I haven’t been following the gun nut reaction to the latest shooting, but are they still spinning “if only some of those people had been packing” tales? I know we’re in an area where common sense has very little purchase, but I’m thinking the facts of the last two shootings might be letting some of the hot air out of that bullshit tale.
The latest shooting happened in a place of worship (are we supposed to carry there?). And the first responding officer, who was well-armed and had top-notch tactical training, was shot 8-9 times after being ambushed. (Not making a judgment about his actions, which were by all accounts heroic and selfless, just noting that having a gun did him little good.)
The previous shooting was carried out by a shooter arrayed head-to-toe in bullet-resistant clothing after deploying smoke bombs in a crowded theater.
I’m thinking the circumstances of both make it pretty difficult to confabulate “hero with a gun” fantasies, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
“just noting that having a gun did him little good.”
Yeah, funny thing, that.
Considering that planning, the element of surprise, and the willingness to create collateral damage are on the side of the nutbag, tactically speaking, having a gun wouldn’t do a hell of a lot of good in these situations.
Paul M.
see
lonesomerobot
I actually posted some NRA-bait on Facebook and only got a weak reply from one of the usual suspects in my friend list – something to the tune of “one of my Sikh friends carries”. When I followed up that what he was proposing was that the 2nd amendment was no longer a right, by a by-god (or bieber) obligation for every vulnerable segment of the population that might be targeted, he had no response.
But the thrust of my comment was this:
He’s a friend that I’ve known for a while; these last couple of weeks are the closest I’ve gotten to just calling him a fringe whackjob.
J
I’m guessing that the imaginary figure meting out justice blazing away with his six guns in the average nutter’s heroic fantasy is not darkly complected and doesn’t wear a turban.
Yutsano
In the second shooting brown people died. So of course the NRA could give two shits.
DFS
The bishop of my Mormon ward used to pack a handgun in church when I was a kid. I guess you never know when a crew of marauding Missourians might be lurking around the corner.
raven
Herman Cail is lying about this right now on the Boortz show. It’s a plot to destroy America from within.
Alex S.
Well, we can’t give guns to Sikhs, can we? What’s next, muslims with guns?
…so in this case, I haven’t heard that argument yet, probably because the victims were brown people. Jared Lee Loughner shot white people, the Batman shooter shot white people and Anders Behring-Breivik shot white people, too.
cyntax
Well, you do know that’s been the answer in number of states. Texas springs to mind if I’m not mistaken.
lonesomerobot
@Yutsano: and of course the authorities are still trying to figure out what motivated the guy with white supremacy tattoos who had an unusual habit of having his picture taken with swastikas in the background.
Ben Franklin
Where are the primal screams about the Mythical Gun Roundup?
Nemo_N
Yeah, but he probably wasn’t as well-trained as I am! I would have killed the madman before he had a chance to kill anyone and then I would have been a true hero!
Seriously now, since we are dealing with fantasies here, there is no limit to the BS elements that can be added to make the story a tale of “more guns are always better”.
Jay in Oregon
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Being highly-trained and properly equipped hasn’t kept thousands of soldiers from being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, y’know, pretty much every other war in history).
Figs
What we obviously want is a citizenry where every group is cowering in fear of the armaments of every other group, and where every individual within every group is walking on eggshells around every other individual, not knowing whether they will be outgunned in the case of a conflict. Freedom!
r€nato
an armed society is a polite society.
America should be more like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan.
kindness
With all the gun crazies we’ve had lately talking about wanting to limit clip sizes should be a no brainer. I am saddened that it is instead a non-starter in today’s political world. The NRA rules Washington via fear. We’ve seen how fear works as a motivator.
That is where we liberals lose. We use cool reason and are willing to debate efficacies. The NRA instead goes straight to the visceral and turns the knob up to 11 making any discussion impossible.
I suspect this would be different if it were white christians being targetted and gunned down, but they aren’t. The lunies are going after brown skinned folks and action adventure theater goers.
El Cid
The point of having everyone there armed & firing back isn’t that fewer people would die. Likely, more people might have died, including from accidental shots and people shooting at the wrong target from the confusion.
The point is that gunfights are awesome. It’s a far, far better thing that people finally have the opportunity to sack up and shoot at someone, to kill.
That’s what American life is supposed to be all about: waiting for that opportunity to finally be able to draw your firearm and shoot at someone to kill.
It’s not about staying safe; it’s about making life worthwhile.
Figs
@Nemo_N:
Not to mention, would the Sikhs having weapons have made this attack less likely, or more likely? If this dude had suspected the Sikhs were packing, no doubt he would have thought it was for a hostile takeover of his white nation, thus necessitating swifter and more decisive action on his part.
flagellant
I’ve seen some gun supporters referring to the Apr 2012 Aurora CO church shooting, in which the shooter was in fact stopped by an armed congregant. However, the people using this incident as a favorable argument either fail to mention, or downplay the significance of, the fact that the armed congregant was an off-duty police officer, with all the tactical training that comes with that job.
Raven
Ooops, wrong thread!
r€nato
@Ben Franklin: infowars.org is always a reliable site for that sort of nonsense. There hasn’t been a single mass shooting that hasn’t been cast as part of a secret government plot by Alex Jones.
The comments there are even better than anything you can find at the usual suspects for wingnuttery like Hot Air and Free Republic.
DFS
@r€nato: Whenever someone pulls that line, it helps to remind them that Robert Heinlein was never shot at in his life.
nitpicker
About 10 years ago, I was at lunch with my then-girlfriend’s family and a few of their friends from church. They began to relate to me that morning’s hubbub: A homeless man had entered the church and sat in the back pew before the service. Eventually, a few of the men-folk (including two of the guys present) had approached the man and asked him to leave. He refused and was eventually lightly manhandled outside and told the police would be informed if he returned. As I sat there, confused about the basics of why the man had been required to leave, one of the men who had been involved in the brusque ushering said, “That’s why we need to be allowed to carry guns in church.”
“So you can shoot homeless people who try to attend services? In a church? Filled with families?” I asked, as my girlfriend began just kicking the hell out of my ankle.
The conversation went nowhere, as you can imagine. In the end, though, the whole thing just reinforced my belief that the number of non-hunting guns you own (above, say, one) is directly proportional to the likelihood you’re a chickenshit scared of his own shadow.
liberal
I like the way someone on the Intertubes put in in the wake of the Aurora shooting: the bad guy has N (large number) targets, and 1 thing he needs to avoid shooting. For everyone else, the numbers are reversed.
r€nato
@kindness: the problem is that this shooter was armed with a 9mm and had multiple clips. Unless you want to ban ordinary handguns and ordinary ammo clips, there’s no law that could have prevented this short of one that prevents neo-Nazi scumbags from owning firearms.
scav
@Jay in Oregon: ok, gearing up here But those Police and Soldiers were Big Government Guns and everyone knows Big Government can’t create deaths! We need Free Market(tm) Gunplay!!!!
ow ow ow ow ow. . .
Hidden Heart
Bringing guns to church? Why, yes. And no, but not for want of trying. And on and on.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@liberal: That was pretty much my point as well.
PeakVT
It doesn’t matter what the gun nuts think. What matters is whether average people are outraged enough to ask their politicians for some limits on guns. I don’t think we’ll see that until we get a really high death toll from a mass shooting, as in over 50.
David Hunt
It merely shows you’re limited in your cognitive processes by logic and evidence. Most of the individuals making the “more people should be packing” claim are free from that particular limitation. Others are aware of how preposterous the “argument” is but simply lie through their teeth and make it anyway.
I was driving home late at night about a week after the Colorado shooting and heard one of the vast hoard of wingnut radio jocks (Bill Cunningham?) talking with a police officer (from Tennessee IIRC). This cop was actually saying that a bunch of armed people in that audience who responded with deadly force would have solved the problem. He was clearly aware of the body armor, the smoke (was it tear gas?), and the darkness, but said that he was confident it would have turned out alright. It became apparent that he figured that he as a trained cop could have handled this situation so every other person licensed to carry also had the level of ability that he attributed to himself. This just convinced me that this yahoo would have killed at least one innocent bystander if he’d been there. I flatly refuse to believe that anyone who actually possessed the level of skill and training to have disabled the attacker with a firearm in that situation could not know how elite that level of skill and training is. The jerk was just expressing his hero fantasies on the air.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Yes, but brown people would be allowed to have guns, and we all know that the second amendment only applies to white people.
Steve
@kindness: There are issues where the liberal argument is entirely cerebral and the conservative argument is gut-level emotional. I do not think gun control is one of those issues.
r€nato
@nitpicker: just curious, did you ask these fine Christians if Jesus would have kicked a homeless guy disturbing nobody (except maybe with his BO) out of church?
pharniel
Aren’t Sikhs supposed to go around armed constantly anyway?
That’s what the dagger is for right?
So they had weapons and OMG against surprise and planning it didn’t help.
I think anyone who says ‘maor guns’ has instantly volunteered for immediate deployment.
Ben Franklin
@r€nato:
Gun Show Exemptions?
scav
@r€nato: Yeah, funny all those little formerly observed quaint traditions of setting out extra plates and being kind to strangers because they might actually be Jesus checking up on you have died out.
hitchhiker
I’ve been baiting my NRA friends with the suggestion that our security is backwards.
We should be trying to make sure that everybody is armed, by their logic, because guns in the hands of citizens make us safer.
The security people should be passing out guns to people as they enter public spaces, not checking to see if they’re carrying.
This is the logical extension of the claim that it’s good for people to be armed, because then they can stop crazy criminals instead of waiting for the police.
So far nobody has answered my question about what’s wrong with this logic . . . can’t imagine why.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@nitpicker: “That’s why we need to be allowed to carry guns in church.”
“So you can shoot homeless people who try to attend services? In a church?
Well, Jesus hated the homeless. Remember Luke 17:76, “Whenever you see the least of my brothers, kick his ass to the curb. If he gets uppity, pop a cap in that motherfucker. Do this, in memory of me.”
@PeakVT: We need more brave politicians like Mike Bloomberg, who scold Obama for not doing more on their way to hosting a fund-raiser for Scott Brown, NRA Rating A.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Steve: On this issue, the examples of a cerebral argument being proffered by liberals is legion. A significant plurality, if not a majority are making their arguments in terms of logic and evidence.
On the other hand, I challenge you to find a logical argument on the other side of the issue.
You can’t.
Your concern trolling is duly noted.
Linda Featheringill
I suspect that most people who gun down a lot of folks are willing to die. They may even want to die and are planning on it. And they probably don’t care if they are being shot at or not.
dr. bloor
@r€nato:
Sounds good to me. You wanna hunt? Use a rifle or a bow and arrows, just lime the framers did.
r€nato
@David Hunt: yeah, what an awesome country this would be if we went around with our guard up all the time, 24/7, prepared physically and emotionally for a firefight that could happen at any time. USA #1!!!!
mapaghimagsik
gun ownership cannot fail, it can only be failed.
El Cid
@r€nato: Surely the homeless guy had begged for money, and at some point bought something and maybe got change for it, so he was a money-changer, so they were right to throw this greedy money-changer out of the temple. Q.E.D. Thank you Jesus.
GregB
What is the saying that the gun strokers use over and over again?
An armed society is a polite society.
For some reason that doesn’t describe the well armed America that I know.
Ben Franklin
@hitchhiker:
So far nobody has answered my question about what’s wrong with this logic . . . can’t imagine why.
Could be interpreted as a rhetorical question. Imagine the Colorado theater; pitch black except for the muzzle flash and smoke eddies; everyone in the theatre is armed and begin firing at whatever moves. 12 dead times 10.
schrodinger's cat
@PeakVT: Those 50 have to be the right type of people, you know real Americans, as defined by La Palin.
Or the realest of real Americans, wealthy people who donate lots of cash to the right politicians.
Amir Khalid
@El Cid:
I’ve heard (and I certainly find it very believable) that actually killing someone can be a profoundly traumatic experience even when the killing is well-justified. I wonder if these brave advocates of guns for all, ever take a break from their heroic OK Corral daydreams to think about that.
scav
@scav: I really should have written that a bit differently. The Traditions died. Their GI Jesus is entirely into checking out if you have died, especially if you’re the wrong sort.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@schrodinger’s cat: “wealthy people who donate lots of cash to the right politicians.”
Placing these people in the middle of a firefight doesn’t strike me as a Bad Thing(TM).
sphouch
I believe during the colonial days, the citizens of (South Carolina?) were required to bring muskets to church to defend against Indian attacks…
amk
Remember that corrupt clown issa and the house thugs indicting holder for fast & furious based on specious reasoning that a gun was used in killing a ‘law enforcement officer’ ? So now what they are gonna do about the shot police officer at the hands of a white racist ?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Amir Khalid: …”OK Corral daydreams to think about that.”
They don’t think. They emote.
Cassidy
@amk: Nothing. Sean Hannity will later praise him as a hero.
WereBear
There need not be any speculation on this point, because it’s been asked and answered in the Old West.
Where towns adopted a “no guns” law, by the way.
Scott P.
@PeakVT:
Your comment reminds me of this.
Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
You can’t box them in on their gun-hero fantasies because they can always use deterrence as the magical answer. “Well, if everyone had guns, no one would commit these acts because they’d KNOW everyone has guns. So the mere act of having guns would prevent many/most of these massacres before they ever need to be fired.”
Pongo
@DFS: We had the same sort of argument arise when I lived in Phoenix and there was some dude arrested for making a fuss when he couldn’t bring his gun into a public library. Apparently he feared well-armed rogue librarians.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid: #48
I’ve read accounts of what were really him-or-me situations that resulted a great distress for the survivor.
I think most folks in the US aren’t very familiar with death. As a child, I was taught how to shoot a rifle and encouraged to hunt for small game. I shot a squirrel. It was a good shot and the animal didn’t suffer.
But I still remember how goddamned dead the little creature was. End of my hunting career.
I see pictures of soldiers cut down in battle and am frequently surprised at how very, very dead they are.
I suspect some of these gun lovers are just playing with death. They have little to no knowledge of the real thing.
roc
NRA purists love to talk about Switzerland and Israel when they conflate gun ownership with polite society.
… but do they have any examples of polite and armed societies that *don’t* have a national health care system to take care of the unbalanced amongst them?
I know I’d be a lot more receptive to our state of relaxed gun regulation if we didn’t leave diagnosed mental cases to fend for themselves, or allow insurance companies to routinely jack with people’s supplies of daily meds for paperwork and bureaucratic reasons never *quite* explained.
I think America is ‘different’ from those places, not solely because we have no national service system to teach proper safety and discipline to the armed populace, but also because of how thoroughly we allow these people to become disaffected, debased and removed from society.
To say nothing of the way that our zoning and self-segregation feeds and perpetuates xenophobic and class-based conspiracies…
amk
The news of ‘murkan gun nuttery spreads to Mars.
El Cid
@Amir Khalid:
Well, clealy the response to that is to better acclimatize people to dealing with the aftermath of killing people.
Not killing people is not American. After a while, surely good, healthy patriotic Americans would much better be able to cope with killing people, and hopefully would look forward to it just as much as many others do.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Pongo: “well-armed rogue librarians”
Totally hawt. I’m sure there’s a pr0n for that. Also, “rogue librarians” sounds like a band name. =)
JGabriel
__
__
mistermix @ top:
__
Difficult, but not impossible.
After all, given the circumstances, a conservative gun hero who took out the armored shooter in Aurora, or who was packing and prepared to take out a neo-Nazi in a gurdwara, would just go to confirm how heroic conservative arm-chair gun-fetishists really are.
But even beyond that, one of the biggest problems with the “hero with a gun” fantasy is the hero part. Not only can’t we expect every gathering that could be targeted by a mass murderer to possess a hero, we shouldn’t expect it — not every person will be or can be a hero. If they could, well, the word wouldn’t mean very much would it? We could all just sit around singing Everyone’s A Hero In Their Own Way and be done with it.
.
Martin
@sphouch:
Oh, sure. Go and defend the Wisconsin shooter, why don’t you!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Johnny Gentle (famous crooner): “Well, if everyone had guns, no one would commit these acts because they’d KNOW everyone has guns. So the mere act of having guns would prevent many/most of these massacres before they ever need to be fired.”
…which completely dismisses the murder-suicide crazies like Kyle Huff
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@amk: hehehehe. thanks for making me smile =)
fuzz
@roc:
Everyone in those countries also has extensive military training and even reserve duty afterwards. It’s just not at all comparable to here, where you can carry a gun after a course at the local shooting range.
roc
@Johnny Gentle (famous crooner):
It is funny how quickly NRA types cite evidence of shooters disregard for laws against murder as proof that they’d just as soon disregard any gun regulation. Yet they never seem to notice that every one of their anecdotes of “citizen blows away armed robber” is evidence that “knowing everyone is armed” doesn’t act as any sort of deterrence either. To say nothing of military cases (e.g. Hasan).
JGabriel
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
“Rogue Librarian” sounds like a redhead in glasses that I want to date.
.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@JGabriel: rouge librarian? =)
Li
@pharniel: Actually there are a number of reports that the founder of the temple was killed while counter attacking with his obligatory knife. He died, but the terrorist sustained wounds that slowed him down significantly, and probably saved many lives. Indeed, that is why Sikhs carry knives; to defend the principles of justice and equanimity they cherish so, against people of that very type he bravely stood against.
“And the first responding officer, who was well-armed and had top-notch tactical training, was shot 8-9 times after being ambushed. (Not making a judgment about his actions, which were by all accounts heroic and selfless, just noting that having a gun did him little good.)”
Oh yes, if being armed does no good even for cops, then we should disarm them unilaterally immediately. Perhaps equip them with rubber chickens or something. I’m sure that the next psycho hate terrorist will stop shooting if we ask him nicely.
Martin
@Li:
Wow, I’m having trouble dreaming up a more disingenuous argument that that one.
Well done!
amk
@Li: Way to miss the whole point.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: “Oh yes, if being armed does no good even for cops, then we should disarm them unilaterally immediately. ”
Nice strawman you have there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.
Nobody is actually making that argument, Li.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
synchronized demolishing of fallacious arguments.
I knew there was a reason I keep visiting BJ =)
Li
@roc: Ding ding ding! Way to identify the real problem without even realizing it. Health care, particularly mental health care, is lousy in thus country. Combine that with endemic greed and no community, and it’s a wonder we don hav more spree killers.
But yes, let’s disarm the sane people who don’t spend time throwing hate-metal concerts. Unless you think a bunch of punk skinheads are going to disarm quietly. You’ve got to understand these people, and their hate, are serious. They really want to kill you. If it gets as bad as they want it to get, the gays, browns and libs are going to wish they were much better armed.
Haydnseek
@nitpicker: “That’s why we should be allowed to carry guns to church.” Incredible. Why don’t you carry some extra fucking FOOD to church so when this happens, you are equipped to do something that your beloved Jeebus actually told you to do? I can see why your conversation went nowhere. If you’re rational, there’s nowhere for it to go.
Cassidy
Up close sucks. I worked an IED where the gunner was dead, about 10 feet from me, while I was working on another guy. The dead Soldier was on fire and I remember thiking jus thow dead he was that his body wasn’t even reacting to being on fire. FYI, have never shot anyone and never wanted to.
@Li: Well, you’re missing the point about the cop. The point is that even someone reasonably well armed and well trained, unlike most of these chucklehead
penisgun strokers, was still ambushed and seriously harmed. The accounts I’ve read states that he was performing aid on a casualty which is something else that doesn’t figure into these macho man fantasies: dealing with the wounded. These assholes think they’re gonna get a standing ovation when they let their inner Chuck Norris out and that the wounded will be magically healed by Free Market Baby Jesus.David Hunt
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Patently untrue. The Second Amendment clearly applies to everyone. It prevents all non-white people from doing anything to restrict the ability of white people to own and carry as many guns as the want. See everyone’s covered!
SatanicPanic
@kindness:
I DON’T WANT TO GET SHOT AT THE MOVIES OR IN CHURCH! is not what I think of as cool reason.
Li
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Actsully, you are confusing the straw man that I set on fire (I.e. defending yourself is unlikely or impossible even if you have police training) with one that I made. Of course I don’t seriously believe that cops should be disarmed (except torture devices, they don’t need to have tazers at all) but observing that a trained cop who is ambushed wasn’t helped by his armaments and using that to say that everyone who isn’t a cop should be disarmed is not any more logical.
Cassidy
Up close sucks. I worked an IED where the gunner was dead, about 10 feet from me, while I was working on another guy. The dead Soldier was on fire and I remember thiking jus thow dead he was that his body wasn’t even reacting to being on fire. FYI, have never shot anyone and never wanted to.
@Li: Well, you’re missing the point about the cop. The point is that even someone reasonably well armed and well trained, unlike most of these chucklehead
p3n1sgun strokers, was still ambushed and seriously harmed. The accounts I’ve read states that he was performing aid on a casualty which is something else that doesn’t figure into these macho man fantasies: dealing with the wounded. These assholes think they’re gonna get a standing ovation when they let their inner Chuck Norris out and that the wounded will be magically healed by Free Market Baby Jesus.Supernumerary Charioteer
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
It’d take a little digging to find, but I’m positive that there are Library Wars doujinshi out there.
steve
If you added up every victim of all 60ish mass shootings since I was born (1976) you would get a lower number than were killed last week on the highways.
I don’t think there’s a policy way to stop these freaks. The incredible rarity of these events means there’s nothing we can do to identify them before the case, as false positives would vastly overwhelm the true positives.
And the extreme rarity, roughly 2 per 300 million people per year, means we’ll probably never have a good handle on why they cracked and others didn’t.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: That’s a big “if”. Skinheads make up a small fraction of the population. I daresay it’s far less than the “gays, browns and libs” contingent.
Furthermore, I’m certain that I can safely speak for most of the commenters as well as the front pager when I say that they are more inclined to want some sensible regulations around who can acquire guns.
Also, if roc’s argument is so great (and it is, actually), why didn’t you just lead with that, instead of being an idiot?
Here’s a tip: Read the thread first, then post.
lonesomerobot
@Li: Straw man much? I love how this discussion always devolves into ‘GUBMINT TAKING MAH GUNS’. Because that’s the only way you can delude the argument, by making specious claims of “disarming” the population when that is neither possible or even remotely a goal of those (including myself, a gun owner) who would prefer a serious, non-hysterical discussion of our gun laws.
Cassidy
@Li: Well, no one has said that everyone who isn’t a cop should be disarmed. Is there a sell on straw where you live?
Pen
I won’t lie: due to the constant stream of news stories specifically dealing with “conservative” domestic terrorism I purchased a pistol, was concealed carry licensed, and am receiving tactical response training. The very first thing my instructor did, on day one, was give basically the following speech (paraphrased of course): “I don’t teach heroes. If you are one, there’s the door. Heroe’s get people, innocent people, killed. They’re a threat to themselves, their family, and their neighbors.” He then proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes or so going over crime scene and autopsy photoes of dead innocent people who were caught in the crossfire or targeted by mistake. It wasn’t pretty, and there was more than one picture of a dead child in the mix.
It was traumatic, and at the end of the video presentation we had a couple people get up and leave. Good, if they can’t stomach the consequences they have no business learning how to use a gun in the first place. I have no illusions that I’ll be a hero if I need to fire my gun, but I’m receiving instruction and going through “shoot/no shoot” life-fire training specifically so my chances of an accident are trained out of my muscle memory and I’ll know when NOT to shoot. (Pulling the trigger’s easy, having the skill to knw if you can without collateral damage is considerably harder)
The fact that I even had to consider doing this is evidence of a failure of our society. It’s a direct result of morons like this shooter, the entire NRA crowd, and even my own family members who like to, as a previous commenter put it, “play with death”.
Ruckus
I don’t get it.
Jason Bourne frequently was unarmed and took the gun away from the attacker.
Why do we need no stinking guns? We all just have to be Jason.
mapaghimagsik
@Li:
So our problem is that we don’t have enough liberal Gun nuts? I’m not sure the answer is To go all civil war here. Though that sure would make the firearm industry happy.
scav
I’m not entirely sure Li can distinguish between gun control and unilateral and universal disarmament by the law-abiding population. When his doctor says, “Hmmm, a few pounds less would do you no harm. I suggest a diet.” does Li hear “Stop eating all food immediately!”?
J.D. Rhoades
They are in my neck of the woods. I finally gave up trying to argue with them. When someone insists that a bunch of yahoos firing in a chaotic, darkened, smoky theater at an armored assailant would not have resulted in a bigger bloodbath and that anyone who says differently is a coward who “thinks avoiding the death of one or two innocents justifies allowing more innocents to be mowed down [actual quote],” you quickly realize you’re dealing with crazy people.
divF
If you want a vision of a world in which everybody is armed and divided along racial lines, read “A Jagged Orbit”, by John Brunner, published in 1970.
artem1s
‘Ronald Reagan’ should be the only words uttered in response to ‘arm everyone to the teeth’ argument.
If an nutjob amateur can get past the secret service (armed to the teeth, continually on the alert with the best weapons) and hit the most heavily protected human being on the planet, then I think that alone should be enough to prove their position holds no validity.
pragmatism
Lots of “the shooters are manchurian shooters groomed by the liberal machine, probably brainwashed” and SPLC is a hate group.
Raven
@Pen: That’s a good thing to share, thanks.
Cassidy
@Pen: I don’t mean to sound like a dick and apologize if I do….as someone who is well trained in tactics, shooting, etc. you should be learning how to determine multiple escape routes for you and your family and identifying cover and concealment on the way there. Pulling a gun is a bad idea.
Gus
Yes. SATSQ.
Ben Franklin
@Pen:
Many hesitate, at the moment of truth, their weapon is acquired by the opponent, and then they are shot, dead.
What is the stat? 50% of gun-related fatalities, are shot with their own weapon?
Haydnseek
@Linda Featheringill: There is a technical term for this. It’s called “officer assisted suicide.” Seriously. Every big city PD can cite numerous cases.
Chris
@Figs:
They’re rediscovering why we invented government in the first place: because one protection racket running the show is still better than ten protection rackets blazing away at each other in the streets every day with the rest of us caught in the way.
Raven
@Cassidy: That was probably after lunch.
eta “Unass the AO, part 1.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@steve: Numbers don’t mean that much to the people who’ve been personally affected by such a tragedy (like in my case).
It doesn’t help that we’ve severely curtailed treatment for mentally ill people in this country, while simultaneously increasing the ease of access to assault rifles and other weapons of mass murder since Reagan.
Your comparison to people killed on highways falls flat for several reasons. There’s a legitimate need for driving, and it isn’t designed to kill. It’s also highly regulated. People drive everyday. People rarely shoot and hunt every day. There’s far more vehicle operators than gun operators as well.
Furthermore, I don’t think anyone here believes that there is a way to stop everyone that wants to massacre people. That’s fallacious. The desire here is to make it more difficult.
And finally, as far as rarity, your argument would be more honest if you actually tracked the trending of mass murder in terms of frequency rather than looking at just a count.
Cassidy
@Raven: Haven’t heard that phrase in a while. Made me giggle. Sometimes I miss AD.
Martin
@Li:
Actually, he didn’t set up a strawman. The NRA and other pro-gun groups have set up the ‘defense’ argument as though it’s a duel with either party (assailant, target) having reasonably equal odds, and that citizen carrying is a ‘balancing’ of odds. The frequency with which police get shot show that there is no such balancing. The assailant has an overwhelming benefit, even if every single person were armed. The only exceptions to this are during periods of diligence – when every single person assumes that there’s a shooter in their midst all the time – as you have in combat. Look at how many of our troops die in camp, when their guard is down. They’re all still armed, but that diligence isn’t there at that time.
The balancing argument is a flat-out lie. So if there is no balance possible, do the risks of giving easy access to guns to 1% that would be assailants level out with the benefits of giving easy access to guns to the 99% that would not. Statistically, it seems pretty damn clear that easy access to guns works against us.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have a right to carry, even if it’s bad for society, but let’s just end the argument that an armed citizenry makes us safer. It doesn’t. It’s unambiguous that it doesn’t. So let’s just dispose of that argument right off.
Chris
@kindness:
No, they’ll find ways to go after the Not-White-Christians while leaving the Christians alone.
These pricks spent twenty years pushing for the militarization that turned police forces into special ops units, then when those things were turned against them just two times at Waco and Ruby Ridge, suddenly shrieked oppression and spawned the militia movement. Rights-for-me-but-not-for-thee is the essence of conservatism. I suspect that if you give them free rein, they’ll find ways to restrict minorities’ right to bear arms in the same way they’re currently trying to restrict their right to vote.
Raven
@Cassidy: Just tryin to keep it loose.
maurinsky
@El Cid:
Some of the comments on the story about the clerk in CA who talked down an armed attacker indicate that some gun nuts would have found it preferable for someone to end up dead at the end of the day.
SatanicPanic
@Li:
There are a bunch of nutty people around, we should fix that. In the meantime, there is no reason to limit the amount of guns out there. In what universe does this make sense? This is the most self-refuting of the dumbass gun-owner arguments.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: All I have to say to that is wow. You’ve gone completely fact-free.
ETA: Also, you either don’t know what a straw-man is, or you are pretending not to. It doesn’t help your argument at all. Flagged for moving the goal-posts, and again for twisting the argument.
Dennis SGMM
@Chris:
We have a winner. Just as only the right kind of people should be able to vote so it will be with guns and with the same tactics.
Chris
@DFS:
And was also just an all-around dick. “I’m a military veteran who believes only military veterans should get to vote.” Totally different from Plato, a philosopher, saying that the ultimate authority should reside in a philosopher-king, or Khomeini, a Shi’a cleric, saying that only Shi’a clergy are wise enough to run society, or… etc etc etc.
Some Guy
I am actually more disturbed by the other main argument to deflect the import of these mass shootings: They are all gov’t plots designed to gin up the evisceration of the 2nd Amendment (which dovetails with 9-11 was a set up mythology). That kind of paranoia is fully resistant to reason. Once you are in the highest ether of conspiracy theory like that, everything is a lie but that confirms your deeply held belief.
Cassidy
@Raven: I hear ya. I just hate the concealed carry thing. I’m more scared of getting shot by some *idiot and his teddy bear than being a victim of a crime. The only carry I support is open carry that. That way I know who to not stand near.
*Not aimed at you Pen. It sounds like you’re trying to be a reasonable, trained gun owner and I support that.
Martin
@Cassidy:
Bootstraps. We all have bootstraps, right? Fuck the lazy ass wounded.
Jeffro
@hitchhiker: That would make a great ad: something that looks like a typical airport security line, people shuffling through…only to be handed guns. You could have someone’s carry-on set off the detector…b/c they DON’T have a gun in their bag…and have them get hassled by TSA. Punch line/end credits: feel safer with more guns?
Equally great: picture a bunch of people shuffling forward in a soup line. Director of the soup kitchen comes running up to a microphone all excited, with a well-dressed banksta in tow: “The bill passed! Congress finally acted to help ease unemployment! You’re all going to get jobs!” And then hands a sack of money to the banksta, saying “Let’s go, job creator!”…with a nice ‘yeah right’ sideways glance back from the banksta.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
By that standard, people in general should probably be excluded from doing anything dangerous at all due to their incompetence.
Humans can usually pick up REAL quick who the threat is. It is something we developed during the last million years or so of evolution (body language clues, facial expression etc. We have huge portions of our brain wired for interpreting facial expression and the like. Training and rational judgment still have critical roles, as evidenced by the armed civilian responder who arrived just as Jared Loughner was being subdued by by standers after the Arizona shooting viv s vis Congresswoman Giffords. The responder could very easily have mistakenly shot an innocent person. The police unfortunately do all too often)
Now, in the Aurora shooting, that was all out the window. Dark theater, smoke bombs…and the shooter (if you did manage to see him aside from the muzzle flashes) had tactical armor and an AR-15, so any handgun owning responder was going to be at a critical disadvantage. The best option was to get on the floor and look as inconspicuous as possible.
However, the Virginia Tech shootings occurred over a considerable space of time, and the buildings were well lit and the students and faculty managed to actually barricade doors. When the gunman tried to force himself into rooms(which actually did happen), it became immediately obvious who the threat was, and it is quite reasonable to posit that someone with a weapon would have a decent chance of success in killing the gunman as he tried to enter the room.
I am not a fan of having to take a gun to church. That really is not a society I want to live in. However, I also know that when you need help immediately…the police are merely minutes away. As a GLBT person who has had to flee from threatened assaults before…I know that I am ultimately responsible for my own protection. I also know that as a disabled person, I cannot actually escape from somebody who really wants to make me the star of the next “teach the queers and trannies a lesson” beatdown. That means I need to be able to use lethal force if need be to protect my life and those of my loved ones.
Side note concerning things that will keep you worried: 3D printers can now make critical gun parts, including the lower receiver of an AR-15 rifle. The plans have already been published on the web for anybody else with a 3D printer.
It is likely just a matter of time before high impact plastics or resins are available that can be used to fabricate the barrel and chamber. Gun bans will become utterly meaningless at that point, since untraceable weapons without serial numbers could be “printed” anywhere. Similar technology can also scale to make ammunition, including the propellant (not to mention prescription medications…also mentioned in the article)
Soonergrunt
@Li: There are NO such reports that I’ve read or seen.
roc
@scav:
It seems like that would depend on whether he was going to troll his doctor.
Raven
@Cassidy: Yea, I gave all that shit up. I’ve got 3 22’s and a disabled wwII japanese rifle with one hell of a bayonet on it. If my dogs and my Louisville Slugger don’t do the trick, fuck it. I never thought I’d live this long anyway.
Chris
@roc:
Those countries have gun ownership because they have a draft. Everyone does his couple of years in the military, gets fully trained and certified on how to handle a gun, and gets to keep it when he goes home, because all the citizens can still be called upon in the event of an enemy invasion.
In other words, what those countries have is “a well regulated militia,” which is what the Constitution says we’re supposed to have and exactly what the NRA and its buddies are determined to make sure we never do.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@roc: “It seems like that would depend on whether he was going to troll his doctor.”
The image of that is bringing me no end of giggles.
Cassidy
@Raven: Lol. I was looking into getting a shotgun for home defense and I was looking at the Coach Guns. I liked them for their size and thought they’d be a little more manueverable around corners and down the stairs, my “kill zone” if you will. So, as I was weighing the cost of the tricked out and more expensive, Mossberg vs. the Stoeger the salesman was really pushing the pump. The look on his face was priceless when I stated that if you can’t fix it with two shotgun shells then I need a priest and some holy water anyway.
I’m not nearly as bad now and ended up not getting the shotgun. For a good while there, I was…hypervigilant as my wife would say.
Li
@scav: Of course I can tell the difference, and like many here I would like to see sensible gun regulation, especially regarding mental health and straw man purchases. But this is way down on my list of priorities, behind financial reform, reforming our mental health system and getting a new energy economy running. Making silly arguments like the “no chance to defend yourself and others” argument, particularly in association with a news story where one of the victims managed to wound the attacker with his ceremonial knife, is so dumb that even the supermarket Rambo types can see through it. We can stroke ourselves for hours about how much smarter we are, and attack anyone who points out how dumb this argument is, but we don’t get anything done that way. The real problem in this country isn’t guns, it’s our society and its f-Ed up priorities. Our greed leads us to murder by the millions through starvation and deprivation, primarily through unregulated manipulation of the commodities markets. It has led our financial industry to defraud even our own cities with their rapaciousness. You want to save some lives with regulation, start there. And in so doing, we might even free up some cash for a decent mental health system, which would do more to stop spree killings than even the sort of gun regulation we support would.
I would like to end with a favorite Sikh aphorism, which is most appropriate for this situation. “ANGER SPOILS COMMUNITY, PRIDE ENGENDERS ARROGANCE, DECEIT UNDERMINES PEACE AND GREED DESTROYS EVERYTHING” That terrorist was angry, prideful, deceived and a deceiver, and ultimately had only destruction as his legacy. Hopefully the other one percent of the population who are virulent racists won’t follow his lead, and shake of their apathy, because then we would have an army of three million murdering the people you love, and that would be a civil war whether you like it or not.
Sloegin
A lot of people didn’t grow up (or pay attention) during the heyday of hijackings.
It was always an interesting game to see how many innocents died at the hands of the hijackers, and how many bystanders died at the hands of the security forces storming the plane/bus/boat etc.
On multiple occasions law enforcement rang up a higher score.
Cassidy
@Cassidy: On that note, now that I’ve started to mellow out and gotten away from being so paranoid, the only justification I have for the guns I want to own are 1) I like shooting them, 2) I’d like to be armed in the event RWingers decide to go apeshit, and 3) zombies!
celticdragonchick
@flagellant:
Not true. She was an ex-Minneapolis police officer…meaning she was actually a civilian. She said in an interview that she heard about the attack on the Youth With A Mission campus the night before and brought a handgun on a hunch. She did function in a security role for the church, albeit in an unarmed fashion generally.
She was also kicked out of the church after coming out as gay. Unbelievable.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Cassidy: In most cases, I’d suggest a dog over a gun, assuming that allergies or extreme distaste for canines doesn’t get in the way, especially if you do not live alone. The stats on one of your family members getting shot by your own gun in your own household is not encouraging.
Of course, I’m not entirely ruling out gun ownership as a bad idea, particularly if a dog is not an option. Still, the stats tend to work against the homeowner in terms of self defense, at least according to cops I’ve spoken to on the subject.
Li
@Soonergrunt: I’ve read two, one that stated that he used a serving knife from the buffet, and another which said he used his ceremonial knife. I could link but I found it on the google in two seconds and I assume you aren’t trying.
Roger Moore
@dr. bloor:
FTFY.
Pen
@Cassidy: You and I agree on that point 100%. The first thing I was taught was that avoidance of a live-fire situation was the absolute best course of action every time. But that won’t always be an option, and that’s what my tactical defense training is for.
We let anyone and their brother own a gun in this country and I don’t know a single one of my NRA gun-toting relatives or neighbors that’s even received half the training I have (and I’m not even close to ‘done’). They’ll either shoot indiscriminantly if prompted, have their gun seize up through lack of care at a crucial moment, or freeze solid. Usually, they’ll freeze. If we lived in a society that required everyone to receive service training or go through combat classes that’d be one thing, but we don’t.
r€nato
@Li:
but it wouldn’t have mattered at all if the shooter had not had a firearm, he simply would have used some other weapon like a knife… right?
And he still would have achieved the same body count, right?
Raven
@Cassidy: I’m very familiar with hypervigilance. Ever see Patience Mason’s work on PTSD and families? Her hubby is Bob Mason, author of Chickenhawk (before it came to mean what it does today).
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/sikh-temple-president-tried-to-take-down-shooter.html
I see “tried to stab”. You claimed stab, and then claimed that the wound slowed the shooter, rather than the conflict itself.
Here I quote you “but the terrorist sustained wounds that slowed”
I suspect you are lying. Feel free to provide a credible link to support your allegation that the man was actually stabbed and I’ll concede.
Pen
@danah gaz (fka gaz): 100% correct. At this point a good biometric lock gun case is only about $250-350. There’s no excuse not to own one, and your kids can’t get the key.
mechwarrior online
Former military here and I grew up with guns, yes I own one. I bought one back when I was in the service for practice and have no real reason to get rid of it, nor do I really use it. It’s just a thing I own.
Anyways, firing in self defense or retaliation is a bullshit concept. You have to be “ready”, which a lot of people miss. A cop or soldier on the job with their weapon is often in a mindset to be ready, especially if they are conducting a dangerous operation. You’re primed, clear, it’s a very different state of being and mental set that someone who’s never been in that sort of situation can’t fully grasp or understand.
The idea that someone could properly respond to a situation when completely caught by surprise (and not surprise as in surprise attack in Iraq on professional soldiers on patrol knowing that could happen) is so divorced from reality it calls into question the sanity of those proposing it. I’m sure they could respond, and by blind luck they might respond in the proper way, but overwhelming they are only going to make the situation worse. Even trained cops, marines, sailors, soldiers, et all have made things vastly worse by interjecting themselves into a situation they didn’t fully understand when caught off guard and off duty. Which is why it’s generally only a last resort and regarded by trained professionals as a pretty stupid thing to do.
Now I’m not disparaging guns as protection, far from that. A gun is great protection in your own home where you know damn well who is supposed to be there, who is not, and exactly what is going on, but for these sorts of ambush attacks it’s not.
And frankly having society run around with the mental assumption that everyone is a potential threat at anytime constantly scanning for potential threats is a great way to have all sorts of accidental shootings, it happens all the time with cops and the military.
Still though, I’m against gun control. Because many of the same people that scream “rational solutions” are the same people that actually want blanket bans… which is something I learned reading KOS and other liberal blogs. And given that, any sort of gun control is a stalking horse for a blanket ban and should be vigorously fought at every moment and on every level. And I’d consider gun control, endorsement of gun control groups, or support of gun control groups, a completely deal breaker in a politician of any stripe.
Cassidy
@danah gaz (fka gaz): I completely agree. That was all post-Baghdad when I wasn’t mentally and emotionally well. I still believe in home defense and I think a gun can be a part of that, but I also think it requires certain planning beyond “Hehehe….I have a gun”. But even when I owned guns, I didn’t keep them in a posture to support home defense. They were always unloaded with the ammo seperate. I didn’t lock them up as I had them stored up high in the closet. I only locked and loaded once when my neighbor came over seeking refuge scared that her husband was going to hurt her. I knew the guy and had worked and deployed with him, so we called the cops and I got my gun and told her to text him to stay home.
truthdogg
@Chris: I think “well-regulated” is the key there.
In fact I’d argue that the “well-regulated” part of the 2nd Amendment is a major point of it.
Punchy
Add another zero onto that last number and then maybe, just maybe, someone may propose, but never pass, a ban on military assault weapons.
celticdragonchick
@Sloegin:
The incident where Egyptian commandoes stormed a passenger plane about 20 years ago come to mind. It was a bloodbath.
Also, the siege of the Moscow Theater after the Chechnyan terrorists wired the whole place to blow and had suicide bombers strewn about the place among the hostages. The Russians pumped the place full of valium gas, but killed a lot of people through overdose and didn’t tell ER doctors what drug was used on the victims.
In truth, a lot of people were going to die no matter what in the Moscow affair. The terrorists made that fairly clear and they prepared very carefully to produce maximum casualties.
Redshift
@Chris:
Obviously, if he’d been shot at, he would have been more polite, so that just proves his point! QED, or something…
truthdogg
No, I’ve already been in arguments with gun strokers whose first response to that suggestion is “run away then, you pussy, I wouldn’t.”
lonesomerobot
@celticdragonchick: Of course, her being a “civilian” immediately negated all of the training she had as a police officer. This seems a silly thing to quibble over and label patently “not true”.
I’m sympathetic to what you have to say but it still is coming from a position of fear. The fact is that even in the VA Tech shootings the “someone could have had a gun and stopped it” argument disregards that when the cops DO show up, they have to sort out who is the shooter and who is the “hero”. I recall from the news reports the situation there being very chaotic and drawn out, what with the university failing from the standpoint of making information available.
mechwarrior online
@Cassidy:
Reason 1 is as good enough as any. I’ve seen people screaming to ban rare earth magnets because kids eat them and they perforate their stomachs. Just because someone may do something stupid or malicious with an object is no reason to ban them. Hell cats and dogs cause all sorts of problems, we don’t ban them. Thousands of people injured, killed, made sick, devastation when allowed to roam wild, they are truly pests… but we don’t ban them.
I’ll start thinking the “gun control crowd” isn’t just stark raving lunatics dancing in the blood of tragedies we they call for abolishing dogs, cats, personal pools, bleach, fertilizer, and a laundry list of other items.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Cassidy: “when I wasn’t mentally and emotionally well.”
Ding ding. Doesn’t that sort of illustrate part of the problem as well?
I’m not saying that to denigrate you – rather I’m just citing your own assessment of the state you were in at the time you decided to purchase as an observation that maybe there are too many people in a bad head space that buy guns. Maybe waiting periods and screening are a good idea, and maybe gun shows not so much.
Pen
@Cassidy: Thanks. And sorry to spam the comments but my ipad’s terrible with 3g reloading. Anyway as far as the open v conceiled thing I agree. The only reason, and I do mean only reason, that I choose to CC verses open is that I don’t want the fact that I’m armed to ever factor into any situation I’m in. If a store has a “no firearms” policy I’ve got no problem leaving it in my case in my trunk, but other than that I consider my gun to be nothing more than an extreme last-ditch defensive measure and a great way to spend a weekend at the range. It’s not for showing off and if nobody ever knows I have a gun I consider it a win.
Raven
@mechwarrior online: bongs, made from parachute flares!
scav
@Li: Learn to multi-task.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@mechwarrior online: Aren’t you a regular over at Jim Hoft’s petting zoo? The one he refers to as “The Gateway Pundit”?
I ask merely for information.
celticdragonchick
@mechwarrior online:
In a situation like the coffee house ambush where a gunman came in and shot cops and guardsmen filling out paperwork, then I agree. The gunman chose his time to make the ambush. There is no defense against that.
Many other situations have very different dynamics. When I have been threatened in public, I had ample opportunity to recognize that I was in danger and that the other parties were engaged in escalation towards violence. It was not an ambush. It was a process that took place over a period of one to two minutes. Fortunately, I was able to leave and they let me leave… That is by no means guaranteed in the future.
Also, other shooting incidents that took place over a period of time allowed for some sort of rational response to develop (barricading doors at Va Tech)
SatanicPanic
@mechwarrior online: So some people want to ban all guns, therefore you are opposed to any restrictions on guns. I don’t want to get all WaPo centristy, but there may be some middle ground in there.
Raven
@celticdragonchick:
Woody Allen, Love and Death
War!
Napoleon has invaded Russia! It’s war!
Oh, what about all our plans?
We were gonna be parents this year!
There’s gonna be a slight change.
Instead, we’re gonna be refugees.
– That’s terrible!
– We have to take everything and flee.
I’m very good at that. I was the men’s
freestyle fleeing champion for two years.
We have to burn the food so the French
don’t get it. But it’s tough to light borscht.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@mechwarrior online: That’s a load of crap.
For starters, there are plenty of responsible gun owners here.
On this very thread even. By your own standard, you must start believing “the gun control crowd”. You won’t because you are an idiot, and an ideologue.
Your straw man is even worse than Li’s.
Patricia Kayden
@Figs: Funny, if it weren’t true. That’s the kind of trigger happy country some people would want for America’s future. Everyone armed. Everyone with their finger on the trigger. Everyone ready to blaze away at the slightest provocation. Everyone dead/injured.
Sounds like heaven.
El Cid
@maurinsky:
The comment itself may have been snark, but trust me, this is indeed the viewpoint of many.
Including people I know, who have said repeatedly that they’d rather have the chance to shoot back even if more people die than to just passively let the killer hunt them.
It’s about emasculation, the robbing of their manlihood, their ability to fight back.
It doesn’t matter for policy and rhetorical purposes that this may not characterize their feelings deep down, or how they might react at that moment.
All that matters is that this is how they think and talk about it, and presumably vote about it, openly.
They really, really do cherish the notion of being able to be powerful, to make a choice in that moment, to not have some librul gubmit or whoever else take their powerful weapons of choice away and leave them vulnerable to the exploitations of evildoers without their ability to strike back.
Damn the consequences. Fuck who dies. What counts is their thinking about phrases denoting toughness and fighting back.
Roger Moore
@Ben Franklin:
Most of those are probably people who are shot by friends or relatives who know where the gun is, not people who have their gun taken away from them by a random criminal. What I do remember seeing is that people who have guns in their house are something like 5x more likely to be the victim of gun violence than people who don’t. The obvious reason is that some family quarrels that wouldn’t result in anything worse than a shouting match or a fist fight escalate to a shooting when there’s a gun handy.
celticdragonchick
@lonesomerobot:
Her training, such as it was, was no longer current and not really any more relevant then training I had in the Army. I know how to use a variety of weapons…but I no longer go regularly to qualify at ranges or receive additional training. She is in the same boat. Nonetheless, she performed heroically. Presumably, many other people who are ex military or ex law enforcement could potentially do something similar under like circumstances.
Considering I have degenerative disc disease and major pain issues…I’m not really itching to get in a firefight with anybody. I do intend to survive, however, and I have no moral problem whatsoever with putting two rounds center mass on anybody who wants to hurt me or my family.
Li
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Lord, you want me to sort through a pile of conflicting news reports and find you the unvarnished truth before the investigation is even done? I’m arguing based on the reports I’ve read, and I’m not sure that the possibility of self defense is really all that controversial. Sure, against a well prepared and suicidal murderer self defense is hard to impossible, but thankfully such crimes are vanishingly rare compared to the dangers most people face.
Are all of you seriously arguing that so few have managed to defend themselves with a knife or gun that there is no point even trying?
Cassidy
@danah gaz (fka gaz): You won’t find any disagreement from me.
@mechwarrior online: I’m gonna totally disagree with you. For one deaths due to bleach, etc. can be countered with agressive education campaigns and better parenting through education, so they’re not the same. Guns have a very singular purpose: to kill, and you and I and every other person with any amount of training knows if you’re not shooting to kill, you’re doing it wrong. That is the purpose of the gun. Everything else you mentioned can kill if used improperly. The gun kills when used properly.
Re: Dancing in the blood, etc…..when are we supposed to talk about gun control. Everyone says “don’t politicize” and “your disrespecting the dead”. Seems to me the last mourning period is overlapping this mourning period. So maybe, we should have a fucking conversation about gun control. I’m all for a full ban. What we have is not working. Period.
This phrase always bugs me and plays right into the gun fetishist and their “scawy, black guns” condescension. I’ve said before: less than $200 for a Ruger 10/22, $50 for a 100 rnd betamag, and $15 for 500 rnds if 22LR hollowpoint. For less than $300 I’ve created a close quarters wepaon of mass destruction. 22LR will tear chunks out of stuff for such a little round.
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
Not only that, but any advocacy of any type of restrictions on guns is also such a grave offense that the politician can no longer be supported no matter what his stances on any other issue. Yeah. Okay.
Someone in an NRA gun thread months ago pointed out that plenty of other countries, like Canada, have their own thriving gun cultures. They just don’t have the neurotic, obsessive, near-pornographic gun culture that Americans do, the above being a picture perfect illustration of that. And people laugh at abortion and gay marriage as wedge issues used to “distract” the public? The gun debate has both these things beat to a pulp in that respect.
Hypatia's Momma
How many of the “shoulda been carrying” folks sincerely believe that of Dr. Tiller?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: “Lord, you want me to sort through a pile of conflicting news reports and find you the unvarnished truth before the investigation is even done? I’m arguing based on the reports I’ve read, and I’m not sure that the possibility of self defense is really all that controversial.”
No, I just want you to cite a SINGLE remotely credible source that claims that the shooter was stabbed.
One.
Instead you are deflecting from that. So now, I’ve gone from suspecting you are lying, to being willing to put money on it.
Cris (without an H)
Jesse Taylor (yes! that Jesse Taylor of Pandagon! When did he start posting at Wonkette?) finds Instaputz Glenn Reynolds going there oh yes
Heh, in your ass jerk
Redshift
@mechwarrior online:
Congratulations on being part of the problem. Even if “many” people who favor gun control want blanket bans (an unsupported assertion, since reading blogs, especially KOS, does not tell you much of anything about what most people believe), that does not in any logical way lead to the idea that any gun control that is enacted will inevitably lead to blanket bans. Slippery slope arguments based on nothing but what some people want are purest bullshit. These things are decided by politics, and there is nothing in the past hundred years that gives any credence to the idea that passing one gun control measure will inevitably lead to more and more.
Decide if you want that having no further constraints on your gun ownership is worth the price in blood and sorrow the country pays every year, but don’t try to claim you’re making any kind of rational argument against gun laws, or that by declaring yourself an absolute single issue voter, you’re not actively part of the problem.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick:
I’ve read you before. You simply cannot be stupid enough to make that response to my comment.
First, you don’t know what my fucking position is on gun control.
Second, that’s among the cheapest ‘does not follow’ bullshit I’ve seen recently.
Not to mention that all sorts of voluntary dangerous activities have regulations applied to them, whether directly or indirectly.
Come the fuck on — I know you really, really, really, really, really, really appreciate having and having had a gun and there were 80 million billion situations in which you were thankful you had it, etc., etc., but this doesn’t empower you to come to stupid conclusions.
Steve
@danah gaz (fka gaz): You seem to have difficulty distinguishing between arguments grounded in logic and arguments that you personally find appealing. If you’re one of those people who is like “my side is automatically the thinking side, everyone else is just an idiot” then yeah, we’re not going to get very far. You also need to educate yourself about what “concern troll” means.
Chyron HR
@Steve:
Says the guy who sincerely believes that Obama’s failure to take away our guns is part of his evil plot to take away our guns.
El Cid
@Redshift: Meat processing regulations is simply a stepping stone to banning meat.
They can regulate the cleanliness of meat production when they pry my smoked baby-back ribs from my greasy, sauce-soaked fingers.
lonesomerobot
@celticdragonchick: Right, but you said yourself that she not only was in some sort of security position with the church, but had also decided to bring a gun that day on a hunch. So, in some way she was actually at least more prepared to confront a shooter than the vast majority of vigilante wannabe keyboard commandos that fantasize about their glorious hero moment.
And ultimately the idea that our society must just be given over to the concept that gun ownership is no longer a right, but an obligation, is anathema to me.
Cassidy
@Chyron HR: It’s a rope-a-dope!
@El Cid: mmmmmmm…BBQ….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cris (without an H): it was, from what I”ve read, a blunted ceremonial sword. So I guess the gun professor Putz wanted the man to defend himself with would’ve been unloaded.
Li
@scav: That’s what I want us to do. And every time I see a spree killing come up, I can count on all of my favorite sites having one post after another about how tragic it was that that crazy guy had a gun, and virtually none about how tragic it is that he was crazy and had no help. Or in this case, how tragic it was that no one saw how dangerous a hate filled ex military type could be. Really, how many posts on Ballon Juice about all of those starving children to make our bankers a few extra million? I can recall two in the past few months. This happens, and we have more stories than that in a few minutes! Our priorities are totally whacked! This liberal enterprise would have so much more success and credibility if it wasn’t composed of cowards who only cry foul when the gun is pointed at them.
The Moar You Know
Oh, it’s not difficult at all. Little bit of blaming the victims, little bit of a deliberate ignorance of reality, and there you go.
There was a guy with an AK who shot a bunch of National Guardsmen up in Reno a couple of years ago. Some Galtian Superhero decided to grab his .45 and be a hero. Shooter popped a few rounds in his direction and he decided (smartly) the valorous place to be was curled up on the floor of his business. I’ll never forget what they quoted him as saying, it’s too bad that you don’t hear from guys like this more:
That’s the reality. You’re not going to stop a guy like that, as you want to live, and he doesn’t.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Steve: Just to be clear, this is the statement you made.
“There are issues where the liberal argument is entirely cerebral and the conservative argument is gut-level emotional. I do not think gun control is one of those issues.”
Maybe you had better unpack that. It certainly smells of concern trolling, even if you don’t realize it.
The right wingers, with possible exception of a lone-few are making reactionary emotional comments against gun control – and often going so far as to say “if more people carried this wouldn’t be a problem” – despite any evidence, while I see (even as evidenced by this thread alone) several liberals run the gamut from “guns are bad, mmmkay? ban them” to the much more common “umm, why don’t we actually evaluate all of these shootings and start doing something to address the problem?”.
Cassidy
@Li: So essentially your position is that your position is everyone is wrong because your priorities are right? Am I reading that correctly?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Cassidy: No. His point is that he’s right because STFU that’s why. He’ll happily twist an argument into something it’s not in order to support that base assumption of his, and in some cases (like the one I cited) even lie to do so.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
One of the fun things in my overly-long career catching smugglers at MIA was the night I arrested 26 guys unloading cocaine off a cargo flight. I had a girl recruit with me and before I left the vehicle, I left my Colt 2″ Detective Special (always unloaded) with her. My boss went berserk the next day and demanded an explanation. “Well, Capo,” sez I, “I did not feel like wearing that damned thing in my ass if those guys got belligerent.” Norma, the girl recruit, BTW, became one of the best on the team. She understood.
NRA be damned. You do NOT need a goddam gun in most situations. You just invite violence. Just ask a Bobbie.
celticdragonchick
@dr. bloor:
Technical note: Muskets are not hunting weapons. They are smoothbore firearms specifically meant for war, although the term is often misused or mistaken with other flintlock weapons of the era.
I own a reproduction King’s 2nd Land Pattern Brown Bess musket. It has a very thick stock so that it can be used as a club, and it has a bayonet lug (I also have the bayonet) Being a smoothbore weapon allowed for very quick loading (about 4 shots a minute) but accuracy was nil. This is why massed volley fire was necessary, since that was the only way anything would be hit! The bayonet was actually the primary killing part of the musket, and the British were the best trained bayonet men on the planet at the time.
Flintlock rifles were quite accurate…and very, very expensive (about a years wage for the average farmer or hunter) and they were custom built for each owner. Fire rate was maybe 1 shot every minute and a half to two minutes. They could not accept a bayonet* and had slender stocks to save weight, which made them difficult to use in hand to hand fighting. Militia with rifle relied on dirks and tomahwks which were still at a disadvantage to a British infantryman with a long-ish bayonet on his musket.
Also, the British tended to hang militia who were captured with rifleman accoutrements. Riflemen liked to go after officers, artillerymen and the drummer boys (drummer boys relayed orders, so killing them severely hampered combat operations), so the British considered them murderers (never mind they hired German Jaegers to do the same thing to us!)
*The Ferguson Rifle was the first true combat rifle (I think) and was used by the British at King’s Mountain. It was a breech loader rather then a muzzle loader and could fire up to 6 shots a minute, and also mounted a bayonet. Captured Ferguson Rifles from King’s Mountain were used in the Civil War by Confederates who had inherited the weapons through their family tree.
Culture of Truth
What if everyone brought a live cat everywhere they went? Can you imagine unleashing 100 angry kitties on the movie theatre shooter?
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@celticdragonchick: Clearly, you are liberal know-nothing gun hater.
=)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Li: You should start a “responsible gun owners for sensible regulation and universal health care” SuperPAC. I”m sure Wayne LaPierre and Ted Nugent will direct money and grass roots energy your way.
Someone mentioned Switzerland up-thread. Does anyone know what kind of gun regulation there is there? When I took German as an undergraduate, twenty-odd years ago, one of the scary little cultural nuggets we learned was that the Swiss gov’t kept a record of what newspapers and magazines citizens subscribe to (I would guess that’s become impossible in the internet age), and I can’t imagine that in a country like that you can go to a WalMart, or a tent in a WalMart parking lot, and buy as many guns as you want.
pseudonymous in nc
@mechwarrior online:
Glad that you’re so explicit on that, which means that you are equally willing to accept regular gun massacres as a price worth paying for your beliefs. Right? Because those beliefs don’t come free.
El Cid
By the way, I don’t think many if even one of these mass public shooters thought they’d get away with it.
I’m pretty sure most assumed as part of the glorious insanity of their actions that they’d go down with their own bullet or in a blazing cloud of gunfire.
They mostly assume that they will die, whether at that moment or soon after. I believe that.
So I’m not so sure how this decision to kill mass numbers of people in public whom they don’t know would be affected by their understanding that a gun-toter might be in the crowd.
The problem is that there is something about our culture where we’re turning out so many of these mass killers — including the mass killers of their ex’s and family and occasional workplace rage killings as well as the mass public shooters of innocent victims unrelated to the killers.
I kind of place this white supremacist slaughterer in with them as so far I don’t think it was the result of an organized political movement and goal, though I do believe his idiot racism aided in the choice of victims.
This isn’t happening everywhere; though it’s certainly possible that various regulations at national, state, and local levels could offer some help in, say, reducing the victim count, maybe, if we’re still doing the same things to churn these publc psychopath eruptions out, they’re still going to attempt these things and maybe have at best fewer victims but this isn’t what’s causing it.
Including non-gun-related things such as domestic violence laws & tracking, because it would be great if we had a lot fewer men killing their s.o.’s and ex’s and children and families. Here in Georgia it’s practically a routine, ‘Oh, hey, another crazy asshole male just shot up his whole family / extended family / etc in their house or trailer or apartment…’
And I believe it’s becoming more common — though with a far lower starting point — in other nations less permeated by our nutty shoot-em-up culture.
r€nato
@El Cid:
last year there was a tragic local road rage story that ended with a driver shooting to death another driver who got out of his car to confront the armed driver.
Surely a fucking lousy decision by the shooting victim, but the evidence – at least, that released to the media – indicated that the shooter had made dubious claims to having been physically attacked by the other guy. The cops indicated there was little evidence of the victim choking the shooter as he claimed, and when they asked the shooter why he didn’t simply drive away when the other guy stopped his car and got out… he had no good answer.
It later came out that this guy had had two prior 911 incidents with the cops in that same city, where he had threatened to shoot another driver in road rage incidents.
I can’t help but think that this guy drove around armed because he had a secret fantasy of settling the score someday with all those drivers who drove him nuts, who cut him off, who drove too slow, who drove too fast, who otherwise behaved irresponsibly and stupidly on his goddamn road that he had the title to. He got his wish and now a family’s father is dead, the shooter’s life has changed and not for the better however it turns out.
Even if he is still convinced he was in the right, I’m pretty sure he wishes he had just driven away that day.
scav
@Cassidy: That’s basically what I’m reading. Oh, that and he shouldn’t have to supply sifted through evidence to support his assertions because it’s hard work. Romneyesque is his innate superiority to us sub-lunar mortals. Oh.2 he’s shocked, simply shocked! that websites post about recent events immediately after they occur instead of nattering on about chronic issues.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: I’ve seen The Patriot and Last of the Mohicans. You’re wrong. Knives and tomahawks rule!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@El Cid: “The problem is that there is something about our culture where we’re turning out so many of these mass killers”
I don’t know if it’s so much cultural. The only hypothesis I have that seems to hold up and correlate is this:
Easy access to guns + Social instability breeds gun violence.
Wealth inequality, lack of class mobility, and food and health insecurity breeds social instability.
offered fwiw.
jl
Don’t have time to go get the quote now, and have posted it at least twice before wrt to gun nuts (so it would be a repeat anyway), but James Madison saw this view of life as the end result of idea that individual citizens, or groups of citizens of a democratic republic can nullify, violently obstruct, and shoot their way to their idea ‘liberty’. Every man armed, and ready to shoot over any incident, and disagreement.
In practical terms, it does not work very well in the few cases when it might be helpful: for example, when a nutcase opens fire in a crowded room.
But where does it end?
Funny that Madison saw it ending in violence and anarchy and tragedy. The gun nuts fantasize it as being wonderful. The arms and ammo manufacturers can count their profits and live behind their private gates.
Ten twenty years ago, it was debatable whether the Holy Blissful Founding Fathers(TM) PBUT, could be considered as being more liberal (in the modern sense of the word) than the GOP. Now it is obvious to me.
The GOP and their allies have become, clearly I think, what Jefferson called the hoarse croaking of reaction.
lonesomerobot
@danah gaz (fka gaz): because the almost 10,000 gun deaths a year in the US are all the result of inadequate attention to mental health.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
Quite so. I wasn’t actually addressing that. I was discussing your (somewhat sarcastic) observation that people with weapons would tend to shoot innocents rather then the actual threat. It is a common meme, but one that is not particularly supported outside of Wild West and John Woo movies. Notwithstanding, there are always the Zimmermann types who really do want to get their “gun on” and will use any excuse to to do it.
Cassidy
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Actually, I have an diea about that. I don’t know if these things happened on a routine basis pre-internet, but I know that they seem to have escalated in scope and frequency in my lifetime (34 y/o). My thoughts are this. I think part of the problem is when we stopped letting little boys fight on the playground. That was a safe place for boys to get thier aggression out, no one really got hurt, and at a young age they learned how to accept defeat, deal with bullies, and recognize that as pack/ social animals we have a pecking order. Once we eliminated that, males stopped developing that coping mechanism. Add to it the proliferation of violence in our media which teaches that violence is an acceptable solution and BANG!
My thoughts anyway.
elmo
@JGabriel:
All I can think of is Rupert Giles, and yeah – yummy.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
LOL!
I want one of the rifle stock war clubs that Chingachgook was using!
celticdragonchick
@elmo:
Rogue librarians sounds like a Warhammer 40K book about Space Marines and out of control Psykers…
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: I think Cold Steel makes some but with carbon fiber.
David in NY
@Cassidy: I think it unlikely that Page did not fight when he was a little boy. Also, I haven’t met many thugs (and meeting them is in my line of work) who took out their frustrations as little boys at not being able to slug people on the playground and thus became robbers or hit men or serial killers. It really doesn’t work that way.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick:
Perhaps you’re assuming that the calls for more people to be armed is coterminous with the assumption that they would all be like you, responsible, well trained.
There is little empirical evidence that the constant and public calls for more people to be carrying weapons is correlated with calls for more intense training and weapons control experience.
There is very, very little empirical evidence that ill-trained users of firearms, particularly those without training in the use of firearms in tight spaces with high numbers of civilians around, are skilled at accurately assessing targets and accurately directing firepower at center body mass.
As a matter of fact, some of the military weapons and close combat training I received was quite explicit about the dangers of opening fire in enclosed situations of poor visibility and limited mobility.
This is the sort of claim in which the empirical evidence should be gathered on the side first that a widespread increased possession of firearms by ill-trained (i.e., ‘the general public’) individuals would be likely to decrease the death toll and successfully avoid collateral damage in confined public situations of mass shootings with limited visibility and limited mobility.
It is not the sort of situation in which a broad example would be granted to the negative, i.e., that increased firearms possession among ill-trained individuals — the overwhelmingly likely result of calls for increased firearms ownership and carrying to the general populace as there is zero simultaneous call for and less than zero simultaneous likelihood of increased training — would not result in increased collateral damage and friendly fire.
It strikes me as quite silly that someone would demand that the weight of evidence be on proving increased firearms possession and carrying by the general public would increase friendly fire in confined circumstances with large numbers of civilians (with poor visibility and mobility), rather than finding the burden of evidence to be upon the argument that such a thing would not cause this result.
Li
@danah gaz (fka gaz): I’ve searched and found lots of articles, in three scenarios. He stabbed him with a butter knife. He stabbed him with the ceremonial dagger. Or he tried to stab him. Im not going to link because its so damn easy to find this stuff that you calling me a liar over it is a farce, and i dont want your money . Really, I was more basing it on a radio interview with a cop who credited him with slowing down the attacker and saving many lives. I’m so sorry for not having every thing footnoted before hand, and giving the victim too much credit.
This impossibility of self defense argument is still lousy, even if you tear down victims who try to defend themselves to support it. It makes you seem like you are asking people to give up when attacked, because gosh darn we shoulda had gun control of some sort. Obama, at least, understood that an argument with no hope gets nope. With tactics like these, one wonders why the left insists upon goring themselves with this issue again and again. Focus should be put elsewhere if we want any success.
Cassidy
@David in NY: Okay. Like I said, it was just a thought on my part. I’m nothing resembling a mental health professional.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Cassidy: That may be an aspect of it.
I really don’t know either way. I will say that the reason my hypothesis (admitting that’s all that it is) has stuck with me is that it seems to hold true across countries and particularly the unrest part seems to hold true throughout the entire arc of human history. I like Canada as an example, as they are a close neighbor, and have a thriving hunting/gun ownership culture, and mass shootings there are much rarer – even taking population differences into account. They also have a much better social safety net, and less wealth inequality.
Martin
@celticdragonchick:
I think you’re missing the real point there.
The point isn’t just that innocents might get shot, but much more likely that the assailant wouldn’t be shot because responsible citizens would refuse to take such a shot in a chaotic situation.
All of these arguments rely on, and then simultaneously ignore a core central point: that responsible gun owners don’t want to shoot innocent people. The assailants in these situations are unburdened of such an attitude, which is why they are successful at killing so many people – they simply don’t care who they kill. You and I do. And because of that, you and I won’t shoot – we certainly won’t shoot when we’re unthreatened, and we’ll almost certainly not shoot even when we are – because it’s highly unlikely that the circumstances will seem sufficiently safe for us to do so. So again, the ‘defensive armed citizen’ doesn’t materialize as an outcome of gun ownership.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: Check this out.
Soonergrunt
@Soonergrunt:
@Li:And even if there were, using a ceremonial knife to defend against gunfire? Sorry, you don’t get to count that as actual self defense. There’s a reason we use the term “bringing a knife to a gunfight” to denote stupid.
Trakker
@mechwarrior online:
Really? You can read minds? In other words all of us who have expressed a desire for common sense gun control laws are secretly trying to take away your guns? Amazing.
So, you like the status quo? No limits on the size of clips? No improvements to the background checks, no pressure for law enforcement to do a better job removing firearms from convicted felons, nothing? Thousands of innocents shot to death every year and you oppose any attempts by politicians to make society safer? Sad.
Martin
@Li:
It’s not an impossibility of self defense. It’s an improbability of self defense, based on statistical observations. And again, if you put a gun out there, are the odds better that that particular gun will be used to initiate a crime, or defend against one? So far, the odds are vastly in favor of initiating a crime. Either responsible gun owners really, really suck at being gun owners per their own arguments, or their arguments are bullshit.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: My argument about the tried to stab vs. stabbed is not to be read as anything other than an indictment of your debate tactics. To wit: YOU ARE LYING.
For the record, I googled [ sikh temple shooter stabbed with butter knife ]
I get a bunch of articles where again, they say TRIED to stab.
Here’s another one.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/06/sikh-temple-president-hailed-hero-dies-defending-worshipers-from-gunman/
You are misrepresenting things. That’s the point I am making here. It is not to be read as an argument that they “should give up”. If you want to see my position on all of this, you can read my other posts that aren’t directed to you. They clarify my points about gun control.
Again, my point about stab vs tried to stab is that you are being disingenuous. You are KNOWINGLY misrepresenting the situation. That’s why you STILL won’t provide a single link to support your claim. Now, I could have overlooked your misrepresentation as a simple misreading of the situation – except that you SPECIFICALLY made the claim that the shooter was wounded – and that slowed him down. That’s an outright fabrication.
My point again, is precisely this: You’ve demonstrated that are willing to KNOWINGLY argue in bad faith. You are willing to LIE to support your claims. Therefore, you are not to be trusted in this debate.
Is that clear enough?
Li
@Soonergrunt: Oh yes, that victim was so dumb for trying to save people. What a stupid victim! And you wonder why we have lost this argument.
Meanwhile, a vast majority of the people want financial reform, but we can’t advocate our way out of a paper bag on that one. By the way, I find it entirely appropriate that you are replying to yourself in that post, because this whole argument is just about as productive as talking to ourselves about how right we are.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
Quite possibly so, although I would guess (admittedly from personal experience, which is anecdotal and not scientific by any means) that the overlap between CCW carriers and competent gun owners is fairly high (and allowing for the odd “My husband makes my carry this thing but I have no idea how to use it” situation or the wannabe Zimmermann hero type.)
It tends to be a self selecting group, although I freely admit that I am not a sociologist and have little training in this area aside from some research into schools and grass roots improvements. Wild shootouts involving multiple shooters seem extremely rare. The last one I know of in my area was in the 1970s and that was the infamous Greensboro massacre where the Klan and neo-Nazis ambushed a labor march. CCW permit holders simply do not have much use for permit in everyday life (thank God) and when they have used them (evidenced by the reference above to the IHOP shooter who was engaged by a shop owner) they usually act responsibly. (I have no idea why Moar You Know was so insulting to the shop owner above. He did the right thing by trying to bring down a mass murderer who was in the middle of committing the crime)
celticdragonchick
@Soonergrunt:
Uh…you use what you have. If all I have is a knife and a guy with a gun comes into the room to shoot me, I’ll be damned if I just give up and let him. I will make him work for that and hopefully make him bleed before he kills me.
Soonergrunt
@truthdogg: It was for the Founding Fathers, for whom unpaid Militia participation was mandatory for every male from age 16 to age 40.
Six hours on the village common every Saturday, with fines and the stocks for anyone who “failed to repair,” a term we still use for missing formation.
muddy
@mechwarrior online:
Yeah, I remember the day I brought my cat to the theater and killed and maimed dozens! That was pretty sweet.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
Pretty cool. :)
Tomahawk throwing was actually a popular sport, but not really practical in actual combat. You were likely to just really piss off the Brit you threw the weapon at, and he will not be considerate enough to give it back to you ;)
Raven
@Soonergrunt: You should have put a comma before stupid for Li.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@celticdragonchick: Of course. And hopefully it works. You use what you have. I think soonergrunt is simply arguing that this kind of thing rarely works, not that it shouldn’t be attempted. Despite Li’s claim, I’m not arguing that, and I don’t see anyone else here doing that either.
Li
@danah gaz (fka gaz): That’s because you are getting a bunch of articles from today, which are all based on the same ap wire release. But yes, because you don’t understand chronological listing, and I based an argument on an early report without footnoting all of my sources on what I thought was a minor point, that proves I am a liar not to be trusted. Boy that victim was stupid for trying to defend himself and his congregants. You’re so right about everything.
A few years ago I noticed that it had become impossible to talk with people on the right without being shouted down by a crowd of nitpickers and dogmatic asshats. Even people who once seemed reasonable would start questioning everything and never giving an inch on anything they believed, no matter how delusional they sounded. Now it’s not even possible to talk to my own side without the same thing happening. God help us all if this is a sign of the times, I’m not sure society can survive a complete failure of communication.
celticdragonchick
@muddy:
My kitteh could probably do it…She is a vicious little thing!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@muddy: that’s a potentially viral video if there ever was one. =)
sneezy
@Pen:
There is no reasonable sense in which you “had” to do anything. The likelihood that you will ever be within miles of a mass shooting event is vanishingly small, and it is nearly certain that you will live the entire rest of your life without ever needing to draw a firearm.
You didn’t need to do anything. You made a choice. From your explanation, it sounds as if you made it primarily to satisfy some emotional need that you have. But in any case, you made a choice. Own it and quit being a weasel about it.
celticdragonchick
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
True.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: Link or you are lying. That’s what this boils down to. No amount of deflection will allow you to weasel out of that simple fact.
ETA: Like most people, if I’ve read something even a month ago that I didn’t “footnote” I can recall enough of the key components to plug it into google and find my claim. You are insisting that you can’t – over something that has occurred very recently.
I sifted google, and tried all reasonable permutations of what you wrote, and found NOTHING. Surely you can find at least one link.
muddy
@danah gaz (fka gaz): I picture it flying from throat to throat like the rabbit in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
celticdragonchick
@Soonergrunt:
Depended on the Colony. Here in the Carolinas I believe militia duty extended until age 65. Also, it was a way to pay off taxes since most people simply did not have hard currency to pay with.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: A real man doesn’t need the brit to give it back; he takes it back from his skull. Mel Gibson says so.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
LOL! Best laugh I have had today!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@muddy: My ex used to have a kitteh like that =)
Li
@Martin: Those statistics you are referring to are familiar to me. There is an obvious problem with their methods. When a violent crime happens, there are bodies or victims, and legal proceedings which can be counted. When a victim scares off an attacker, there are none of those. For instance, I was once gay bashed, face broken in and jaw broken. The violent jerk ended up in court, which can be counted, and I’m sure it was. Two times later in life I avoided being bashed by displaying a knife. Though I reported the incidents, the police didn’t even take a report, and thus by that study’s methods I would have no chance of defending myself, when in fact my chances were 66%. The first time, of course, I was in high school, where my pocket knife was banned but my assailants fist full of rings was allowed. So perhaps my experience is unduly coloring my reaction to people who say there is no point in self defense, and for that I apologise.
Joey Maloney
@roc:
On the off-chance you didn’t know this, NRA purists are idiots.
I live in Israel. It is very, very difficult to get a gun for private ownership unless you live outside the Green Line and I don’t even want to get into those settler lunatics and the way the government sucks up to them. Sure, there’s universal military service and everyone learns how to handle a gun in basic training. And every day I see soldiers carrying their automatic rifles around with them everywhere. But except for security guards and cops, there’s no civilian open or concealed carry. After living here for years I couldn’t even tell you where a gun shop is. In order to get a permit you have to demonstrate a specific reason for needing a firearm and in some cases pass a psych exam. The vast majority of Israelis turn in their weapon after military service and never touch another one for the rest of their lives.
David Hunt
@Chris: @Chris:
Ruckus
@Patricia Kayden:
They think it sounds like the wild west when men were men and the women were whores in the bars or stayed home and had loads of kids. IOW wild west novels.
Folks it’s the 21st century, not the 19th. Life moves on. It changes how we live it. Get over it and move on. We don’t need guns and 30-100 round clips 24/7. We just don’t. Never really have for that matter. And by the way I’ve carried tens of thousands of dollars in cash in public and never once was worried about being robbed. Even the one time the airport inspector yelled, “His bag is full of cash”. Twice. If you live in fear all the time, you have a problem. A gun will not solve that problem. It can very likely make it far worse. What we really need to teach is statistics. So that maybe people can figure out what things in life really are dangerous and what really are not.
Roger Moore
@celticdragonchick:
And at the very least slow him down enough that some of your friends and relatives have a chance to escape, which is what seems to have happened in this case. My understanding is that when a soldier does that- taking on ridiculous odds to give his comrades a chance- he isn’t called stupid; he’s called brave and given a medal, even if it is often posthumous.
scav
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Li’s too busy re-sodding the entire field and painting the bleachers. Hard to recognize it’s the same arena.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@scav: No shit, right?
Some people’s children.
Soonergrunt
@Redshift:
Most gun fetishists are not capable of doing this kind of calculus, because they really do believe that if the event ever happens in their presence, they’ll calmly draw their weapon, assume a Weaver stance, and place a controlled pair in the active shooter’s chest (and usually one more in the forehead as he falls) before the third innocent bystander is shot, and therefore nothing remotely like gun control is needed because true gun control is using both hands.
It’s bullshit, of course, but they believe it because they NEED to believe it. Not because it’s true or has any rational basis whatsoever.
celticdragonchick
@Roger Moore:
There are times when attack, even against overwhelming odds, is the only realistic alternative to just being killed in place. One in a hundred is still better than nothing at all. I am fortunate enough to live in a time and place where that kind of choice is rare. Thank God.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: “unduly coloring my reaction to people who say there is no point in self defense, and for that I apologise.”
Perhaps you are allowing your willingness to lie and then to construct towering straw-men out of other people’s arguments (in a ham-fisted attempt to deflect from your fundamental dishonesty) to color your reactions.
Maybe you’d be better off apologizing for that instead.
Joel
@celticdragonchick: Holy crap, nice misdirection.
The Moar You Know
@celticdragonchick: I’m being deliberately insulting as the guy was/is one of those “cold dead fingers” assholes who always talked a great line of shit about what a hero his gun would make him if some scary brown person came to put them all under Shariah law.
Didn’t fuckin’ work out that way, did it? He did the only sane thing – he ran. Hopefully at some time during the fleeing/crouching in terror/shitting his pants process he got his mind changed about how valuable his little peashooter would be when the SHTF.
Don’t shit yourself you’d win it either. I don’t. The spree shooters want it more, don’t care who dies, plus they approved the ending in advance.
Ruckus
@El Cid:
Part of the emasculation may be the inequality of our society. Banks and rich people rip us off all the time, frequently legally. We see many with so much and if you look at all you also see people with nothing. That ideal to have a gun may be to have that last vestige of control, of space that many of us have had to give up at a pretty rapid pace. Life is different than 20-60 years ago and that ideal of opportunity for all really is gone. Huge college costs, bank fees, crappy jobs, lack of health care, little way to have retirement(just bare existence at best), everything costing more so there are always big profits without wages coming close to keeping up, houses costing more than many make in a lifetime. I’m sure the list is incomplete, these came to mind as I typed.
celticdragonchick
@Joel:
You are a little late to the conversation. I have considerable respect for Cid and our disagreement is minor, actually.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick: Look, if you ask people would they rather have some selected number of responsible, well-trained, properly such and such firearms owners and users to have a weapon in an environment in which a threat may arise, unsurprisingly many people might say ‘yes’. Myself included, not saying that I’ve found myself trying to think this through on the odds.
But that’s not what’s being proposed from the calls to simply have more people carrying firearms.
I have heard this as “If more of X had been armed, then…”
I have not heard “If more of X had been armed, as long as they had gone through some sorts of training and preparation in responsible and safe gun ownership, then…”
Those are not the same things.
I think a lot of times gun owners like yourself hear the first call and think ‘oh, like me’.
But I urge you not to think that.
If one calls for the broader carrying of firearms and prohibiting places from prohibiting firearms, you aren’t selecting for the tiniest few of the most safe and responsible.
This is increasing the likelihood of guns being carried by all sorts of individuals, including the kinds of people who might be incautious and have a weapon go off accidentally in public, and who might indeed have a personal confrontation erupt so that instead of a vehement confrontation, argument, and fight erupting in a bar or theater, a weapon is drawn, and if fired by intent or accident, that bullet having left the barrel hits whatever is in its path, innocent victim or not.
At this stage, I’m worried about my safety without regard to some potential mass killer or stereotypical criminal.
You tell me the movie theaters in which there’s a high rate of firearms porting, and it isn’t some sort of gun owners club or police event, I’m not going.
If I could fantasize that calls to allow and encourage firearms carrying into public places would result in only the most responsible people doing so, that’d be one thing.
In this world, though, and in the world of places I actually go, I don’t see any reason to assume that this would characterize the outcome.
Or maybe private establishments could start “no gun” sections, with armor plated walls in between, for those people not reassured by the high probability of an increasingly random distribution of firearms carrying among the other sections.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: I carried a tomahawk and a knife in Afghanistan. But I relied on the Mossberg 590 shotgun and the M-4 carbine a LOT more.
celticdragonchick
@The Moar You Know:
I don’t get your attitude at all. The guy had the presence of mind to actually stand up and try to stop a murderer, even though he was outgunned. Yes, he failed…because he was outgunned (most cops would have been as well).
If you were one of the people in the IHOP, you would have been pleased as hell that SOMEBODY had the balls to actually try and stop the asshole who had come in to shoot at you. Maybe you would have had some time to get out the back door of the kitchen while the gunman was busy shooting at the storekeeper. Whatever. The guy did his best with the gun he had…and you want to call him names for…what?
I sure as hell would have been cheering him on. The longer he keeps the asshole busy, the longer I have to do something to keep me and my family alive.
Stuart_b
One of the arguments I have seen as justification of carrying is the contention that more criminals are killed by armed citizens than by police. That’s a dubious claim, unless it comes from a percentage of suspects shot who subsequently die, rather than numbers. But creepy, and the idea that an armed citizen would have killed the shooters rather than taken them into custody–and that that would be a good thing–seems to underlie the pro-gun arguments.
At the same time, counter the “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns,” side is that firearms are manufactured exclusively for legal uses (and that certainly now includes arming gun nuts along with police, military and hunters), and those illegally acquired have been diverted–generally by theft.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@El Cid: I think you nailed it. Surely, I can’t argue with that, at least not in the situation you describe.
That said, as for me – I have no problem with people carrying a weapon (even a handgun) for personal protection. That said, I do disagree that it affords people a lot of personal protection, and may make things worse. But that’s a personal opinion that I’d happily not have enshrined into law.
For my part, I just want reasonable screening, a waiting period in all cases of civilian purchases, and a ban on the import and manufacture of unnecessarily excessive firearms and accessories (such as 100 round magazines).
Obviously, there are social aspects that I think would cut down on mass shootings. Refunding organizations that treat mental illness, some more focus on the inequality of wealth, and fairness towards our poor, and other programs that have the ability to increase social stability.
All of that said, I’m under no illusion that any of these will completely eliminate mass murder from our society. Perfect is the enemy of good. I’m just looking for improvement.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: I’m not saying that if one is faced with one’s life, one shouldn’t use whatever is available, even if it’s a losing proposition. Far better to go out standing up than otherwise.
I’m saying that it’s disingenuous bullshit of Li to claim that there was any kind of practical self defense on the part of this guy or any other mass shooting victim. The Fort Hood victims threw chairs at Hassan, charged him, and did whatever they could think of, for all the good it did them. And the answer isn’t to help them stroke their fetishist wet dreams about pulling out their penis replacements and shooting the assailant, which in the real world will only increase the body count, it’s to make sure that people like Jared Laughner, James Holmes, Nidal Hassan, and Wade Page don’t get hold of mass killing devices in the first fucking place.
@Raven: hat tip.
lonesomerobot
@celticdragonchick: But the underlying argument here has nothing to do with whether it’s wise or practical to defend oneself. This dissonance that you’re adding is ultimately fodder for the gut-level NRA attitude, which is “we’re all safer if we all have guns to defend ourselves”.
First, most people would like to think that they won’t lay down and die.
Second, most people aren’t you – they don’t have your fears, your experience or your training. They don’t have your beliefs or responsibility about firearms. They may not be rational. There are many, many people in this world I would never trust being near if I knew they had a concealed firearm. There’s no way to predict that even the most well-trained and alert gun owner will be able to successfully handle a mass shooting situation. This isn’t saying ‘just give up,’ it’s saying that taking the side of those that would have more guns in public spaces is actually the less sane of the choices.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Soonergrunt: This.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: My dog would try to lick and cuddle multiple people to death.
Catsy
@Chris:
Bingo.
The problem isn’t gun ownership, per se. The problem is the deep, pathological sickness in American culture that fetishizes owning and shooting firearms.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: Militias were as different as the places they were organized. But they all had common threads–mandatory participation by able bodied males, willful subjugation to authority of the state, and community discipline to enforce that, as well as generally understood regulations, customs, and courtesies, with an enforcement mechanism to back them up.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
That is, indeed, a problem…and one that was not anticipated by the Founders when the 2nd Amendment was crafted. As observed above, militia enrollment was nearly universal in many areas, ergo every fighting man with a gun was considered trained and ready for duty (that being most of the male population outside of the cities)
I do not encourage or advocate gun ownership for anybody who is not willing prepared to be trained by competent personnel to some standard…and that is the part of the 2nd Amendment the right wing nuts are leaving out: Mandatory training and drill!
The militia according to the United States Code:
(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.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Fair enough. Most people of sound health and good character are “in the militia”, even if it is merely the “disorganized militia” which is whomever the local sheriff can round up to help in a rescue or some such. Actual training and competency with a weapon was presumed by the Founders (well organized) and I have no problem with some stipulation for training to be attached to many if not most types of firearms. I would actually prefer to make it compulsory a’la Switzerland, but my 18th Century civics idealism will never go that far. Too bad so many other gun owners will not admit the civic duty clause contained in the 2nd Amendment.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Catsy: I tend to think of mobs of people as inherently analog and organic.
I don’t attribute the mass-shootings to the pathological paranoia of shooting-fetishists to some sort of survivalist mentality directly.
Or better yet, I should say that I tend to think of the “deep, pathological sickness in American culture” as a symptom, rather than the cause.
I tend to believe that this sort of pathology is created by social inequality and insecurity on a broader sociological level. Basically, we are creating the conditions for this by continuing to treat the poor like they deserve to die, to strip the hope from the middle class, etc. Fundamentally we’re ASSHOLES due to this tribalist bullshit, but it’s social insecurity that causes tribalist bullshit to fester and thrive.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
That is, indeed, a problem…and one that was not anticipated by the Founders when the 2nd Amendment was crafted. As observed above, militia enrollment was nearly universal in many areas, ergo every fighting man with a gun was considered trained and ready for duty (that being most of the male population outside of the cities)
I do not encourage or advocate gun ownership for anybody who is not willing prepared to be trained by competent personnel to some standard…and that is the part of the 2nd Amendment the right wing nuts are leaving out: Mandatory training and drill!
The militia according to the United States Code:
(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.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Fair enough. Most people of sound health and good character are “in the militia”, even if it is merely the “disorganized militia” which is whomever the local sheriff can round up to help in a rescue or some such. Actual training and competency with a weapon was presumed by the Founders (well organized) and I have no problem with some stipulation for training to be attached to many if not most types of firearms. I would actually prefer to make it compulsory a’la Switzerland, but my 18th Century civics idealism will never go that far. Too bad so many other gun owners will not admit the civic duty clause contained in the 2nd Amendment.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid: @The Moar You Know:
I don’t get your attitude at all. The guy had the presence of mind to actually stand up and try to stop a murderer, even though he was outgunned. Yes, he failed…because he was outgunned (most cops would have been as well).
If you were one of the people in the IHOP, you would have been pleased as hell that SOMEBODY had the balls to actually try and stop the asshole who had come in to shoot at you. Maybe you would have had some time to get out the back door of the kitchen while the gunman was busy shooting at the storekeeper. Whatever. The guy did his best with the gun he had…and you want to call him names for…what?
I sure as hell would have been cheering him on. The longer he keeps the asshole busy, the longer I have to do something to keep me and my family alive.
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: You’re not Daniel Day-Lewis.
@celticdragonchick: I think you’re confusing the point. This guy’s fantasy met reality. The fantasy is that he was a Chuck Norris superman who was going to blast his way to freedom and be awarded with some sort of cool certificate by a ressurrected Charlton Heston. The reality is the very distinct sound of an AK47 making your tiny little piece of metal and plastic suddenly seem inadequate.
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: You’re not Daniel Day-Lewis.
@celticdragonchick: I think you’re confusing the point. This guy’s fantasy met reality. The fantasy is that he was a Chuck Norris superman who was going to blast his way to freedom and be awarded with some sort of cool certificate by a ressurrected Charlton Heston. The reality is the very distinct sound of an AK47 making your tiny little piece of metal and plastic suddenly seem inadequate.
Ruckus
I believe there are a number of Iraq and Afghanistan vets here and I’d like to know how many people in those war zones didn’t carry weapons? Did everyone carry, open or concealed, or did most not carry?
Because here are two places where many were/are trying to kill you/blow you up and while I don’t know I’ll bet the majority of people did not carry or have guns.
celticdragonchick
@Soonergrunt:
My cat is psychotic. I actually have to keep sharp metal things away from her like a little kid. She likes to play with thumb tacks!
celticdragonchick
@Soonergrunt:
Yep.
Pen
@sneezy: You do know that for most people the word “consider” is part an parcel with making a choice, right? I’m being civil; I suggest you do the same.
Li
@danah gaz (fka gaz): I’m not a liar because I can’t link to a radio report that happened within hours of the event, and I’m not making some sort of stupid argument in favor of stand your ground laws or every ten year old having a pistol or something. I’m on your freaking side, on this and many fronts I’m sure, and some of you are treating me like I’m below contempt, it’s unbelievable! All I wanted to say is that this is a stupid argument, and it continues to be, because no one will ever be convinced by an argument that calls victims stupid for trying to defend themselves. It’s disrespectful and hopeless, and it’s only true in the case of suicidal criminals, who are thankfully very rare. I mean, really, some in this thread are actually saying that all of those people who threw chairs at the base shooter as he was shooting at them, and the Sikh priest who tried to stop that racist skinhead, and in fact anyone who responds to violence other than a trained police officer (and apparently not even that, according to the post) is a stupid idiot who’s death is almost their own fault for trying to defend themselves. That argument is not going to win, because it makes you look like you are making fun of the victims and their efforts to save themselves and others. Some of you actually ARE making fun of people who died trying to save other people, which is so heartless it makes me think I’d might as well be reading Red State. We would be better served in focusing upon achieving liberal objectives that are wildly popular instead of wasting so much time on an argument that we lost by making stupid arguments like this, and I’m being nitpicked to death and called a liar for pointing it out.
Soonergrunt
@Ruckus: The vast majority of people did not carry firearms. Those that did and were not part of either the Iraq/Afghan government or one of the approved groups (Sons of Iraq/local security contractors, etc) were subjected to close scrutiny.
I never saw any non-government local person with a gun in either place who wasn’t trying to kill me.
Whidby
@Pen:
Unfortunately, a child can defeat most of those cheap gun safes. There’s a video out there on teh google. Even on very fancy bio-metric safes, all you have to do is just lift up the edge an inch or two and drop them to spring the latches (or whatever those things are called.)
So, I’m shopping for better safes now.
Ruckus
@Soonergrunt:
That’s pretty much as I thought.
So in a war zone where lots of people had guns, and probably were not afraid to use them, the majority of citizens remained unarmed. MMMMmmmmmmm. Strange that, some might think that with all that lead flying around having more guns would protect them, make them safer. Seems that having a gun did exactly the opposite. Sort of like here.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: Here’s a tip: I don’t give a fuck what “side you are on”. You’re not on my side, because I’m on the side of *honest* discourse. Full stop.
If you intend to make a point about guns and defense, and you make an outlandish claim, you had better be prepared to back it up. If you can’t you’d best leave it out of the discussion. If you don’t, and are called on it, you can salvage your credibility by saying, “I heard it on the radio. Hmm, it seems that’s not corroborated” instead of deflecting and spinning, deflecting and spinning.
Also, just because some nitwit with a radio show says something stupid, it doesn’t make it true, and doesn’t even make it rise to the level of a “report” on the situation. Putting a mic in front of somebody doesn’t automatically make them credible. I suggest you stop listening to “Coast to Coast”, particularly Alex Jones because that man is fucking liar.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Li: “and some of you are treating me like I’m below contempt, it’s unbelievable!”
It’s actually pretty believable.
Leading in on your initial post with straw-man arguments, and then repeating unsubstantiated claims, and throwing in more straw-men, and finally endlessly deflecting until you are so boxed in that you can’t help but FINALLY admit that you’ve got nothing will lead to that sort of thing.
If you want to be taken seriously in the future, I’d suggest you try a different approach next time. Also, stop fucking whining. It’s pathetic. (“you are treating me like I’m below contempt, it’s unbelievable!” – hahaha, this ain’t beanbag – welcome to the Internet)
celticdragonchick
@Ruckus:
Walking around with anything that even looks like a gun in an urban war zone makes you an immediate target for people with much larger guns then whatever you have…like a Hughes M230 30mm chain gun on an Apache gunship.
A news team with a cameraman found that out in Baghdad…
El Cid
@celticdragonchick: I didn’t say anything about the IHOP dude.
In fact, I didn’t have a recommendation on what anyone in such a particular situation should or shouldn’t do.
I was discussing things related to probabilities of what would happen in some given scenarios, particularly the probable and estimable result of policies and behaviors being recommended by many.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick:
There are two vastly different discussions separated by an unbridgeable chasm between what I’d like to be the case and what appears to me likely to be the case.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
Exactly.
Also, I have no idea you got linked into the IHOP discussion I had with Moar. I didn’t do that…at least not intentionally.
Ruckus
@celticdragonchick:
And you just made my point. Thanks.
More guns equal more problems, more situations where lives can and will be lost.
In most of the world, including war zones, more people having guns makes other people with guns want to shoot them. Sure not all of us have that desire or even reflex and that’s why most of don’t carry or need/desire guns. I’ve spent over six decades on this planet, worked and lived in some pretty tough neighborhoods, carried lots of cash as part of my job, and I’ve never needed a gun. I’ve been shot at and I have carried a sidearm as part of my job. I still don’t need a gun. Having lots of others have guns makes my life that much more dangerous.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: I should point out that when I said unidentified “persons with firearms were subjected to close scrutiny” that quite frequently that scrutiny was by a Predator drone. Often if a drone wasn’t available, the scrutiny was achieved by shooting the person with a crew-served weapon, and then going to see what they were doing.
I never saw any non-coalition persons walking around either of those places with an AK who wasn’t up to something that was bad for me.
We did let several people in Afghanistan who were carrying bolt-action rifles (usually British Martini-Enfields and Khyber copies) which they used for hunting, walk on past.
Pen
@Whidby: I’ve tried to pry my safe open just to see if it could be done with no luck. I haven’t tried the silly putty fingerprint copy trick yet but I’m still years away from having a child savvy enough to know that one so I’ve got some time to save up for a better wall-mounted safe I’ve got my eye on.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Pen: hopefully your kids don’t watch Burn Notice then.
“Cracking an old school safe is pretty tough, but modern high-tech security makes it much easier. Thing is, nobody wipes off a fingerprint scanner after they use it, so what’s left on the scanner nine times out of ten is a fingerprint.”
(with video demonstration accompanying it, of course)
ETA: Adding that anyone that underestimates the ingenuity of their kids is getting shit lifted from their wallet and liquor cabinet at the very least. I imagine the gun safe isn’t far behind.
Pseudonym
@Soonergrunt: How could you tell they were up to something that was bad for you after you, uh, scrutinized them with a crew-served weapon? It seems like that might tend to blur some distinctions.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Pen: All I’m really saying here is be careful, of course. If your kids are toddly you are probably safe for now.
Pen
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Yeah, he’s two. I figure I’ve got 2 years for sure, 4 at the most before I have to realistically consider upgrading to the wall safe I’ve got my eye on (This one, abut $2k). Considering what I’ll be storing I don’t consider it overkill at all.
A moocher
@SatanicPanic: The universe in which limiting the number of guns makes sense is this one. The claim or argument is not self-refuting, and your loud braying does not make it so. In an actual discussion such as this, the donky’s bray simply announces loudly that he’s got nothing.
I doubt very much that you even understand what “self-refuting” means.
A moocher
@SatanicPanic: The universe in which limiting the number of guns makes sense is this one. The claim or argument is not self-refuting, and your loud braying does not make it so. In an actual discussion such as this, the donky’s bray simply announces loudly that he’s got nothing.
I doubt very much that you even understand what “self-refuting” means.
Soonergrunt
@Pseudonym: If he’s carrying an AK, he’s probably up to something. That’s not the kind of thing people run around a war zone with willy nilly.
As I pointed out earlier, some old Martini Henry or Martini Enfield that was taken off a British soldier in the 1880-1895 timeframe and passed from father to son to grandson is probably being used to hunt game, such as there is, if the thing is even functional.
That, and all of the stuff we do to tell people that walking around with an AK will get you shot. But mostly because I was always running around with locals–interpreters in both countries, and Afghan National Army in Afghanistan. They know pretty well when somebody’s up to something. And of course, our training and experience come into play.
I might have come off as a little flippant. It’s not like we sit in the truck and say “hey, Billy, he’s got an AK slung over his shoulder. Fuck him up with a six to nine round burst, would you, there’s a good chap!” But we do watch them, report on their actions and location, send a picture up to higher, and so on. If he’s acting hinky, he’s probably going to get approached, and questioned if possible.
Some guys don’t let you do that. I’ve seen more than one contact report with stuff like “placed subject under surveillance due to his being in a field that we’d never seen him in before. Terminated surveillance operation and engaged with .50cal (14rds) when subject opened up on us with an RPK.”
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@A moocher: I think you need to reread his comment. If that doesn’t help, follow the discussion up a couple of clicks.
Pseudonym
@Soonergrunt: I’m just curious about what it was like. What were the RoE for you guys? Does Af have any gun control laws, or any laws to speak of? Was this in an urban or rural area? Is there actual game in the area? Goats? How do they respond to being hit by bullets from an RPK?
brantl
Of course it’s wishful thinking on your part. The whole wingnut fantasy is at stake here. Every fucking gun that a conservative picks up has shards of Excalibur forged into it, and confers the wisdom of Arther of Camelot on the snot-nosed, beady-eyed, fanatic little shit whose carrying it, didn’t you know that?
Instead of the reality that 1 second after the second guy fires at the guy who started it, any third, fourth or fifth guy doesn’t know which of the other participants is a bad guy, periond