I am tired of seeing Obama take every incident of shootings to scold this country on the exercising of our rights under the Constitution even though more and more of us are actually giving up those rights. This shooting was a targeted attack on Christians. Where’s the media outrage? Where’s the Al Sharptions? Where’s the mention of a hate crime as this is what this is? Nowhere. Karl Denninger has a great take on this. I’ll post it here because he puts things so succinctly I do not need to add anything further to it:
There are some very disturbing reports coming in about the Oregon shooting.
First off, it was clear within minutes that the shooter targeted Christians. How many people in our political system have been outraged that Christians were targeted for execution while others were either shot in the leg or not shot at all? I have heard exactly nothing from Obama or anyone else in political power in that regard. Why not?
Second, you’ve heard my screeds over the years about The Second Amendment. If you cannot argue facts and logic then get the hell off my lawn — you’re unwelcome around me. In matters of life and death there is exactly zero room for any sort of “squishy”, “touchy-feely” or “feel good emotionalism.”
Let me be clear: If you resort to emotion when life or death are on the line you are going to die.
If you wish to entertain the debate here on firearms, gun control or anything of the sort then you are going to argue logic and facts. Here they are:
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. You call the police when there is an active shooter and they show up with guns. They don’t willy-wally around; they look for a tactical solution and if they get one that works they shoot the bad guy. That’s exactly what happened yesterday.
We cannot have cops everywhere, all the time. We are not only incapable of paying for it nobody would want to live in such a world. Even if a cop is just one minute away from anywhere in the United States (an utterly fanciful expectation even in a big city) a person with a bolt action rifle or single-shot pistol can shoot a dozen people (or more!) in that one minute. As a result the faster any good guy with a gun can engage the bad guy with a gun the lower the risk is of everyone in the vicinity winding up dead — and the more good guys with guns and the closer they are to the situation the better the odds are for you and everyone else.
Virtually all (something like all but three) mass-shootings in the last couple of decades have taken place in “gun-free zones.” To those who want to further restrict firearms — since there are literally over 100 million peaceful Americans that never have and never will commit a crime with a firearm, and that is an overwhelming majority of the population that owns guns, why don’t we ban gun-free zones since virtually every single mass-shooting has taken place in one? There’s an obvious reason that these homicidal maniacs don’t shoot up a cop shop — everyone there is armed and will shoot back! If our President — or anyone on the left — gave a good damn about human life they would both take down the “Nobody here that obeys the law is able to defend themselves, commit mass-murder here” signs.
You have an unalienable right to life. The Constitution does not grant you that right because the government never possessed it in the first place and you cannot grant that which you do not first possess. The Founders understood this and we know that because they declared it to be so in the Declaration of Independence; that’s why such a right is not in the Constitution, but the recognition of same, in the gravest extreme, is found in the Second Amendment.
You are free to decide at any time to give up. You are not free to demand that others give up, including giving up their right to protect their own lives. Any infringement on the Second Amendment is a declaration of your disrespect for someone else’s life and an indirect assault upon same. The only means by which that is legitimate is if and when you are willing to die in the place of those who you demand be disarmed. If you are not willing to take a bullet intended for me then you have no right to demand that I, in any situation that I find myself, be debarred the ability to effectively fight back against such an assault.
A right cannot be conditioned upon a permit. By definition a permit or license gives you the ability to do something otherwise prohibited. If I have a right to defend my own life I need no permit to do so.
For the above reasons people at large have the right to own, possess and carry upon their person arms suitable for defensive use without any damn permits. Period.
If you cannot argue these points from a perspective of logic then you have no basis to be here as a member with the privilege of commenting and having your state (e.g. what you’ve read, etc) between sessions. In point of fact this is a perfect illustration of the difference between rights and privileges — you have no right to be on this site on the Internet at all as it is private property, and therefore I may deny you entry as I wish.
Now let me leave you with one more thing to contemplate.
There are reports that the shooter reloaded during his rampage. If these reports are true and he was in the room with a bunch of people who were about to become deceased then you need to hear this very clearly and must read this next sentence over and over until it sinks in:
Stop watching the damn movies and become educated now about firearms.
The instant that jackass dropped his magazine and thus announced he was out at the close range that exists in a classroom (30-50′ or so maximum, right?) there was absolutely no reason on God’s Green Earth why the persons there should not have immediately grabbed something (e.g. a chair!) and threw it at him and/or bum-rushed the shooter.
He was empty and thus at that point he was a thug with a club until he could reload.
Everyone reading this needs to spend some time in the deep, dark recesses of their mind and drill this singular fact far, far into your consciousness:
If you find yourself in a situation like this you must assume you are dead.
Therefore, logic says that anything you do from that instant forward can only change things for the better. Yes, you may fail. One ex-military member reportedly did try to rush the shooter and was shot several times. It is reported he is expected to survive. His doing so likely prevented some number of other people from being shot as the shooter was occupied with shooting at him. He is a hero but the point here is not to urge people to be heros — it is to point out that once your life is under assault in this sort of fashion nothing you can do will make the situation worse; you can only improve your odds.
You won’t hear this from the mainslime media nor from the so-called “pundits” and “experts” but it is true. You do not know how many rounds or what other weapons the person threatening you has. You only know that that person’s very presence and presentation means that from an objective point of view you must assume you are dead and thus if you get any tactical advantage, no matter how small, you must take advantage of it immediately and without a second thought.
On United Flight 93 the passengers did exactly this, collectively. They saved a tremendous number of lives by doing so. They correctly surmised that they were all dead at the moment they learned the plane had been hijacked and was intended to be used as a bomb. There was, for this reason, no downside to any action they might take — they could only improve their odds and those of others, and decided to do so.
This was the correct decision. It is the only logical decision and the only logical set of actions in a circumstance such as this.
Folks, firearms do not shoot themselves. They do run out of ammunition. If they are not aimed, but rather wildly fired, they either miss or if they hit someone it is much less likely to cause serious injury or death than if they are deliberately aimed. Bullets do not have a GPS embedded in them as you see in the movies and without deliberate, concentration action most of the time they will miss. There is an infamous Youtube video of a bar fight in Toledo a number of years back in which many shots were fired at close range typical of the distance you’d find in a classroom. Watch the video folks, and then realize this: Not one of those rounds hit anyone.
Therefore anything you can do that detracts from an active shooter’s concentration and deliberation who is targeting you increases your odds of survival and that of everyone in the area with you.
If you are scared of firearms then do something about that. Take a shooting lesson from an instructor or someone you trust that owns firearms. Learn how they work and how to handle them safely without quivering in fear. A gun is just a mechanical device and simpler than most that you use every day; it is vastly less-complex than a bicycle, lawn-mower or car. Safe use and handling of firearms is not difficult to learn at all and every gun works essentially the same way. Understanding this and having at least a passing level of comfort with it means that if you find yourself in a situation such as what occurred the other day and you are given a tactical break no matter how small you will have a clean opportunity to save not only your own life but that of everyone in the vicinity.