the CDC, right?

                Bottom line, nobody really knows, and kids do flip out sometimes. So best to take it slow and careful. No weed under 25 is the Canadian medical guideline, and it seems prudent.

                2. The Dutch studies have issues depending on who did them and when. And who paid for them.

                  It’s a direct pull from their national health database. The only extra work was seeing if a relative had ever flipped out. (And, obviously, they couldn’t check for weed use in those whose records start before it was decriminalized, so they may have discounted people who were triggered by exposure to the multiple psycho-active elements.)

                  Does/will Canada follow the THC level rules that Europe does? I can’t remember the level off the top of my head, but it’s a lower than the average street pot (median) in the US before it’s classified as a hard drug.

                  1. In Canada it is the Wild West right now. The OMA is fighting with the CMA, the family doctor’s association is fighting with the internal medicine association, the Liberals are fighting with the Conservatives, and the bureaucracy is ignoring all of it while grinding forward with its own agenda.

                    There are guidelines from the various bodies, which tend toward the conservative end, but they’re essentially making it up as they go along. They don’t know what they’re doing, because nobody knows how it works. All those randomized, double-blind, gold standard studies they do for things like Lipitor or Oxycontin have not been done. What has been done is at the hypothesis-generating correlation level. Correlation does not equal causation.

                    The Liberals decided they could get elected by promising to legalize weed, they got elected, and now they’re doing it. Everybody else is scrambling.

                    Lost in the shuffle is the patient. If the patient wants super high THC content, and complains hard enough, they can probably get it. But to be fair, they can get it anyway, and cheaper too. Medical weed is expensive here, there’s a tremendous load of tax and regulation cost on the medical producers.

                  2. In Canada it is the Wild West right now. The OMA is fighting with the CMA, the family doctor’s association is fighting with the internal medicine association, the Liberals are fighting with the Conservatives, and the bureaucracy is ignoring all of it while grinding forward with its own agenda.

                    There are guidelines from the various bodies, which tend toward the conservative end, but they’re essentially making it up as they go along. They don’t know what they’re doing, because nobody knows how it works. All those randomized, double-blind, gold standard studies they do for things like Lipitor or Oxycontin have not been done. What has been done is at the hypothesis-generating correlation level. Correlation does not equal causation.

                    The Liberals decided they could get elected by promising to legalize weed, they got elected, and now they’re doing it. Everybody else is scrambling.

                    Lost in the shuffle is the patient. If the patient wants super high THC content, and complains hard enough, they can probably get it. But to be fair, they can get it anyway, and cheaper too. Medical weed is expensive here, there’s a tremendous load of tax and regulation cost on the medical producers.

        2. Except that the long-term effects of frequent marijuana use include (as I’ve been told by my friend who’s an ER doctor) permanent brain damage: it reduces the number of connections between neurons. Instead of dozens of connections per neuron, a long-term marijuana user’s brain has just two or three connections per neuron, which literally makes them less smart since it’s the complexity of those connections that gives the brain its intelligence.

          So if there was a system put in place where long-term marijuana use made you ineligible for a driver’s license, I’d be okay with it. But I do NOT want people whose brains have been reduced to 2-3 connections per neuron driving a ton of metal at 65 MPH anywhere near me, thankyouverymuch. And since there’s approximately zero chance the liberals would ever go along with a “long-term marijuana use means you forfeit your driver’s license” scheme, I end up opposed to legalizing marijuana on practical grounds. Philosophically I’m in favor of giving people the freedom to choose, including to choose to mess up their own lives, so I’d be in favor of legalizing the stuff from a philosophical standpoint. But ultimately, I’m a pragmatist when it comes to politics: I don’t care how good your intentions are, and if the law you’re proposing will have bad results, I’m against it. (Generic “you” in that sentence, BTW). And so in the end, I remain opposed to legalizing marijuana, because I think the harm caused by long-term weed users driving will be greater than the harm caused by the current situation.

          1. You think the effects of long term marijuana users driving will be worse than the violence inherent in black market operations, the militarization of the police, and the continuing erosion of 4th and 5th Amendments rights all to stop people from getting high?

            1. I’m not persuaded that the latter two are inherent to having drugs be illegal. Rather, they’re part of making the “War on Drugs” a bit propaganda campaign for politicians (usually local politicians rather than national) to show that they’re Doing Something. And thus, if marijuana and/or other drugs were legalized, it wouldn’t help with the militarization of the police or of the frequency of 4th & 5th Amendment violations; the offenders would simply shift from the War on Drugs to the War on Gangs, or the War on the Alt-Right, or some other similar justification.

              I’ll grant that black market violence is directly connected to criminalization, and would be reduced if marijuana were legal. And there, I would say that yes, I do believe the effects of marijuana users driving will be worse than the black-market violence. Because the black-market violence is inherently limited to a segment of the population that could choose to not be involved. (Though I’ll grant that the people in the neighborhoods where it happens didn’t choose to be involved, so it’s not a clear-cut boundary. But there’s still inherent limits, and MOST of the people shot by criminals involved in drug-dealing were rival dealers, not innocents caught in the crossfire.) Whereas the effects of brain-damaged drivers would affect everyone, and nobody could choose whether or not they had a long-term smoker driving down their street. We already have that with drunk drivers: in 2015 (the latest year I was able to easily find numbers) there were about 10,000 deaths caused by drunk drivers in America, and about 15,000 homicides. I don’t know the breakdown of the homicide numbers, so I don’t know if criminals shooting other criminals was more or less than 10,000 homicides, but it’s probably in the same ballpark as drunk driving. Legalizing marijuana would just make for more impaired-driving crashes, and (I believe) widen the number of innocent people affected.

              So overall: yes to the first part of your question, and I disagree with the premises of parts two and three: they’re caused by politicians grabbing any pretext for power, and wouldn’t go away if drugs were legalized.

            2. Based off of existing evidence, black market operations increase when pot is legalized.

              ****

              Something worth remembering is that the largest value smuggling op in Washington State history was… tobacco cigs.

          2. “Except that the long-term effects of frequent marijuana use include (as I’ve been told by my friend who’s an ER doctor) permanent brain damage: it reduces the number of connections between neurons.”

            Compare and contrast with the long term effects of frequent alcohol use. That toxicity is very well understood, as is the increase in violent behavior brought on by alcohol. Irish Courage is the term, I believe. (They’d call it Scotch Courage, except Scotsmen are friggin’ crazy drunk or sober.)

            People driving high? Already happens. People driving drunk? Already happens. Life is hard. Drive a truck. That’s what I do.

            At some point we all have to bite down on the reality that government bans on weapons, drugs, foods, pitbulls, whatever the frigging flavor of the moment is, these regulations do not make us safer. They make people who believe in such things more comfortable, and they make people who deal with the government rich.

            1. Alcohol wears off, though, and in the morning you’re sober. Long-term use leaves you addicted, but there are times when you’re not drinking and are temporarily safe to drive. With the effects of long-term marijuana use, you’re never not impaired. Which is why I would want to see a system where, say, to purchase marijuana you need to register, the registration is good for one year, and on your second registration you have to turn in your driver’s license.

              1. “With the effects of long-term marijuana use, you’re never not impaired.”

                THC flushes out of the system in ~24-48 hours, impairment goes away in about 6 hours. What you are talking about is long term brain damage caused by daily, heavy use of cannabis. Basically waking up to your morning joint, and staying buzzed all day. If you compare the damage done by drinking to the same extent, they die of liver cirrhosis and they have alcohol induced dementia. Aka major brain damage.

                So it is true that a daily, heavy, prolonged for many years use of weed might cause brain damage. (No definitive studies yet.) But it takes a lot longer than it does to kill an alcoholic. You can still buy beer, Robin.

                Drugs are bad. Some are worse than others. Street heroin will kill you in two years and make you a toothless zombie in three months. I’ve seen it happen to a guy. One day he was normal, couple months later he’s a street hobo and his teeth are all gone, next thing I know he’s dead in the paper.

                As to the driving thing, you think they’ll drive anyway? I do. Every week there’s another news story of somebody killed by yet another drunk with a suspended license. In Canada, mind you. No illegal immigrants here, who by definition do not have a driver’s license.

                Its the same argument as gun licenses. The premise is false, the results reflect that. Big Brother ain’t going to help you.

                1. So it is true that a daily, heavy, prolonged for many years use of weed might cause brain damage

                  I watched it happen in less than 2 years. Multiple people. One of them was actually brilliant, before he started. And we weren’t a big school, although it might be unusual how many people had enough money to

                  Only one of them could have possibly been smoking daily, due to living with parents who were there when the bus arrived and weren’t nose-blind. (Oddly, he was the least badly effected, but that might be starting level. He wasn’t that sharp to start with, although he was and is a nice guy.)

                  One just graduated college (33 or 34, was in college since graduation) and can’t think through an argument anymore, even with basic logic; the others are stereotype “Millennials” down to the mooching off of family and unable to hold a job, and have been since they graduated.

                  There were also several of my sister’s friends who were regular users, and may as well have had giant “I am a pot head” signs over their head, even though they worked at a place that I KNOW does drug testing so they could not have been using for at least a couple of years.

    4. Even five years ago, I would have been able to give a good accounting of myself against any single attacker. Now I get around with a cane, or on bad days, on crutches. And it’s not uncommon for loonies to attack in groups nowadays.

      Fighting or running are not options. Which means someone(s) are likely to find they made a very poor choice in the victim selection process.

      And for that matter, even if I was still a bad dude at the gym, why should I expose myself to additional risk by playing macho hand-to-hand (or knife, or gun) games with an attacker?

      “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”

    5. You’re thinking about the wrong risk factor.

      Consider politically useful murders. The cheapest, most deniable murder is when you’ve had the police check them for arms the day before, and you have a group of men, who could be anyone, break in and do the deed at night. Second cheapest is picking them up from the jail where the cops are keeping them alone and unarmed. Armed gets a bit more expensive, and we Americans have the oral history to know it. If you are needing to use the SWAT team while they are on the clock, there are much more accountability issues than even ‘accidentally’ misplacing a prisoner. If you use the SWAT team off the clock, the forensic evidence would point to a rarer type of armed group, which could be potentially traced by paying attention to who is doing group training. Things that drive up cost increase rarity.

      There are several things you have to keep in mind.
      a) We had veterans in WWII. They told us about Europe. We know that Stroop spent 300 of his mens’ lives killing 13,000 mostly unarmed people. We wonder if the price would have been too high if they had originally been decently armed.
      b) Many of us know of some fairly unsavory history in our neck of the woods. We know the uses to which certain kinds of laws have been put. Maybe the ones who told us were on the doin’ side, but we don’t want it done to us.
      c) Many of us are or know veterans. There’s some institutional knowledge of use of force situations that we have access to, and can draw conclusions from. Also of really shitty political situations in every corner of the world.
      d) A number of countries had civil wars which were eventually won by the communists. Survivors of the losing side coming to the US remind us of how badly it can suck to lose a civil war, and of what we can expect life to be like under the communists. Though perhaps strike out life and replace with death.

      Students of American history might look at, say, the Ferguson riots and conclude that the political forces behind them are not a bit more scrupulous than those behind, say the 1921 Tulsa riots or the 1919 riots in Elaine, Arkansas.

      If y’all have had, inside the last hundred years, a similar political act filling similar mass graves, perhaps comparisons could be made.

    6. John Prigent said: “Some of you have misunderstood my point.”

      No, I think we understood you pretty well the first time. “I’m just trying to understand” is a familiar rhetorical trick around here. Try something else.

      1. I wonder what John would so supposed a group of ruffians were to set upon him with mischief in mind, yet were to resort to such ungentlemanly means as coshes and brickbats?
        Would he then call out “Ho, fellows! Would you be such base cowards as to ignore the noble rules of fisticuffs!”?

    7. Coward punching is a crime, y’know. And there are some defenses against that, but they require being constantly aware of your surroundings, street smarts. Same with the ‘push into train tracks’ – also, not standing at the edge helps some.

      Had some kids think it was fun to threaten to spray my glasses and face with a can of spray paint as I left school when I lived in Paris (I was going to school in an area that is now a Zones Urbaines Sensibles – a police no go zone more or less.) They suddenly pulled out a can of spray and aimed it at my face as they came level to me. My response was to whip out a box cutter I had in my pocket, unsheathe it and swipe at the hand closest to my face before he could press on the button. The boys (Muslims I should note) didn’t expect that, and snarled that I was crazy. They were twelve years old – I knew because they were in some of my classes. The school was off the main road and accessible only by a narrow one-car wide street, so I was likely to get jumped if I turned away. I walked backward, the blade pointed at them the whole time while they looked angry, then started mocking me for ‘being paranoid and over-reacting.’ I put the blade away when I was close to the street and walked away, still waiting for a further attack.

      1. You seem to have gone to school with some really creative little shits. In my day they’d just punch you in the face.

        1. I went to different schools in different countries. Getting beaten on by more than one kid was par for the course for me – and so was fighting back. (It was to my fortune that I earned my ‘place’ and respect with the same kids who used to fight me BEFORE the teenagers decided to try out the ‘uppity little Auslanderin’ back in West Germany… That got diffused with “Nah, guys. She’s tough, not weak like the others.”) There was a reason why I warned my teachers in high school that I’d grown up with a bunch of triggers, and swore an oath that I would NEVER start a fight but I’d damn well finish any that anyone started with me.

          And I had to get creative too. I grew my nails and sharpened them to claws once.

          But the weird thing is, despite the brutality of the fights I used to get into, those fights seemed cleaner to me than the crap I hear kids get up to these days. Yeah sure, there’s a punch up, but after the punch up is done, it’s all fine until the next punch up, and rinse repeat. (The girls who tried character assassination by claiming I tried to murder a teacher … that didn’t work out well for them when said ‘almost victim’ said “No, she saved my life because she kept me from falling down the stairs.”)

          I don’t mind my life. I have few illusions about the depths of human nature – but I am also not weakened by my experiences or inexperience.

          1. “I don’t mind my life. I have few illusions about the depths of human nature – ”

            I’m one of those non-social types. I don’t understand human nature. People do things, and I am mystified by what the hell they’re doing.

            Example, I went to the doctor today and got treated like a cow. “Give me your card, go there, sit there, didn’t you get the email…” the nurse is treating me like a cross between a moron and a dangerous wild animal that could bite. Why? What possesses people to act like that? She’s never met me before, and I haven’t even said anything yet. I don’t understand.

            Result, my blood pressure was measured at 127/70. Normally I run at 110-115/65, its that high because she pissed me off. Awesome patient care. Really impressive.

            “But the weird thing is, despite the brutality of the fights I used to get into, those fights seemed cleaner to me than the crap I hear kids get up to these days.”

            They fight like rabid weasels these days. Biting, weapons, ambushes, the tribal warfare full monty. In Toronto they shoot and knife each other, in Hamilton they swarm kids that get caught alone. Out here in the boonies where I live its more stand-up and fight like a man, like it was when I was a kid. But even here, two or three on one isn’t rare, and neither is a hockey stick to the head.

            Culture matters, right? Homeschooling! Keep your kids clear of the little feral shits until they’re old enough to fight back effectively.

            1. “shooting and knifing each other”?!?
              Unpossible- that sort of thing only happens in the USA!

      2. First time someone did the “Talk to the hand” thing to me, I dang near put her to the floor.

        Apparently, I was supposed to know that the person who’d been screaming in my face wasn’t going to continue the 3 inches to impact with my nose and glasses. Even though she’d suddenly thrown her arm up in a classic punching maneuver, and my uncles had been drilling us on the whole “open-palm to smash the nose, if you get the angle right it can shove it up into their brain” thing since we were old enough to walk to school.

        1. Yeaaah, I know what you mean. If someone else had done that to me too, they’d be on the floor. I do NOT assume the other person is going to stop when they have the forward momentum of a limb already toward my face.

          There was this tall teenage boy back in high school who decided it’d be funny to pick up a notebook I had dropped and hold it out of reach. He didn’t expect the roundhouse kick to his face – that I stopped before hitting his cheek. He dropped my notebook, which I caught without shifting, and backed away.

          Looking back, I was seriously scary, and I still don’t have an issue with that.

          1. Definitely one of those things where the sheer shock that I responded at all was in my favor, but jeeze, you’d think folks would THINK.

            1. That’s just it! They don’t! Most of the shit that got started in high school was because someone thought it was funny to escalate to shoving and didn’t expect the punch in the face or kick in the gut – and then trying again LATER because they got humiliated. Shouting insults at me was no fun because I ignored them (or had earbuds in my ears and never heard them anyway) and frankly yelling at someone who isn’t paying any attention makes the shouter look like an idiot. So, try shove me out of chair = chair flung at their head. (and really, why the hell am I supposed to give people who insult me the time of day?)

              I don’t believe in ‘proportionate retribution’. I’m too small for that, and I was never trained that way.

              1. I’d argue that your “over-reaction” is actually proportionate– exactly because they were so much larger, and generally in groups, when they initiated combat.

                It takes a pretty big advantage for the target to overcome the attacker’s advantage. In war, it would game out as an ambush.

                Add in that you’re already someone who would be at a disadvantage in a fair fight? Whoosh.

    8. With so many UMSC or Army vets, there must be some of you with a basic knowledge of unarmed combat who could handle an attacker of that kind without needing a gun.”

      That’s assuming everything is equal; but there’s truth in the old saying the “God made man, Sam Colt made ’em equal.”

      Training has a limited ability to equalize between a 6’3″ 275 lb attacker and a 5’2″ 110 lb soaking wet defender. Unless that training is “two to the chest, one to the head; repeat as necessary.”

      Part of training is knowing when a threat moves beyond annoying to life threatening. None of us is talking about shooting an annoying threat.

    9. Honestly? If someone pushes people under a train, then shooting them is a good response. They’re attempting murder. And that’s one of the big reasons to carry – for shooting folks trying to kill/maim other people.

      And you’re misunderstanding most of the responses. Because we’re not saying you can’t be BMOC and declaim “*I* don’t needs me no gun!” We’re replying to your questions of “reasons why”. You even admit it here with “must be some of you…”.

      You seem to be making an argument that gun carry is unnecessary because some are capable enough to not need it. Your premise and your hypothesis don’t agree.

      The whole point of carrying is making a personal decision to defend yourself and others with an above-minimum capability. It’s a right for a reason.

      1. Oh, as to the “sudden danger from inside contact range”:
        Firearms are not a panacea. They don’t magically ward off bad people. In a good firearms self-defense class, weapons retention and effectively employment inside contact range are elements of the curriculum, as well as alert levels and situational awareness.
        If you’re in Condition Yellow, you will assess the person moving up behind you as to their threat level, then act based on the perceived threat. And you also won’t stand close enough to the train platform edge to be easily pushed under the train.

    10. I was born in 1951. I have watched as increasingly onerous and restrictive gun control laws were passed at federal, state, and local levels in response to a host of shooting crimes, a list too long to go into. But as time went on and none of these “common sense” laws did squat to make us safer reasonable sensible folks started to wake up. I think what really turned the tide was that infamous Assault Weapon Ban which ran from 1994 to 2004. Call it an experiment in gun control, it was studied to death from all sides and angles and proved itself so useless that Congress refused to renew it when the ten year grandfather clause came about.
      After that grass roots pro gun activists and politicians began implementing different legislation. State by state we saw licensed concealed carry by private citizens become the law of the land. And in each and every case of that and any other pro gun policy we always heard the same refrain shouted from the rooftops, “there will be blood in the streets!!!”
      And when the legislation passed and none of the dire predictions happened the media was silent. Until the next time when the same rhetoric was again trotted out.
      What it really boils down to is that a firearm in the hands of a trained and capable owner raises them up to a level playing field with the strongest over muscled bully on the street. Brute force yields to a well placed bullet. And yes that does add a higher level of deadly force to any conflict, but that is the price we have chosen to pay for equality.
      I weep for our once cousins the Brits who chose to surrender their right of self defense in exchange for the illusion of safety only to find that they no longer possess either. According to official UN statistics in 2010 Great Britain with one fifth the population of the United States had as many reported violent crimes. One may argue that they book keep their crimes differently, but it’s still difficult to explain away a five to one difference. It does explain why since 2010 the UN has made those numbers very much harder to dig out focusing instead only on firearm related incidents.

    11. John, your point is still nonsense.
      The 250 pound 6’4″ drunk beating up on my 100 pound 5’1″ wife isn’t going to pay any attention if she strikes back with her taekwondo skills. Especially since she has none, and is well into her 70s. She has exactly two options: be a helpless victim, or shoot the bastard.
      The whole point of personal weapons is to give the intended victim an equal chance. Without weapons, the strong will destroy the weak. Is it your intent that weak people should be defenseless against stronger attackers? If yes, that makes you evil. If no, then why did you make that silly point?
      http://olegvolk.net/gallery/technology/arms/chicago_politicans_6625web.jpg.html

      1. “The whole point of personal weapons is to give the intended victim an equal chance.”

        I think John Lott has made the point slightly differently: The whole point of personal weapons in the hands of potential victims is to increase the perceived risk to those willing to threaten force. When some potential victims cannot be victimized with impunity and when any potential victim might be carrying a personal weapon, herd immunity is increased even for those not armed.

        1. Yes, that is the mechanism that makes the number of shootings go -down- when the number of people carrying weapons goes -up.- It becomes far too dangerous for dirtbags to attack other people.

          Liberals seem to have a great deal of difficulty understanding this relationship. To them, if the number of guns goes up, the number of shootings HAS to go up, right? I mean, how do you stop an attack without killing the other guy?

          Dear Liberals, this is why we mock you. Because you are -stupid.-

        2. RES, very good point. This is why crime goes down when even a small fraction of the people is known to carry. And this is why criminals target groups and places unlikely to be armed, like tourists or people in “gun free zones” (more accurately “defenseless victim zones”). They may be too stupid to have a job, but they often have just enough brains to think about self-preservation.

    12. With so many UMSC or Army vets, there must be some of you with a basic knowledge of unarmed combat who could handle an attacker of that kind without needing a gun.

      Possibly, but why on earth should someone voluntarily take that risk when they are being attacked?

      They are at a disadvantage for knowledge– they didn’t know the guy existed before he attacked, while the attacker knew about his target at least long enough to decide it was worth attacking– so the very idea that “you could handle this without a gun” is suggestive of a really warped mindset.

      Contrast with “if you are attacked when you don’t have a gun, here’s what you can do to try to defend yourself well enough to survive to put some distance and move to the next step of being able to offer fatal force to actually stop the person attacking you.”

    13. You have a point. There’s a saying: you can’t out-draw a drawn gun. There’s a concept called the continuum of force that an armed citizen must bear in mind. If I’ve got a gun on me and need to put up a fight, it’s not necessarily going to be my best choice, or my first choice. I have other weapons and other choices, including unarmed resistance. Our laws, and the morality underlying them, require us to use the force required to stop the threat. Lethal force is the ideal choice only on a very bad day.

      As an aside, and I’ll forgive you because you’re obviously one of our Anglophone cousins from across the Pond, calling American Southerners ‘Yankees’ is a good way turn a polite conversation ugly. There are some in attendance here, myself included.

      1. Andrew, your statement of the laws may be accurate for some states, not for others. For example, in NH the law states specifically when deadly force is permitted. It definitely does not use the notion used in some other places of the minimum force required to stop the threat. It may be your choice to act that way, and I would not argue against that, but that’s different from saying the law requires it.

  36. “Because, you know, we’ve had laws against murder since… ever… and that’s why there is none.”

    Well, the laws do help; if we didn’t have them, not everyone would immediately become a murdering psychopath, but there’d certainly be a somewhat higher level of it.

    The cases that anti-gun advocates are so afraid of, as I’ve noted before, are essentially those in the center of their imagined Venn diagram between reliable law-abiders and reliable law-breakers, i.e. the people whose abiding by law is based on circumstance and capacity rather than choice — the people for whom the decision to murder or not murder, they imagine, depends purely on whether, at the time the impulse seizes them, the easiest and most effective method hypothetically available to them is still too inconvenient to obtain or use in practice.

    The problem with the Broward County shooter is not that measures weren’t in place to prevent what he did, it’s that those measures didn’t work because none of the danger signals were followed up on — and I can’t help but wonder if that’s because there are so many danger signals being sent these days. As I’ve said in other blogs, I think that in real life the Boy Who Cried Wolf is far likelier to happen with a sincere but hypersensitive shepherd who believes every warning he gives is merited than with a mischievous one who knows he’s lying for his own amusement.

    1. I don’t know; I mean, are there really that many people saying that they want to shoot up schools? I don’t think we needed law enforcement to be hyper-sensitive to the signals; they just need to be sensitive enough to pick up what seems in retrospect to be pretty obvious. If it turns out that we have too many teens and adults (this killer was an adult, technically) beating up their parents, stealing mail, seriously abusing animals (in this case, reportedly setting his dogs on the neighbor’s potbelly pigs), and threatening to shoot up schools for law enforcement to deal with… we’re going to have to come up with a solution for that.

      1. “In retrospect,” sure; hindsight is always 20-20. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that any given police precinct or FBI office regularly gets more anonymous warning calls than they can follow up on.

        It doesn’t even have to assume ill will. I once called my local police station to report on an abandoned bag I’d seen under a bridge as I walked to work — I’d just been feeling a little paranoid that day, I guess — and it took me close to half an hour of navigating various switchboards, and waiting on hold at various numbers, before I was finally able to tell a real person what I’d seen and where it was. And the officer I spoke was personable enough but I was clearly one in a long line of calls; you have to wonder how many such reports they deal with, and how many people just give up bothering before they can actually tell someone something.

        Besides, the problem is that no solution is without tradeoffs, and whatever the tradeoff cost the Left will scream about it. One approach might be to point out, “Look, you can scream about innocent Muslim boys getting arrested for bringing clocks to school, or you can scream that nobody arrested this shooter before he bought a gun — but you can’t scream about both at the same time, or we’ll stop listening to both warnings. Make up your mind.”

        1. Was driving on one way street with dedicated bus lane, that travels the same direction as traffic, with someone driving in the bus lane – the wrong way. Called 911, by the time someone answered, the car was long gone. Hey, I tried. Yes, laid on horn at car going wrong direction first, but no sign they realized their mistake as they went by. Supposedly they sent someone to look for the car, but I have no way of knowing.

          1. The two times I’ve called 911 in my life, it was to report traffic hazards. No cars driving the wrong way, but I did once report a fire near the side of the highway that looked like nobody was in control of it (and was told “We know about it and the fire department is already on the way”), and the other time I reported a wooden pallet that was lying squarely in one lane of a two-lane highway out in the middle of the countryside. (My best guess is that it fell off someone’s truck). On that one, I was apparently the first to call in and report it; about ten minutes later, I passed a police car going the other direction (back towards the wooden pallet), which I assumed was the guy who’d been dispatched when I called.

            Both times, I got through rather quickly. But then, I was calling the emergency line so I didn’t have to navigate any phone trees. I actually don’t know the non-emergency number for my local police station; if I ever needed to call them to report something that wasn’t worth calling 911 over, I don’t actually know how I’d do it.

            1. I had a flip-flop situation; drunk neighbor was yelling at me through the door. The city had a 311 non-emergency number; I asked for a callout, but they wouldn’t do it without a 911 call. (This was in California, naturally.)
              I persuaded the neighbor to go sleep it off when I made it clear there was a loaded 12 gauge on the other side of the wall. Where we live now, anybody close enough to hassle has jumped a fence or crashed a gate; as the shopkeeper’s sign puts it “Due to the increased price of ammunition, no warning shots will be given.”.

              I’ve called 911 a few times for wildland fires. The two that come to mind were already reported, but they don’t mind redundancy.

            2. The only time I have personally called 911 was to report the cows from a nearby ranch had escaped and were loitering all over my at-the-time subdivision’s road. Not a problem for me, going to work at 5:45 am, but I knew how fast and careless some of my neighbor’s were later.

              It didn’t take long to get through, and the 911 operator responded well to my confusion as to who, exactly, I ought to be telling this to, since I didn’t have any available numbers to me *other* than 911: she transferred me to the sheriff’s office, where I got a weary “Oh, no, not again” and a “thank you.”

            3. I did call 911. They had to put me through to the correct dispatcher based on where I was at. Almost would have been better to use the emergency on OnStar, they would have known what street & direction I was traveling on (too much glare on dashboard to read it) & not area I know exact cross street names on. It was “Just left Doris Ranch headed to Hwy 105, just after passing City Police parking lot, saw a car in the bus lane going the wrong way.” Granted “North bound on Pioneer Parkway, between Main & Centennial saw car in the bus lane going the wrong way, between D & E streets” would have been better. Able to recognize the make of the car would have been even better, but nope, that’s NOT ever happening. Somewhere between “H*ly S***, there is a wrong way car” & 911, my memory cells went on vacation. I’d blame it on old-lady-sydrome, but wouldn’t have been any better when I was much younger (drives my husband nuts). Yes, I too need to add the local non-emergency number to my contact list.

      2. We had two “I want to shoot up the school” arrests out here this week and last. *glowers at media for inspiring copy-cats*

            1. I am well aware that part of the reason why the anti-gunners want disarmament is so they can (so they imagine) visit upon us ‘wrongthinkers’ whatever violence they deem appropriate, in the ‘greater numbers’ they imagine are on their side.

              1. Anyone doubting that need only watch five or ten minutes of CNN’s show-trial “town hall” on gun control last night. CNN’s hand-picked audience of rabid antigun types and sleaze-bag “moderator” Jake Tapper (a former spokesman for a gun control group!) made it perfectly clear that they not only want to take our guns, they want us dead or jailed.

                Of course, most of the people here already know that. CNN just made it clear to the rest of the country last night, as well. Dana Loesch can just go ahead and take the next couple of months off, because all of NRA’s campaign ads for 2018 just wrote themselves last night.

                2. Its funny how the chants of “BURN HER!” seem to be missing from the CNN video today. I really hope somebody got that on their phone, because that’s a hell of a thing.

                3. They appear to have made an error; they invited one of the JROTC kids that risked their lives getting fellow students to safety (I believe three are dead, not sure how many others injured) to “submit questions” and then handed him a script with the stuff they didn’t want removed.
                  He declined, and told other media.

                  CNN…called him a liar.

                  That got some of the other victims, and their families, coming out to mention that CNN was oddly focused on only folks saying *specific* things.

                  1. CNN says it didn’t happen, they didn’t do it. I am sure they were just helping him refine his question to make his point more clearly.

                    Colton Haab differs and names names.

    2. I am picturing the smoking remains of a structure after a fire. There were multiple fuses, in series, so any given entity could open the circuit. But “Everyone has their fuse. I can just put in a penny for now and…” got repeated. And then it was all pennies and no fuses. All it took was for one more short and… things got mighty hot.

      1. Every disaster has three or four links that if they had been just a little different the event would have been significantly different. When one piece keeps coming up perhaps you need to isolate and work it

        1. This is what pisses me off the most about the “It’s a gun problem! Ban guns!” or “It’s a mental health problem! Get them in the wards!” or “It’s a moral issue! Make them not be gay!”

          There *is* a problem with rising rates of gun violence. The media, however, encourages – indeed demands – instant, simplistic solutions, which completely misses the point Orvan and Aacid are making – that there are MULTIPLE failure points leading to the event, and ALL of them need to be considered and addressed. One simplistic solution looks good in the headlines and the polls, but does SFA that’s actually effective.

          Full disclosure – I’m Canadian, and yes, my view on gun ownership is probably different, on average, from that of your average American. But the dishonesty coming from the extreme ends of both sides on this, and the simplistic solutions being blatted into the wind, piss me off no end.

          1. Actually William, no, there isn’t. The rate of Gun Violence is not rising, it is lower now than it has been in decades. The decline started in 1993, before the AWB or the Brady Bill passed- at least here in America.

          2. Never underestimate the tendency of the media to exaggerate or flat out lie to advance a narrative. See Russia, Russia, Russia! (or Prozac, Prozac, Prozac, and so on).

              1. 50% of the increase was in only one city. Can’t remember which one….

                But outside of the cities targeted by Black Lives Matter, it’s continued the downward trend. Per the FBI stats.

            2. Sarah, we know (because they announced it) that during the Obama administration crimes were not getting charged based on Victim Group membership. I take any statistics government produces with a freighter full of salt.

          4. I’m going to take pride in being labeled an “extreme end” on the subject of liberty and rights.

          5. Full disclosure, I’m a Canadian too. Everything you’ve been told about guns, murder rates and shootings is a -lie,- Mr. Underhill sir. It isn’t a mistake, or a misunderstanding, its a lie. Deliberate, premeditated and malicious.

            Example, as others have said, rates of gun violence are not rising in the USA. That you think they are, I’m going to be charitable and assume you’ve believed someone who is lying to you. Like CBC, CTV, Global TV, the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, New York Times, CNN, and so forth.

            So one of the main problems right now is an un-truthful media, and you didn’t even know that. You can’t debate a liar. You have to defeat them.

          6. There *is* a problem with rising rates of gun violence.

            Oddly enough, not in the US.

            There does seem to be a serious increase in Europe, it just takes a couple of years of averaging to figure it out, because it’s so tiny.

            And I found out the other day that Canada is only three behind the US in school shootings* since 1989, when as I understand it y’all had a really nasty one.

            *in the FBI standardized at least four killed not including the shooter, on campus, metric.

            1. Semi-duplicate post, because WP has the original stuck in “moderation” for, apparently, having an embedded link, since 9:16 this morning:

              https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-gun-control-advocates-claims-u-s-isnt-the-worst-country-for-mass-shootings/

              … a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings.

              So who’s tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089.

              That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

              1. I’d be willing to bet that the U.S. has the highest rate of school shootings, though, because that’s the safest place for an evil b*st*rd to find victim-disarmement zones. In most countries in Europe, the whole country is a victim-disarmement zone, so the mass shootings happen in places like sports stadiums, cafés, and offices of satirical weekly magazines. In America, though, shooting up an office runs a high risk of at least two or three people in that office drawing their concealed weapon and shooting back, so the shooters tend to choose places where that can’t happen to them. And so America has more school shootings even while having fewer mass shootings, because almost all the mass shootings that happen in the U.S. happen in schools.

                1. Per 100k? Since 1990, nope. Canada has had 8 or 9, we’ve had 13. We’re three or four times bigger. Maybe 5, can’t really remember.

                  Might be proximity and the psycho SOBs thinking they’ll get as famous as the shooters down here, for some of them….

            2. “Oddly enough” — no, it’s not odd at all. Not if you read and understand John Lott. Rising rates of violence occur, quite reliably, when the victims are disarmed. So in many parts of the world, including Europe, violent crime is rising, while in the civilized parts of the USA (i.e., the parts where victims are not disarmed by the State) they are going down. As you would expect, when you extrapolate from the obvious fact that criminals dislike getting hurt or killed.
              One interesting resource on all this is the UN Crime Victimization Study which I read some years ago — not exactly a pro-gun source.

              1. You might want to read the conversation again.

                I was responding to a comment that pointed out that someone wouldn’t be surprised if the US led in school shootings, because that was the only place reliably disarmed and not guarded.
                In contrast, most of the rest of the “first world” has pretty much everywhere disarmed and unguarded.

                Thus yes, it is rather odd that Canada– not exactly awesome for gun rights and self defense– has more school shootings than the US, by population.

        2. Every disaster has three or four links that if they had been just a little different the event would have been significantly different.
          This. One of the things that “civilians” get incensed about is when “pilot error” is listed as a cause in a flight mishap report. They get all upset about “blaming the pilot” and such.
          Yet, almost EVERY aircraft mishap involves something the pilot could have done better or some indicator he missed. And it’s almost always only one element in the whole chain of events.
          One of the biggest bits of training for aircraft mishap investigators is learning to look for ALL the links in the mishap chain.

          Then, you have to figure out which elements, if eliminated/mitigated, get you the most likelihood of preventing future mishaps. Sometimes it’s the pilot one. A lot of the time you can’t really fix one or more of the elements (often, it’s that pilot one).

          It’s the same with school shootings. Yes, the firearm is an element. And they (the “Do something!” crowd) are all shouting about this single element, and ignoring the other really big stuff that was also contributory.

          Then, you have one of the elements (Broward County Sheriff) blaming the other elements…….

          1. I had a comment yesterday that I scrapped comparing this to the DC-10 door failure. Your core issue (equivalent to the fact that the door could fail to properly latch) is the societal pressure that creates these people. The inciting event (Equivalent to the handler forcing door closed) is that this individual decided to cause the mayhem and was not stopped by the systems in place. The firearm is the most tertiary part of this, just as the undersized vents in the cabin were. There would have been a serious incident one way or another if this link had been absent. This link facilitated the route that the disaster took (in this case gun vs bomb vs gas, etc).

            If you had an airplane that randomly popped cargo doors the FAA wouldn’t just shrug its shoulders as long as the cabin vents worked and allowed the aircraft to land. And neither would the public. But the media and politicians refuse to even let the idea of breaking this chain in multiple places pass. Punish the sheriff departments that failed. The Fibbers that sat on the report and didn’t even pass along as they were supposed to according to the Bureau. The teachers that knew and just passed him along.

            It’s almost as if they want it to happen.

          2. “Then, you have one of the elements (Broward County Sheriff) blaming the other elements…….”

            Then, you have one of the elements (Broward County Sheriff) saying “It’s not my fault! There was nothing I could do! Don’t blame me!…….”

            Leadership inaction.

  37. I kinda/sorta thought about buying a gun during the Obama years, but never got around to it. A bunch of my (gay) friends got together after Trump’s election to take a concealed carry class, so I went with them. (Denver, it was really good; if anyone wants the name, let me know.) Another year passed. A (not-gay, former Marine) friend took us to a local range, just for fun. And now. Oh my but this is an expensive hobby. Concealed carry permit (~$200) is next, but not a pressing issue. I don’t feel particularly endangered. A bigger gun safe might come first.

    The thing I’ve noticed at the ranges around here is the diversity. I’m very surprised. Couldn’t put a label on the group to save my life (well, other than the obvious “shooters”).

    1. > for fun

      It’s amazing how many peoples’ attitudes change when they find out that shooting can be *fun*.

      And a while later they suddenly realize they’ve become one of those nutters with “an arsenal”, which is silly, because each gun, like each golf club, has its own specific purpose, except for the ones that somehow colonized their storage space without explanation…

      2. One of the big actors… I think it’s the guy who plays Hawkeye in the marvel films…. had that exact reaction.

        He took someone up on the challenge, and found out it’s very enjoyable.

    2. mrsizer, a good weapon, with minor maintenance, will last nearly forever. And all hobbies taken seriously are expensive. Take a look at what fishermen will spend on a bass boat.

      1. Some of mine were made in the German Empire during the reign of Wilhelm II, back in 1891.

        They still work perfectly, as they did a century and a quarter ago. When they’re two hundred and fifty years old, I expect they will still work perfectly.

      2. At least you can use a lure more than once! I wondered why people had 1000s of rounds of ammunition. It goes FAST.
        But I did get a neat laser bullet that is reusable (but bullet-sized watch batteries do not power a laser for very long). The cats don’t much enjoy being used for target practice, but they forgive me if I let them chase the laser after I shoot them.

  38. Anyone who understands firearms when this latest tragic event was first reported had to think to themselves thank God the shooter did not have the knowledge to bring a more effective weapon. Had he used a shotgun with buckshot loads the death toll would have been much worse.
    And say we did wave a magic wand and make all those nasty guns disappear, that hateful piece of slime could just as well created a pack full of fire bombs from common household chemicals and burned down the entire building.
    Hateful crazy people bent on terrorist acts do not give up the first time they encounter a block, they back up and find a way around it. You either must identify and restrain them before they act, or be prepared to quickly and decisively respond once they implement their plans.

    1. Possibility: he wasn’t going for numbers, he was going for specific targets, although he didn’t care if secondary targets died on the way.

      1. I saw some early reports indicating he was targeting specific people, but those have been memory-holed as inconsistent with the narrative.

  39. I just saw the trailer for Death Wish again today (I went to see Black Panther; good movie, although not surprisingly Hollywood can’t imagine an African nation that isn’t still mired in savagery). There’s an exchange in it that couldn’t be more timely: “You’re not a cop!” “Somebody has to do it!”

    We’re a long way from New York City in the seventies; unfortunately it always comes back a lot faster than it can be gotten rid of.

    2. “Hollywood can’t imagine an African nation that isn’t still mired in savagery”

      In fairness, that was the depiction in the comic book original. In further fairness, I have seen absurd amounts of kvelling about this depiction of an African nation not ravaged by the slave trade.

      Meh. For whatever reason I was thinking about it when I arose this morning and realized that its roots are in the writings of Burroughs and H Rider Haggard. Possibly A Merritt, too — I’ve read less of him than I’ve wanted to.

      1. yes well, i am wondering how early medieval farming techniques are feeding that city with no imports

      2. I’ll admit that I am not up on Wakanda’s history in the comics; it just seemed odd for a nation that chooses its king through deadly combat to be surprised when a violent tyrant becomes king.

        1. It doesn’t have to be deadly; the film made it very clear in T’Challa’s first ritual combat that yielding was always an option. It also seemed pretty strongly implied that an actual challenge was a rare and startling event. And it’s worth bearing in mind that most real-life tyrants get into power not by personal violence but by getting other people to be violent on their behalf.

          1. Jim Geraghty at NRO took on the Wakanda mythology yesterday.

            In the film’s backstory, the imaginary kingdom of Wakanda was founded atop a meteorite of the priceless, do-just-about-anything element vibranium, and the country has thrived in secret peace and prosperity for centuries. The rest of the world believes a technologically enabled illusion that Wakanda is a remote, isolated, backwater country, known only to Geography Bee contestants.

            The story ensures that the audience will sympathize with the villain, the angry revolutionary Killmonger, perhaps a bit too much. The Wakandans did doom the rest of the continent and the world to all kinds of preventable trouble when they decided to keep the vibranium for themselves and shut out the rest of the world. They chose to keep utopia for themselves and let the rest of the world suffer.

            And yet . . . In an earlier scene, one of T’Challa’s friends tells him, “When you let in refugees, they bring their problems with them.” Some members of the audience clucked after this line of dialogue at my screening, but it’s worth noting that this character isn’t meant to be a villain and that . . . he’s got a point.

            [SNIP]

            Another aspect about Wakanda that nags at the audience is that we never get much sense of what life is like for the average civilian there. Do they mind not having free elections? There doesn’t seem to be anything resembling a parliament; the nation has traditions but no discernible constitution. Killmonger seizes the throne and decides overnight to turn the country into an expansionist empire aiming to destabilize every other country on earth, and a significant number of Wakandans think that they have to go along out of respect for the throne.

            [SNIP]

            Wakanda seems utopian in its skylines, endless gadgets, and magnetic levitation trains. But we know it can’t exist, and it’s not just because vibranium is fictional. Wakanda can’t exist, not owing to any inherent flaw in Africans, but because of the inherent flaws of human beings. Every human society involves trade-offs. If you want more security, you’re probably going to have less freedom from surveillance and fewer civil liberties. If you want to avoid the paralysis of division, you have to concentrate power; but absolute power corrupts absolutely. In theory you can avoid wealth disparity through socialism, but collectivism destroys the incentives to create, innovate, and work hard, and a corrupt few inevitably rise to the top, creating new wealth disparities. People have to choose what values they prioritize in their nation.

            [SNIP]

            The film leaves us thinking that vibranium is the secret to Wakanda’s thriving society, but access to resources does not necessarily make a country wealthy, healthy, or happy. In the real world, the country of Niger has one of the world’s largest supplies of uranium, as well as gold, coal, and oil — a combination of valued resources that probably is as close as we’ll find to vibranium. But the United Nations ranked Niger as the second-least-developed country in the world in 2016, ranked 223rd in the world in GDP, with 45 percent of Nigeriens living below the poverty line and only 20 percent literate.

            [END EXCERPT]

            Also, from his Morning Jolt newsletter:

            And the comic book and film use vibranium as a catch-all hand-waving way to explain how and why Wakanda is prosperous — and overwhelmingly prosperous, with no discernible international trade. (North Korea shows us how much your economy can thrive when you shut yourself off from the rest of the outside world.) Think about it: Wakanda builds its amazing stealth aircraft, skyscrapers, magnetic-levitation trains, mining equipment, and gadgets without ever importing a single tool, part, nut, bolt, or raw material.
            Comments

            I also enjoyed this observation over at The Ringer: “Wakanda is an isolationist nation of pacifists whose core commercial innovations, outside of medicine, are in warfare and air travel.”

            1. The makers of Black Panther could have the movie a call to violent Black power, and did not. There are some interesting questions that could be asked about why.

              Theory one, they wanted to, but decided the political environment was too touchy.

              Theory two, Black Panther was needed to insulate the franchise against some creative decision they made, whether in the past or in the future, and its purpose is solely to make the SJWs chant ‘one of us’ while at the same time not being irresponsibly incendiary.

              Theory three, MCU has a bunch of secret right wingers, who wanted to do an ultra-right wing story, but needed the right way to disguise it.

              #OreoPanther

              1. Argument in favor of theory three: notice how there’s one character in Black Panther who argues the theory that “White people screwed over black people in the past, so that justifies us hating white people now.” I.e., the same theory behind the calls for reparations for slavery, etc.

                Which character is this? The villain.

            2. “The film leaves us thinking that vibranium is the secret to Wakanda’s thriving society, but access to resources does not necessarily make a country wealthy, healthy, or happy.”

              But it fits in rather neatly with the “poverty causes crime” that redistributionists have been pushing since Marx.

      3. To be fair, if the Africans had *had* nations rather than tribes, they probably wouldn’t have been ravaged by the slave trade, at least no worse than anyone else.

  41. Today from ESR:
    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7866
    If you blow up the Constitution, you’ll regret it

    “I am therefore resharing a blog post I wrote some time back on why repealing 2A would not abolish the right to bear arms, only open the way to the U.S. government massively violating that right. Rights are not granted by the Constitution, they are recognized by it. This is black-letter law.”

    Read also the linked articles.

    1. The problem with the Constitution is that it has never been obeyed to speak of by any of the three branches of government, nor by the additional branches not even mentioned in the Constitution (“independent agencies”). And I mean *never*. Read St. George Tucker’s book about the Constitution to see how it was being trampled back then — way back in 1803.
      The plain text of the Constitution makes it clear that the Federal government has no authority to mess with our guns even without the Bill of Rights. That’s because messing with them is not a power enumerated in Article 1 Section 8, so by the plain English text no such power exists.
      Then there is not just the 2nd Amendment, but the 9th and the 10th, *ALL* of which plainly state that same fact all over again.
      But good luck finding any politician who will agree that any of the above is true, let alone one who will act on that truth.

  42. One thing that always galls me every time this happens is when we Canadians conveniently forget our own mass shootings to piously lecture Americans. But then, there’s a lot of inherent anti-American bigotry in Canada we turn a blind eye to.

    1. The issue is that the media begs everyone to. They bring fourth their pious arguments of the sacred Brits and Australians who stopped all school shootings (Notice the specificity there. In the last two decades we have had 5 significant spree shootings at schools, barring gang or one-on-one conflicts). But they neglect to include the side effects of the changes made, the variation in both culture and legal definitions, and so on. The typical remark is that if you remove four cities (LA, DC, Chicago, and New Orleans are one variant I’ve heard, there are a few others.) from the US rates and population you get a crime rate beneath almost any in Europe. But those are all inconvenient truths.

      2. In round numbers, about 30,000 gun deaths a year in the US.
        Two thirds of those are suicide, which is legitimately a mental health issue.
        Of the remaining 10k about 90% can be attributed to inner city gang violence.
        The remaining homicides, about three per day, and terrible though each and every one might be, must be spread over a population of 330 million people.

        1. This country left logic years ago. There is no connection between what actual problems are and what to do about them.

          Firearms homicides are by and large a result of the black market in the inner cities. You know, the exact groups that will be able to get weapons from outside the country. And since we plead away the gun charges almost immediately there is almost no reason for them not to carry.

          But the only people that the government ever wants to encumber are the ones who provide nice, easy process crimes that they can administratively destroy you over.

  43. Regardless of whether criminals can get forbidden tools (Look at how much illicit substances that can be detected chemically in the air via dog or machine get into the country. You think crates of “machine tools” will be found in sufficient number to prevent the main driver of deaths, gang warfare?) you still break what keeps getting touted as the ‘social contract’ that says we should be good little worker bees for the state to skim off. Even without weapons, might makes right will be a powerful force.

    Whether different via age, sex, number, or other reason disagreements will be handled via force no less than they are now. Except here there is no restraint exercised because ‘maybe that octagenarian has a pistol in that handbag’. IIRC there were inmate interviews and studies that suggested that the threat of resistance is what caused change in operation from violent to property crimes, and at least some of those individuals intentionally refrained from arming themselves to avoid the sentence modifiers from being armed. So we now wish to not only disarm the victims but to weaken the punishment effect when so few firearms crimes are actually prosecuted. The state made the decision to aid the aggressor over the victim.

  44. Pingback: The Right to Self Defence | Shadowdancer Studios

  46. Well, this is awkward!

    Parkland student: CNN gave me ‘scripted’ questions on guns
    Colton Haab, a Junior ROTC student and survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. last week, said he going to participate in the CNN town hall Wednesday night, but decided not to when he said the network provided him with a list of “scripted questions.”

    “I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinions on my questions,” Haab said told a local ABC affiliate, WPLG-TV. “CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions, and it ended up being all scripted.”

    Haab said he was asked to prepare a speech and some questions, and he was planning to ask about school safety, and the possibility of using veterans as armed security guards in schools, but was rejected by CNN. After being told he had to ask a scripted question, Haab decided not to attend the town hall.

    “I don’t think that it’s going get anything accomplished. It’s not gonna ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have,” Haab said.

    ******************************************************************************

    Sounds like that school has one hell of a JROTC program!

    1. Another take on that CNN 5-Minute Hate …

      CNN’s ‘Stand Up’ Town Hall Was a Disaster for Our Discourse
      By Charles C. W. Cooke
      Last night’s CNN Town Hall is being touted this morning as an “extraordinary moment,” a “conversation,” and a “debate.” In truth, though, it was none of those things. Rather, it was a disaster for American discourse, the ripples of which will be felt for years to come. One of the students who survived the shooting described it cynically as a “Comedy Central Roast of the NRA and the coming out party for my ADHD.” This, though, isn’t quite right. In truth, it was televised catharsis. And it was supposed to be.

      Catharsis is good and necessary. So is grief. Anger can be, too. But the these things are not the same as debate or conversation, and, in some cases, they serve as brutally effective prophylactics against deep and constructive engagement. By encouraging legitimately distraught and enraged citizens to shout at politicians, CNN ensured that we could continue to conduct this dispute on a faulty and toxic premise: Namely, that the root problem here is that some among us simply refuse acknowledge that school shootings are an abomination. But that, as ever, is not the root problem. Indeed, contrary to the implications we heard last night, we are not having an argument about whether the victims of tragedy are really grieving, or about whether the footage taken from within the school is harrowing, or about whether these events should be stopped. We are having an argument over precisely what we can — and should — do.

      [SNIP]

      What do we think the likely result of this will be? A newfound political harmony? Or a surge in NRA membership, a deepening of the culture war, an increase in gun sales, and a growing belief that “the other side” really does hate you? I daresay that lots of people who dislike firearms enjoyed watching Marco Rubio being berated. Indeed, if Twitter is any indication, they really, really did. But Marco Rubio’s views on this issue are not unpopular in Florida, and they are not unpopular in the country at large. I imagine that those cheering along with the castigations imagined that they were the person doing the berating. Millions, though, imagined they were Rubio. And they’ll proceed from there in future.

    2. Makes me wish he *had* attended. What are they going to do, cut off the microphone halfway through his question when they realize he’s not following the script they gave him? That would give the game away.

      1. Pretty sure their “live” broadcast had a several second delay; time enough to seamlessly cut to commercial to cover up any faux puas.

    1. Do we really need to provide you with the multiple reports of Europeans charged and convicted of self-defense, such as Tony Martin, the British farmer issued a life sentence for shooting a burglar?

      1. Sigh. I guess not.

        And I may have been thinking of fighting back (fists) in general, not the use of deadly force, however justified.

    2. This event was given to me as a positive example of how Europe (specifically Scotland) handles self defense.

      https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/search-judgments/judgment?id=6f3786a6-8980-69d2-b500-ff0000d74aa7

      Short version: jealous ex boyfriend busts into house and starts beating his ex and her current fellow with a bat, while they’re having sex.

      Guy punches him. Doesn’t work.

      Guy grabs a knife and stabs him. Doesn’t work.

      Guy stabs him more, eventually managing to stop the attack.

      Attacker dies of knife wounds.

      Guy who was victim of attempted murder during coitus is sentenced to ten years in jail.

      Appeals.

      They agree that’s ridiculous, and it’s reduced to seven.

      You see, he should have either kept punching when it wasn’t working, or tried to brain the attacker with a less weapon-y weapon. Like a lamp.

      1. Concur; it’s the weapon thing; he used a weapon. Beg pardon your honor, if you hit someone, with a lamp say, hard enough to make them lose consciousness, then you might have hit them hard enough to kill them. And the attacker was using a weapon. What, is everyone in the UK a DnD cleric and can’t use edged weapons (nor gunpowder)?

        1. Apparently they made much out there being a knife where he could GET it; makes me wonder if the gal would’ve similarly been expected to die trying to beat the guy away with futile weapons.

        2. A lamp is indeed a deadly weapon — a cudgel — capable of inflicting deadly cerebral hemorrhage or lacerating the scalp with the potential of fatal blood loss.

  48. News you can use:

    Sorry, Despite Gun-Control Advocates’ Claims, U.S. Isn’t The Worst Country For Mass Shootings
    Gun Deaths: It’s become commonplace to hear after a U.S. shooting tragedy that, when it comes to guns, America is just more violent than other countries, especially those in Europe, where many countries have stiff gun-control laws. It’s a progressive shibboleth, but even some conservatives agree. The only problem is, it’s not true.

    Yes, America does have a lot of gun violence. But more than other countries, especially in Europe?

    To listen to America’s politicians, you’d think that was the case.

    President Obama talked about it a lot, including in June of 2015, after a gunman shot nine people in a Charleston, North Carolina church: “Let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said.

    Days later, Sen. Harry Reid echoed his comments. “The United States is the only advanced country where this kind of mass violence occurs,” he said.

    More recently, the tragic, preventable slaying of 17 students by accused gunman Nikolas Cruz elicited similar sentiments from Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, speaking in the Senate just last Thursday: “This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America.”

    Powerful remarks, and no doubt heartfelt. But a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings.

    So who’s tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089.

    That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

    “There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.”

    “But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.”

    Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it’s not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot.

    Yet, some today propose banning rifles, in particular AR-15s, because they’ve been used in a number of mass killings. It’s important to note however that, according to FBI crime data cited this week by the Daily Caller, deaths by knives in the U.S. outnumber deaths by rifles by five to 1: In 2016, 1,604 people were killed by knives and other cutting instruments, while 374 were killed by rifles.

    So is it not fair to ask: If we’re banning rifles, why not knives, too?

    The point is, guns aren’t the problem; deranged killers that grow up in broken families often without positive male role models in their lives are the problem. So are political and religious extremists, in particular Islamists. If these people didn’t have guns, they would find some other means to do the job.

    Bombs are illegal in both the U.S. and Europe. Yet Europe loses far more people to bombings than the U.S. Doesn’t that make them more violent?

    In the most recent mass killing here in the U.S., what’s upsetting is that Nikolas Cruz, as is usually the case, showed all the signs of a potential killer. He had been expelled from school. He made repeated violent threats. Deputies had made no fewer than 39 visits to his home. He left comments on a web video saying “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” After being notified about the disturbing message, the FBI looked into it, but did nothing.

    In this, Cruz is typical. As columnist SE Cupp notes, “the stunning commonality in all these mass shootings … is that the men who perpetrate them are sick — Las Vegas, Pulse nightclub, Newtown, Columbine, Charleston, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora — on and on, these killers were mentally ill and in almost every case, someone knew it.”

    Sweeping gun control laws may sound good, but they won’t keep handguns and rifles out of the hands of criminals. They will make it even harder for honest Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights, however.

    Rather than politicizing the deaths of 17 people, Democrats and others should instead be pushing for better school security, and for our law enforcement agencies to respond more aggressively to clear threats. Those who are severely mentally ill or psychotic or potentially violent need help. And those that kill for political or religious reasons often show clear signs of being violent. No amount of gun control can stop that.

    1. WP put me in moderation for a single link? Guess y’all will have to wait to find out how the USA is only #11 in deaths per million from mass shootings.

  49. And now one of our local music station radio hosts — who has never, *ever* been even slightly political before — is pushing for gun control. In another country.

    1. Which one?

      By the way, this is why I don’t listen to radio anymore. The BS is inescapable, you have to shut it off. Sirius XM, Chill station. No talking, just electro-pop.

  50. This subject seriously boggles my mind.

    I’m having an argument with someone I know is a sane, fairly decent person…but he is a Scottish lawyer, and thinks that it’s totally OK that they put a guy in jail for 7 years because he stabbed to death the crazy ex of the woman he was having sex with (as in, actually in the act when said crazy busted into the house with a bat and started beating them to death) rather than dying while he tried to fight back with something that isn’t effective, like his hands, or a lamp.

    And apparently he’s actually swallowed the BS about there being “roaming death squads” targeting “minorities” in the US.

    If anybody thinks I’m exaggerating, comments are waaaay down the Disqus line here:
    https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/will-shooting-stop

        1. New Orleans PD.
          Reportedly NYPD as well.
          Fibs had a couple agents outed as aiding and abetting assassins iirc too

          Again just not rogue for reason he thinks.

          1. Yeah, he thinks that shooting the guy trying to beat you to death is a terrible thing.

            And not because you let him get a couple of hits in before you got your weapon out. (Guns are NOT a melee weapon!)

            1. Feeling good by condemning someone else. Just like the arguments that education only will stop rape.

            2. (Guns are NOT a melee weapon!)

              I’d argue, guns can be melee weapons, they’re just not effective one. One class of accessory even exists to turn a rifle into a mediocre shot spear.

              2. I can use a glass jar as a hammer, too, that doesn’t make it a hammer– and trying to do it makes most of the advantages go away.

              3. The first thing that came to mind when you said they weren’t melee weapons was: “Affix bayonets! Ready! CHARGE!”

                (I have a hazy memory of that apparently working in a RECENT warzone, kind of want to say Afghanistan. Because their opponents had “WTF Paralysis going on.)

  51. Reblogged this on Head Noises and commented:
    Defense of self is a basic, natural right; I hold that as Christ ordered us to love our neighbor as ourselves, that right is an obligation, when we have a chance to exercise it.

    Needless to say, it doesn’t feel as good as feeding someone.

  52. One of the young gun control trolls is using #NeverAgain. Appropriation from anti-Holocaust-repetition activism.

    1. Was thinking about something related to this while I was gardening today.

      Just can’t shake the thought: the same folks who are most likely to be yelling about “Never again” are the ones that are pissed that Israel actually does something to keep it from happening.

      1. That’s the point, ennit? They don’t want to have to do something. These are children and they want a childproofed world.

  53. My high school had several building connected by a 2nd floor enclosed passageway but completely open at ground level. Open campus idea. Upper middle class area by income, built when people actually trusted each other to behave properly. Still in use today, and a security nightmare should you actually try to secure it. Back in 1976 had a recent graduate who had been bullied- a lot- killed Mom, Dad, and 2 brothers. If he had decided to unleash his inner demons on the school…

    It would require the entire school be fenced in with one gate controlled access for pedestrians and another for delivery vehicles to provide any kind of security. That’s not going to happen in a high trust upper middle class by income village. I was going to provide a google maps satellite view link, but decided against declaring it an easy target.

    All security is theatre designed to discourage the not so motivated to back off. Or decide on a softer target, let’s say, for example, a GUN FREE zone. Someone determined to commit mayhem can find a way to do so.

    1. 12′ Iron fence with decorative “spikes” around the buildings & open breezeway is exactly what they did to our neighborhood class grade school & district has done to all district schools (per staff, not my normal driving area so have not checked). Neighborhood grade school is 6 breezeway interconnected single story buildings. Income ranges from lower to very high, average is upper middle. Gates that are locked & only open from the inside except for start of day & after bell rings at close of day, otherwise you go in the main gate & check in at the office. The fence was installed by the district without consulting neighborhoods under a federal mandated Safe School initiative that put in sidewalks, crosswalks, in older neighborhoods without them & paid staff & teachers to be crossing guards, “etc.”. Pretty sure they covered the “hey we are fencing in the schools” under the “etc.” in the blurb. Would still have voted yes, but darn fence was a surprise.

  54. Chairman Mao once said “Power grows from the barrel of a gun”, and the murderous bastard was right. If your class, group, party, or whatever won’t keep arms, it won’t keep power for too long. Because those with arms will eventually realize that they can be the ones giving the orders themselves, and why do you need that sorry lot pretending to be leaders anyway?
    Thus, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a check, a separation of powers, and a way to keep that power dispersed.

  55. Heh.

    “The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.”

    Democrat Grover Cleveland, First Inaugural Address (referring to the Chinese) upon entering the presidency after twenty-four years of unbroken* Republican executive dominance.
    http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres37.html

    *Admitted, Johnson was a Democrat but he had been elected as a Republican’s vice-president

  56. Sure glad they addressed their “Disparate Impact” problem …

    It’s Too Late – Broward County School Board Beginning to Admit Their Mistakes?…</B.
    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/21/its-too-late-broward-county-school-board-beginning-to-admit-their-mistakes/
    As expected – buried deep inside a Miami Herald article about the Parkland school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and a school board questioning their progressive policies, we find the following:

    […] Absent Cruz’s school records, it is hard to say precisely when Cruz’s behavior became an acute problem for teachers and administrators. Disciplinary reports obtained by the Herald show that at Westglades Middle School, which he attended in 2013, he’d been cited numerous times for disrupting class, unruly behavior, insulting or profane language, profanity toward staff, disobedience and other rules violations.

    Records show the behaviors continued at Marjory Stoneman Douglas [High School], which he attended in 2016 and 2017 before being transferred, with discipline being dispensed for fighting, profanity, and an “assault.” It appears the Jan. 19, 2017 assault resulted in a referral for a “threat assessment.” A few months later, Cruz landed at an Off Campus Learning Center, where he remained for only about five months.

    Well, there it is.

    This is what Jack Cashill was writing about yesterday: “Did the Progressive ‘Broward County Solution’ Cost 17 Student Lives?” –

    Yes Jack, yes it did.

    Jack Cashill knows all too well, because he watched us follow a similar 2012 Trayvon Martin trail into the rabbit hole of manipulated diversionary school discipline to avoid criminal arrests. Just so the school system could “improve their statistics.”

    Broward County schools intentionally created polices from 2011 through 2015 that culminated in the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland. We know this with great specificity because five years ago we warned Broward County Florida school board members this could happen.

    In 2012 and 2013 while doing research into the Trayvon Martin shooting we discovered an alarming set of school policies being enacted in Miami-Dade and Broward County Florida. The policies were called “diversionary programs” and were essentially about stopping High School students from being arrested. Law enforcement was instructed to avoid arrests and defer criminal conduct to school administrators.

    Students who engaged in violence, drug sales, robberies, burglaries, theft and other various crimes were intentionally kept out of the criminal justice system. County administrators and School Superintendents told local and county law enforcement officers to stop arresting students.

    2013 […] Broward, the nation’s seventh largest district, had the highest number of school-related arrests in Florida in the 2011-2012 school year, according to state data. Seventy-one percent of the 1,062 arrests made were for misdemeanor offenses. (more)/BLOCKQUOTE>Unfortunately, the school board mandated policies came into conflict with law and order. The problem of the conflicted policy -vs- legality worsened over time as the police excused much more than misdemeanor crimes. Over time this culminated in police officers falsifying documents, hiding criminal activity, lying on official police reports and even hiding stolen merchandise police retrieved from high school students.

    In 2012 Trayvon Martin was one of those students.

    It was our initial FOIA requests to the Miami Dade School Police Department which revealed the secret discipline and diversionary program Trayvon Martin was granted to avoid a criminal record. The School Board and M-DSPD kept trying to hide the issue; they delayed responses and charged us thousands for FOIA information; but we knew this story was huge… so we kept going.

    Specifically Trayvon Martin’s criminal conduct was hidden behind school discipline. Stolen jewelry was recorded as random ‘found items’ (the jewelry just intentionally placed in storage with no investigation), Trayvon’s possession of marijuana was similarly obfuscated, and all of the incident reports were intentionally falsified by officials and School Resource Officer, Daryl Dunn, to avoid the Criminal Justice system.

    It is all well documented. None of this is supposition. Our research discovered sworn affidavits from the police department HERE. No-one was ever been held to account – it was just too politically dangerous an issue.

    SRO Dunn never filed a criminal report, nor opened a criminal investigation, surrounding the stolen jewelry. Instead, and as a result of pressure from M-DSPD Chief Hurley to avoid criminal reports for black male students, Dunn wrote up the jewelry as “found items”, and transferred them, along with the burglary tool, to the Miami-Dade Police property room where they sat on a shelf unassigned to anyone for investigation.

    A separate report of “criminal Mischief” (T-08809) was filed for the additional issue of writing “WTF” on a school locker. [It was the search for the marker used to write the graffiti that led to the backpack search].

    The school discipline, “suspension”, was attached to the graffiti and not the stolen jewelry.

    The connections between the Police Burglary report and the School Report of “found items” were never made because the regular police detective in charge of the Burglary case had no idea the School Police Dept. had filed a “found items” report.

    Two differing police departments, and the School Officer, Dunn, intentionally took the criminal element out of the equation – instead preferring “school discipline” and not “criminal adjudication”. (more)

    And it wasn’t just Trayvon Martin, there were hundreds of similar actions taken by conflicted School Resource Officers – totaling thousands of crimes over the course of just the first few years of these programs (2010 through 2013).

    CTH contacted the Miami-Dade School District, every single school board member, and the Broward County School District – to warn them of what was taking place.

    We provided thousands of pages of sworn affidavits and transcribed testimony from law enforcement. We spent several thousand dollars locating, transcribing and assembling the documents and evidence; and hundreds more hours compiling all the information. –SEE HERE– We sent all of it to both school districts and both school superintendents.

    Their response: “go away”.

    The school board’s in Miami-Dade and Broward County had created a disastrous scheme and it didn’t take long to see where this was going. The scheme was supported by President Obama’s federal education policy, and executive orders –SEE HERE– and people like Jesse Jackson –SEE HERE– In August of 2012 President Obama issuing an “executive order” establishing the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence. Effectively placing “quotas” on school discipline based on race:

    Broward County, even went one step further. They stopped arresting students and then changed the policy of suspension. Broward enhanced their program in 2013:

    Broward’s Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline was announced in early November. Instead of suspensions, students can now be referred to the PROMISE program, where they receive counseling for several days and then return to school. A host of non-violent misdemeanors no longer require an arrest, though officers can sometimes override that if they feel it is necessary (“I wanted to make sure deputies always had discretion,” says Scott Israel, Broward County’s sheriff). The school district’s Office of Minority Male Achievement reviews data to ensure that punishments for minor infractions and racial disparities are on the decline. (read more)

    In 2015 School Superintendent Robert Runcie then began bragging about it.

    “Our goal can’t be to have students go into the courtroom,” Runcie said. “Our focus has got to be keep them in the classroom and out of the courtroom.”

    Follow a simple timeline:

    ♦In 2011/2012 Broward County School administration made a policy decision to block the arrests of students in order to improve their education statistics.

    ♦In 2013 that same school board was warned what was happening as a result of that policy.

    ♦In 2015 the School doubled-down on the diversionary policies and allowed students to break the law, including physical violence, without legal consequence.

    ♦In January 2017 Nikolas Cruz criminally assaulted someone; again, law enforcement engagement was blocked by policy.

    ♦A year later in February 2018 Cruz killed seventeen students.

    1. Stoopid WP and its lack of preview. Close BOLD tag at “Admit Their Mistakes?…Unfortunately, …” shoud have returned to normal, not sub-indented.

      Look, just use the link and read what’s there.

    2. Again, this sort of policy has been in effect in various blue jurisdictions for YEARS. We only started hearing about it openly when President Trump announced his intention to deport illegal immigrant felons first, and sanctuary jurisdictions announced that non-citizens would be allowed to commit crimes Americans would get arrested for.

  57. I expect the new wrinkle in the school shooting will have the anti-gunners spinning: “See? Guns are so evil they kept a security guard from using one to stop the shooting!”

    1. See: It’s Too Late – Broward County School Board Beginning to Admit Their Mistakes? above. It appears the Progressive concern over Disparate Impact had seriously affected this school’s ability and willingness to deal with “disruptive” inmates students, especially those who might be defined as “minorities.”

      Read that and you will find yourself asking “WTF? Seriously, W. T. F. was going on at that school?”

      No wonder they whipped up the mob after the NRA so quickly.

    2. Not quite so far fetched, but Mara Liasson of NPR commented that “this was a case of ‘good guy with a gun vs. bad guy with a gun’ that did not work”. The unstated implication was “good guy… will never work”.
      It made me realize that armed teachers are far more likely to be effective, because they don’t have to be conscientious enough about their duty to *run to* the fight — they already *are* at the fight.

        1. Which would be why contrarian Mark Steyn has something to say about it:

          A Total Failure of the State
          During Wednesday’s horrible fiasco of a “Town Hall”, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel spelled it out:

          What I’m asking the law makers to give police all over this country is more power.

          I was sufficiently struck by the above to write it down – because it was clear even then that Sheriff Israel is an incompetent deployer of the power he already has.

          [SNIP]

          Meanwhile, in his first days of retirement, Deputy Peterson had six police officers outside his house guarding him from any intrusive questioning from journalists. That appears to be even more than those crouching outside Stoneman Douglas listening to the “incident” proceeding undisturbed inside.

          Still, Sheriff Israel is not without his friends in the media. For example, Chris Cillizza chose to portray the cowering, frozen Deputy Peterson as a stunning refutation of a popular NRA argument:

          Here’s definitive proof that a good guy with a gun doesn’t always stop a bad guy with a gun

          Is Scot Peterson a “good guy”? Sheriff Israel suspended him without pay for his behavior that day, which would appear to suggest not. The media are insisting that Americans mortgage their security to the state – but hey, when the state lets you down, suddenly its apparatchiks are merely freelance “good guys with guns”.

          I said on Tucker’s show that the state had failed at every level – school district, county, federal. But Sheriff Israel’s performance is especially egregious. An honorable man would surely have tendered his resignation. On the other hand, sitting on stage, watching his voters jeer Dana Loesch and call her a “murderer”, the sleazy creep can be forgiven for concluding that with constituents this eager to be misdirected why not string along? Their fury should have been aimed at him – and he should have spent his hour on stage ducked behind a podium demonstrating the policy-compliant incident-long Broward County crouch.

          https://www.steynonline.com/8492/a-total-failure-of-the-state

    3. Something else about that deputy (not a “security guard”, an actual Sheriff’s department deputy) being derelict on duty: there are no remedies for that. Miguel on the sarcastically named “gunfreezone” blog reminds us today that it’s black letter law (in the USA) that “law enforcement” has NO duty to protect anyone, no duty to respond to an imminent threat against anyone. They often do, but they have no duty to do so. That deputy was, by solid Supreme Court precedent, perfectly authorized to do exactly what he did: nothing.
      Anyone who says “let the police handle it” either does not know this, or is sufficiently evil to say it in spite of knowing the law.

      3. Standard entry tactics require that you have two people before you go in– remember, especially if the guy “trained” on video games or actually knew a little about the French Resistance*, the #1 source for Cool New Gear is drops from mobs. 😦

        *well, beyond that it existed. Which would be impressive enough for itself, these days, much less knowing about the whole the-gun-only-has-to-fire-once, then you have their weapon technique.

        1. Is that so? That’s not what we’re told. But if so, that means it is a waste of money to have one guard because by doctrine he’s not allowed to act. If that actually is the rule, then (a) this fact should be publicized so the public knows they are being lied to, and (b) it should be changed to the correct one, which is that you do not wait, you act.
          And besides, who the hell cares about doctrine? Isn’t the better question what an honorable human being would do, rather than a pathetic loser desperate to find excuses?

          1. From Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” back in 2003: “When a stupid man is doing something he knows is wrong, he always insists it is his duty.”

            “Duty” could be replaced with “according to policy or doctrine” or worse “just following orders” but the concept is the same.

          2. I was well aware that the current doctine is “As soon as you have two people go in” which is why I was lenient in my cricitism of the lone deputy. BUT…

            1: as the SRO he should have been there already.
            2: the doctrine says to go in as soon as there are two people. When the CPD arrived, there were *four* sheriffs, ‘establishing a perimeter’- which the shooter then walked right through.

          3. Betcha that if you can get the citations for what you’ve been told, you’ll find that what the standard says is not to wait for SWAT*. Not “try to do a physically impossible clear of two stairwells a the same time.”

            Two big issues:
            1) the school resource officer is not there mostly for school shootings. He’s supposed to be there to deal with the kind of trouble that is not below the one in a million mark.
            2) the SROs in this, and other, districts, are covering up actual freaking crimes.

            The tactics don’t need to be changed to something that will make you feel better about how many students are being sacrificed, the really freaking stupid situation needs to be changed to effectively counter the problem.
            Gun free zones are insane if you’re not going to control the location to the same degree that you do a court house, and police departments conspiring with school districts to double-victimize those crime victims who were wronged by someone who HAPPENED to be enrolled in the right district is flat out evil.

            * If you look around for the folks who train cops to deal with school shootings, you’ll find that they say that– and that if there is only a single officer, he should understand the risk he takes going in, and make an informed decision based on that. Because chances are that the shooter will just fight him, and likely will shoot him. There’s a nice PDF of it somewhere, I know it came up on Bing not too long ago, totally open source.

          4. Doctrine is there so that the man on the spot doesn’t have to take the time to think things through in a situation where seconds count.

            Now, as to whether doctrine is designed to get the job done or be compatible with honourable human behaviour is an entirely different matter indeed.

  58. And the new spin (from MSNBC) is that arming teachers with handguns would be pointless since an AR-15 round travels about 3x the speed of a handgun round. I’m not sure exactly why they think that’s a factor.

    Aaarrrrrggghhhh, the stupid! It burns!

    1. I’ve observed a lot of arguments from learned helplessness of late. It’s as if the only time they think it’s acceptable have a gun is when that gun represents overwhelming force in your favor and using it carries a very high probability of success, in which case, come to think of it, they would probably turn right back around and assert that the gun is therefore un-necessary and should be taken from you. In summation, the only time it’s okay to have a gun is when it’s not okay to have a gun, and the only time you need a gun is when you don’t. Likewise, their ideal approach to preventing violence – confiscation – involves initiating a great deal of violence.

      I am almost ready to believe that the Left considers cowardice a virtue and doublethinl a moral imperative.

  60. It would appear that in targeting the NRA as being to blame for the Parkland shootings the Proglodytes have, as usual, gone off half-cocked. It would also appear that the deafening drumbeat of opprobrium has had scant effect, as I expect the 33 percent who blamed a lack of adequate gun control held that opinion well before the shooting occurred.

    Polls: Government, video games, movies more to blame for violence than guns
    Two new surveys testing the nation’s temperature on gun violence find that more blame video games, movies and government inaction than weak gun control for the shootings making headlines.

    Rasmussen Reports, in one of its polls about this month’s Florida school shooting, found that 54 percent of adults blame the poor response of government agencies to warning signs about the alleged killer for the mass shooting, Nikolas Cruz, 19.

    Another 33 percent blamed a lack of adequate gun control, the focus of Democrats in Florida and Congress.

    In a second Rasmussen poll, slightly more than 50 percent blame violent video games and movies for “making America a more hostile place.”

    That finding follows a report issued Monday by the Parents Television Council that said 61 percent of prime time shows aired during the recent sweeps week included violence. And 39 percent of 287 episodes included gun violence.

    The Florida shooting reports have revealed that there were over two dozen calls to police agencies about the suspect in the killing of 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

    Rasmussen’s results show the conflict over who and what to blame in the shootings, especially amid reports that law enforcement delayed entering the school during the shooting.

    Even among parents, the blame went to government agencies instead of a lack of gun control.

    Said the pollster, “Among Americans who have children of elementary or secondary school age, 61 percent think the government is more to blame. Just 23 percent of these adults fault a lack of adequate gun control more.”

    1. Responding just as an opportunity to interject this. The NRA is the “squishiest” of the “pro-RKBA” outfits out there, having “come of age” as it were in a time where it was a given that we were in a losing battle and “compromise” to slow the decline was the best we could hope for.

      That said, the anti-gun folk would be really ill advised to get the NRA shut down or completely de-fanged. That would drive its membership over to the Second Amendment Foundation or Gun Owners of America giving them the political power that the NRA has now (hint: it’s not about the money. It’s never been about the money. It’s about the votes they bring to the table).

      As Malcolm X said, “The reason they’re willing to talk to Martin is that otherwise they’d have to talk to me.”

      So the anti-gun freedom deniers should be glad for the NRA, because otherwise they’d have to deal with the real hard liners.

        1. My thought exactly. Or L. Neil Smith (see for example his non-fiction essay collections “Down with Power” or “Lever Action”). Or to combine the two, the Smith & Zelman novels “the Mitzvah” and “Hope” (both recommended).

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