The best contribution Gamer culture makes to shooting is the lack of fear of people finding out how much you suck.
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Tag: self-defense
Quick! Before it Disappears!
Got another live one over at Quora. If you don’t want to read the entire thread (it’s epic), just skip down to the last two comments in the thread started by “Iwan Doherty.”
Wow. Just…wow.
Kids, Guns and “Safe Storage”
Well, here we have another case of where a 12 year old got her hands on an loaded, unsecured firearm:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
Sorry about the video quality.
UPDATE: 911 recording and Interview with the pre-teen and here mother here. The weapon in question was her mother’s .40 caliber Glock.
I Wish I’d Had This Image…
Principle #7, Mr. Cosby
Well, Bill Cosby has opined on the Trayvon Martin incident:
“We’ve got to get the gun out of the hands of people who are supposed to be on neighborhood watch,” said Mr. Cosby, whose remarks were the first he has made publicly about the case.
“Without a gun, I don’t see Mr. Zimmerman approaching Trayvon by himself,” Mr. Cosby explained. “The power-of-the-gun mentality had him unafraid to confront someone. Even police call for backup in similar situations.
“When you carry a gun, you mean to harm somebody, kill somebody,” he said.
Yes, that’s why the police carry them.
Let me refer once again to Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing – specifically Principle #7:
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
Mr. Zimmerman was doing his duty as he saw it. And he couldn’t carry an entire cop around with him. IIRC, he did “call for backup.” There’s audio of the call, in fact.
An honest assessment would say that this is what we know:
- Zimmerman was out doing his neighborhood watch thing and saw Martin.
- He called 911 and followed Martin in his vehicle.
- When Martin walked someplace that Zimmerman couldn’t follow in his vehicle, he got out of his vehicle and followed on foot.
- ???
- In the process of getting his ass beaten, Zimmerman busts a cap in Martin.
The entire case turns on what happened in the ???, but don’t tell that to the media, the folks playing poker with a deck full of race cards, the victim disarmament crowd, or apparently the frickin’ President of the United States of America.
Or Bill Cosby.
UPDATE: On a related note, whom did you mean to harm, to kill, Mr. Cosby?
Quote of the Day – Sean Sorrentino
I like to watch the Bravo series Inside the Actor’s Studio. Near the end of each show, host James Lipton asks his guests a list of 10 questions, the last of which is always “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?”
Sean Sorrentino just gave me the perfect answer:
When I reach the Pearly Gates, I want the first thing I will hear to be “Unload and show clear.”
Quote of the Day – Vanderleun Edition
…I went and signed up for gun training. After the training I felt I would be qualified to get a gun. I would get it because it was my right to get it. I would get it because I could. I would get it because Washington, no matter how deeply mired in denial and dementia Seattle may become, Washington itself is still a “must issue” state. And how long that would last in the demented rush to disarm and make all citizens effective wards of the state for their “protection” was anybody’s guess.Tracking the killings of over 30 unarmed, effectively disarmed and therefore helpless students, at Virginia Tech [in 2007] confirmed me in my decision. It took many bullets for this tragedy to unfold. It would have taken just one going the other way to stop it. That and the training to know what the situation was and how to react.Unless you are morally, spiritually, and politically blind to human reality, you know that this is the truth. — American Digest, The Gun School
As the saying goes, RTWT™. It’s from 2007, but still fresh as a daisy!
Just Lay Back and Think of England
The fallout of Weer’d’s “Do More Than Just Light a Candle” counterprotest is still pattering down all around. One piece I ran across today comes from the Florida Progressive Coalition Blog, Gun Free Zone Blog Celebrates Gun Violence.
No, I don’t think so.
I left a comment there, but it hasn’t been approved, nor do I expect it to be, but I do want to comment publicly on one point made by the author, Kenneth Quinnell. He is attempting to fisk the post I Lit My Candle For… from the blog Gun Free Zone. Here’s the particular portion I want to highlight from the whole thing:
Quote of the Day by Brigid: “but tomorrow is the day the Brady Bunch plan a light a candle to stop gun violence (that’s what I’m going to pull out when some potential gangbanger rapist confronts me in a parking lot, a f’ing candle.”)
First off, the chances of a “gangbanger rapist” attacking Brigid are almost nonexistent. Second off, pulling out the gun might help her, but statistically it’s more likely to increase her chances of dying.
Now the comment I attempted to leave was along the lines of ‘…pulling out the gun might help her, but statistically it’s more likely to increase her chances of dying.” Really? Got a citation to back that up? With a URL? Because I do and it disagrees with your assertion.
But the point I want to make here is a bit stronger.
Mr. Qusling, er, Quinnell blithely asserts that Brigid – and by extension, any woman – is statistically more likely to die if she attempts to defend herself from a rapist with a firearm.
The inference being that she should instead “lay back and think of England,” and she might not get killed.
A more textbook example of
“Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.”
could not be found.
Let’s let Oleg Volk have a say:
And finally:
To quote AGirlandHerGun from Monday:
You, you who hate guns, you gave me nothing.
No hope.
No tools.
All that was offered me was a life of fear, of resentment, of bitterness, of dependance…
The gun community has offered me hope and strength, and courage.
They have taught me to have belief in myself.
Lie back and think of England?
Fuck THAT!
Guns and the “Alternative Media,” Part I
Say Uncle linked today to a piece at TheAlternatePress.com, Women and Guns by one Kristen Houghton, a self-described hoplophobe:
I am afraid of guns; they scare me to death. Even in movies or on TV, the sight and sound of the gun being fired makes me tense up.
Not an auspicious place to start.
She’s also self-admittedly, not too tightly tethered to reality:
Regardless of the statement put out by gun owners that “Guns don’t kill people, people do”, I still feel that if criminals were unable to get their hands on guns no one would get killed.
(My emphasis.) As if guns are the only way people get killed criminally. About a third of homicide victims here would object to that, if they could. And in what world could criminals not get guns? Hell, our own government has been supplying them to drug cartels in Mexico!
But she is paying some attention:
To me, guns equal damage or death but I may be one of the few women who feels that way. More women than ever are buying handguns. Sales have increased steadily, nearly doubling in the last decade. Almost five million more women now own guns than was the case less than ten years ago.
Tell that to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. They think it’s propaganda.
While a whistle, a can of mace, or even a Taser are all items that are recommended by mainstream media as ways for women to protect themselves, they don’t always work. Nor does acting passively when confronted by a rapist. If your attacker is bigger, stronger and playing on your fear, none of these are going to be of much help. Guns eliminate the strength difference between the attacker and the potential victim. This makes it much harder for the strong to prey upon the weak.
Perhaps she’s not so disconnected from reality after all.
It doesn’t take much common sense to figure out that nothing makes a criminal run away faster than seeing a determined woman holding a loaded gun pointing right at him.
She’s beginning to sound like one of us.
I may not like it but society has very likely made women and guns a necessity. Even I see the reasoning behind knowing how to protect yourself with a firearm.
Here I’m going to object a bit. I’ve pointed this out before, but overall, violent crime is at historic lows in this country. It began declining in 1992 and has kept declining even through last year. Society hasn’t “made women and guns a necessity,” women have finally begun to recognize that individuals are responsible for their own safety, and this is a good thing. She needs to get together with AGirlandHerGun and compare notes.
She says she’s going to take a self-protection class and learn to shoot. I hope she does, but without a paradigm shift like AGirlandHerGun has gone through, I don’t think it will help her. She’s going in with too much fear and too many prejudices. I’d also suggest some correspondence with Abigale Kohn and Emily Yoffe.
Light a Candle,
but carry your gun. It’s a lighter burden than regret, as Breda says.
Weerd suggested the idea, and it’s a fine one. Here’s my CCW piece when the weather’s cool enough that I can cover it up:
