The Only Way to Stop a Bad Guy with a Gun....

Ok, so the last few days have seen a rash of random mass/public shootings or attempted mass shootings...As opposed to domestic killings and gang killings.

The last one happened in Oregon on Tuesday the 12th, three people (including the shooter) were ultimately shot by an angry, white, Mormon kid who loved weapons and thought Obama was coming for them. The shooter and another student is now dead.

On Sunday in Las Vegas, an angry white couple with possible white supremacist connections and other anti-government connections shot and killed 2 armed police officers then fleeing into a Walmart where the male was confronted by a civilian who was armed and had a conceal carry permit. That citizen was shot and killed by the male's wife who eventually shot herself after her husband was shot and killed by a possible combination of her guns and the ones fired by Police.

On Thursday the 5th on a college campus in Seattle, a gunman fascinated with previous school shootings and a history of mental illness a mile long and armed with a shotgun, shot 3 students, killing 1. He was subdued and apprehended by a volunteer student security guard armed with pepper spray.


On Wednesday the 4th, Canada tried to copy the US and had their own version of the angry white man with guns when a loan gunmen targeted and shot 5 police officers, killing 3 of them.

And this is older but still pretty sweet. Two conceal carry permit holders get into a road rage shooting and kill each other.


Here's what I am getting from all of this and why all the most solid arguments by the NRA are crumbling at their feet:

A. After Sandy Hook where 26 people, mostly children, were killed by legally purchased guns, Wayne LaPierre the President of the NRA, claimed that, "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun," Well, seen in Seattle and in Las Vegas, that couldn't be further from the truth. In Seattle, the bad guy with a gun, a pump action shotgun which presumably holds anywhere from 3-5 rounds, was stopped by a good guy without a gun when the bad guy stopped to reload. And in Vegas, the "good guy with a gun" didn't have the training necessary to engage the situation and was in the end, shot by a bad guy(girl) with a gun. Since he was the only victim in Wal-Mart and the couple were merely firing shots into the ceiling, he likely would still be alive had he laid down and not confronted them and didn't have a gun.

B. The other thing the NRA will tell you is that the reason we need conceal carry and hand guns is that no one in their right mind would try to rob or harm you if they think that you are armed and that mass shooters only target "gun free" zones. Forget the fact that almost no drug corner in the inner-city is a "gun free" zone nor are anyone's homes where most domestic gun violence occurs but in both the Las Vegas incident and the Canadian incident, the perpetrators specifically targeted armed cops and got away with shooting several of them. Perhaps only one of the three were even shot by the police they attacked. So now we know that you aren't going to deter violence by being armed.

C. Along with notion that the "chance of someone being armed" will deter others from attacking them, you can add the two conceal carry Darwin Award winners to the "not true" list. This also dispels the notion that only criminals shoot each other and that only sane, rational people can pass a background check and obtain a conceal carry license and that all conceal carry permit holders are responsible individuals who won't shoot someone over texting in a theater.

D. The Seattle shooting also highlights how limiting the amount of ammunition clips and guns can carry CAN save lives. If the Seattle shooter had 30 clip AK-47, the results would have been very different.

Literally every thing the NRA has told you has been shown to not be true in one week of shootings.

What else are they lying about?

But Only If They Had More Guns

2 Kids, 1 Adult Killed in Stabbing Spree at Belgian Day Care

From Fox News: 1/23/09
DENDERMONDE, Belgium — A man went on a rampage at a Belgian day care center Friday, stabbing two young children and a female worker to death and slashing 12 others all over their bodies, officials said.


But only if the Belgians had more access to guns this sort of thing....Oh, wait, right, many, many more people would be dead because it's faster and easier to kill kids with an AK-47 than with a knife. (See Columbine, Jonesboro Arkansas, San Ysidro McDonalds, Luby's Massacre in Killen, Tx, Virginia Tech, NIU, etc.)

Of course, if they allowed 3 year olds to carry guns then the victims could have shot the perpetrator before he stabbed them...Ya, that's it.

Oh, and apparently we have a new President who was just sworn in this week and get this, he's black!

Of Guns and the 2nd Amendment; Coming Soon to a Chicago Neighborhood Near You

As you well know, the Supreme Court has recently struck down Washington D.C.'s hand gun ban. Mayor Daley of Chicago, who also has a handgun ban, flipped his shit knowing that this essentially means Chicago's hand gun ban is also unconstitutional.

Although I do personally own a gun, I am not saying that I agree with the decision. The Constitution never says a word about hand guns as hand guns weren't all that prevalent in 1791 when the 2nd Amendment was ratified. The Constitution also never mentions anything about guns, military weapons or military weapons which can fire 1200 armor piercing rounds per minute. Therefore, by Chicago and D.C. allowing their citizens to own registered shotguns, they are allowing their citizens to bear arms in my opinion as the right to free speech doesn't mean you can yell fire in a crowded theater and all of our other rights come with limits. What scares me is that apparently the Supreme Court has now determined that anything and everything which is designed to shoot and kill people is now protected under the second amendment. If you want an anti-aircraft battery in your back yard, no problem. If you want a 155mm howitzer in your front yard, the second amendment has got your back.

There is one thing I like about the decision and one thing that doesn't necessarily bother me. First, I like the fact that they acknowledge that the 2nd Amendment was written at a time where we had a very limited standing army and depended on citizens and militias to protect us against the British, French or those savage little Indians who, for no reason at all, wanted to kill us. The 2nd Amendment even starts off by saying why we were being given this freedom: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...". Scalia had the following things to say: "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited". "Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem," "That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."

Clearly the Supreme Court is not saying that the 2nd Amendment is untouchable by regulation and that reasonable laws should apply, they just don't agree with bans and on a local level, neither do I. I think my girlfriend was a bit appalled when I said that I don't mind the hand gun ban being lifted. Do I think a handgun ban where you are allowed to have shotguns is unconstitutional? No, but I don't think a ban in a city which is surrounded by gun loving Indiana and Wisconsin is going to help anything. If somehow you could eliminate 90% of all handguns, all military weapons, all fully automatic weapons in this country and keep them out of the hands of road ragers, gang bangers, 4 year olds, mental patients and High School kids I would support that ban. However, when there is a gun shop in Hammond, IN which borders Chicago, those guns are going to get into Chicago and it's not going to be the law abiding citizens who are bringing them in and using them. In fact, lifting the hand gun ban doesn't mean that now every gang banger in the city is now going to be able to find a gun when he wants one...he can already do that. And guess what, the gun isn't legal and even after the ban is lifted these people aren't going to be using legal guns. Why would a gang banger wait 10 days for a registered handgun which can be traced back to him after he shoots up a school bus or public park?? He wouldn't. Gang bangers are still going to be carrying and concealing illegal weapons, lifting the ban will not change this. Now, that being said, more guns will and always will equate to more gun deaths. With the handgun ban being lifted, there will be more guns in Chicago and D.C. and more opportunities for those to be used against the families which own them but if that is a risk they are willing to take, it's not my kids who live in that house with them. There will also be more opportunities for thieves to break into you home, knowing you have a gun, so they can steal it and use that gun for illegal activities which won't get traced back to them, it will be traced back to the person who legally purchased it.

So as for local hand gun bans such as what they have in Chicago and had in D.C., I am not too worried about a wave of sweeping hand gun violence when these bans are lifted; we have that now with the ban as these two cities already have some of the highest gun murder rates in the western world. I am a little concerned over the lack of definitions as to what kind of weapons the SCOTUS thinks the vaguely written 2nd amendment applies to. But I would also like to point out that lifting this ban doesn't make anyone safer, not even the people who now can own a hand gun for self defense as owning a gun increases you and your family members chance of being killed by a gun and that gun is far more likely to be used on you or a family member than an intruder.

And this may be a bit off the subject but I would also like to point out that the general public carrying guns isn't necessarily deter someone else from going on shooting rampages such as what happened at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, etc. What, do you think they are afraid of, being shot? Not likely, almost all school gunman types end up shooting themselves so they are obviously not afraid of being shot and killed so I don't see how carrying a gun is going to prevent someone from shooting up a school or fast food restaurant.

Ted Nugent's Gun Policy is About as Good as his Music

My response to Ted Nugents theory that gun-free zones invite murderers:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugent/index.html


Why is it that every gun nut tires to justify gun ownership by saying if everyone had a gun then they could shoot any perpetrator who, get this, HAS A GUN. The problem isn’t that the Virginia Tech students were in a “gun free zone” and were unarmed, the problem is that Cho was legally armed. I know the 2nd Amendment, in plain English, says that every 22 year old non-citizen college student with a history of mental illness has the right to carry automatic weapons capable of killing 30 people in under 2 minutes but how practical is that and is that what our founding fathers intended? As with the 1st Amendment, our freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution are not absolute. I don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, nor do I have the right to slander someone or have a business that refuses to hire Jews for instance. No right winger would ever say that the freedom of expression allows us to have access to child show porn or broadcast swear words on Saturday morning network TV. Why? Because child porn or someone like Andrew Dice Clay aren’t scenarios that our founding fathers could have foreseen. If they can agree on that, and any liberal would cede those points, why can’t they realize that another amendment, the right to bear arms, has limitations and that the arms today are very different from the type of armaments that were common back when the 2nd Amendment was written. John Hancock could have never envisioned a weapon that could fire 1200 armor piercing rounds per minute or a gun that could kill 30 people in a minute and a half, just as he couldn’t have envisioned child porn as some sort of artistic freedom of expression and child porn is illegal.

Why was the 2nd Amendment written? It wasn’t so gun nuts could extend their ego, it wasn’t even really for hunting or personal protection. "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." So what they are saying is: We don’t want British troops forcing their way into our houses and we have no real formidable army so we are going to depend on the average citizen to protect the country against invaders. Even if that speech wasn’t there, what was considered and armament in 1787 when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, was very different from what we have today. Muskets were the most common type of armament and had a rate of fire of 2 or 3 inaccurate rounds per minute at a range of 30-100 yards. The Colt revolver was introduced 48 years later, the Gatling Gun in 1862 and the Winchester Rifle wasn’t even introduced until 1873.
Don’t try to say that more guns make us safer. If more guns made you safer then the United States would be one of the safest countries on Earth. Countries with strict gun control laws like Japan are indeed the safest countries on the planet. I would also like to point out that there are more handguns in Detroit than there are people and look at the city’s crime rate. Almost everyone in Baghdad has a gun and 20-40 people a day are killed in that city. So, the old saying that a criminal is less likely to rob you if there is a possibility that you may have a gun doesn't really hold much water.

I would like to have seen what the police would have gone through if they would have pulled up to the VT campus with reports of gunfire and walk into a classroom with 4 bodies on the ground and 10 people standing up holding hand guns; how are they supposed to figure out who the victims or attackers are? And what if another legally armed student down the hall hears gun fire and runs into the classroom with his gun to save lives and sees dead bodies and guns drawn; who does he shoot? When he shoots who he believes to be the attacker how are the other students with guns to know if this guy is part of the plot or someone trying to help? Bullets move fast but adolescent minds don’t. The entire campus could have gone erupted into a mini civil war if everyone had a shoot first, ask later approach like Mr. Nugent is advocating.

Bottom line is that the Virginia Tech tragedy could not have happened with a knife, nor could have the diner shooting in Texas or Columbine. No kid on a swing set has ever been caught in the cross-fire of a drive by gang stabbing.

As with Chicago gun laws, allowing citizens to own a shotgun which can fire five rounds per minute and are not easily concealable is honoring the 2nd Amendments request by allowing citizens to arm themselves. By allowing that, no one can say they aren’t allowed to “bare arms”. The 2nd says you can bare arms, not any and all arms. A SCUD missile is an arm and I think everyone can agree that John Hancock never intended Ted Nugent to own a SCUD missile battery.

I am a firm believer in what the Constitution has to say, let's just not forget that it never said anyone and everyone has the right to any killing machine available.

What A Dick:

The Owner of the gun store who sold Cho a 9mm said that Cho didn't say why he wanted the gun. Really? Do most people who buy a gun tell the seller who they are going to shoot? What I mean is, how many 23 year old Korean college students buy hand guns for hunting deer? What if he had told the owner that he was going to shoot a bunch of people? Would he have not sold him the gun? Who would have thought that non-citizens with histories of mental problems could legally buy guns?

The other thing I can say about this is that I think race relations have come a long way. Minorities have now successfully infiltrated the world of serial killers and psycho paths. John Lee Malvo, John Muhammad and now Cho Seung-Hui have joined the ranks and broken a glass ceiling that for many years, has been a club exclusively for crew cut white guys with three names. We are now all truly equal. MLK would have been proud.