Someone is At the Door

            
 


   We all operate on the illusion, or delusion as the case may be,  that we are safe within our homes. In order to live with a normal blood pressure, go out to work, get groceries, we all find a way to tell ourselves that no one will enter or try to enter our homes while we are away.  Most of us also believe that when we are IN our homes that a forced entry, or home invasion, is even less likely than a break-in when we are away.
                  Tonight, I went to bed early with a toothache.  I found myself up at the laptop computer at 2:45 am when the ibuprofen wore off.  My eldest son who is still recovering from a lightning strike was also up sitting with me. He still has pain and difficulty falling asleep since his ordeal.   We sat whispering quietly in an attempt not to wake up any more of the light sleepers at our house. At 3 am, we heard someone testing the front door. I looked over, and the main handle was locked but the deadbolt above was not.  I raced to flip the deadbolt above. My son flipped it faster than I could. When we had done this, we looked through the peep hole. Whoever it was had gone.
                    Frequently, we hear our dogs in the kennel a walk from the house bark and we usually assume that a possum or a bear is moving through again. Sometimes, our large tom cat stands at our door from the inside and growls.  Because of our remote location, we have a rather advanced security system.  This is a very secluded place with a lot of acreage around us.  It is also surrounded by forest.  There are access gates on the entrances, and so no one without the electronic key can enter with a car.   Whoever tested the door on a terribly cold night was on foot.   Why would they walk up to a house in the middle of the night and test the door ?   All of our family who are over 21 have accessible firearms, and know how to safely use them, and this is common knowledge here as we can often be heard target shooting from the even larger farms in the area.   I don't want to have to shoot a home invader. I don't want blood splattered over my walls or on my oak floors.  I should be able to sit in my house at 3 am with my sore molar and my son while trying to stay quiet so I don't wake my husband who is slated to go to work early the next morning.   My heart raced as someone was outside the door, and for a moment, I wondered if all that adrenaline had pushed me into a-fib.  It did not.  But now, my son and I sit here with two firearms. His semi-automatic slide is racked, and mine is not.  The cat sits staring at the front door. The dogs are barking.  I am comforted by the idea that all the outbuildings are double-locked.  I wonder if I am awake enough to do everything as trained. I shouldn't be afraid in my own home.  I would call the sheriff, but the person is likely long gone and they won't come out in the middle of the night for anything but a "blood crime" anyway. . I'll call them in the morning, and let them know someone was prowling.    In the past year someone locally who entered a house near here was shot to death.   I did not know the neighbor who did it, but I often wonder how it changed their life afterward.    I sit, writing and nervously eying the door.  I don't think there will be any more sleep tonight.
                     Now, it's four am, and our son who came to us through adoption as a teen a couple of years ago is up. He claims to have been awoken by the sound of my typing.  This is improbable.  He pours himself a bowl of cereal and adds milk and starts his day. Perhaps I am not as quiet as I think when up in the night.
                   For someone to walk on foot on this brightly moonlit night, this far off a mountain trail, and this many acres back from a road,  is insanity.  This is what makes it so worrisome.

Will We See a Returning US Dust Bowl ?

These are the areas in which the Dust Bowl was most acute in the US.

            

 And then the dispossessed were drawn west — from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless — restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do — to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut — anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
— John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

The Dust Bowl eventually stretched all the way to Canada in the time we could least afford to be unable to grow adequate food.  (Graphic: www.dustbowltough.com)

                                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Photo: dustbowltough.com)

    I will admit that I haven't thought much about the horror of "The Dust Bowl" of the nineteen-thirties since primary school.  Even then, it was totally hard to relate to the scenario we were being told as we sat in our brand new rural school with the pretty grass and all of us sitting there in pretty dresses in the prosperity of the sixties.  I remember being told about the displacement of many families when the powdery dry soil couldn't sustain crops in a drought.  This is about all I remember.  I learned more about this in college while getting a degree peripheral to my nursing degree, but the sheer awe of it all escaped me then too.
                   Ken Burns did a series on "The Dust Bowl" recently, and although I didn't see the series, I was intrigued by his promotional commercials for it.  This motivated me to do a little bit of reading about this time. Apparently, World War I pushed American farmers to produce as much food for the US and the world as was possible. The farming practices began to deplete the soil.   The topsoil which had taken a thousand years to develop, was used up and was blown away.  In addition, the aquifer began to deplete.  More than a hundred million acres were left untillable for a time.  In had no idea that the The Dust Bowl had also afflicted Canada.  Simaltaneously, the Great Depression was furthur pressing the world.  The environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl occurred in the most difficult time for Americans and for citizens of the world.  Then, dust storms began.  In excess of fourteen windstorms with particulate dirt and dust occurred and these caused deaths from aspirate pneumonia and asthma.  Goodness knows how many people were unable to exchange oxygen as dirt and dust filled their lungs, or how many developed unusual infections as dirt and bacteria, fungi, and viruses became aerosolized in that dirt.  No one knows how many domestic or wild animals were also lost at a time in which animals were essential to our survival for milk, cheese, eggs, and meat, also.

(Photo: dustbowltough.com)

               There is a lot being written about a potential modern day return to the Dust Bowl.   Last time 7,000 people died and 2.5 million people were displaced from their homes and farms.   According to multiple sources, I will place below, recent droughts that ravaged most of the country’s farmland spurred a dust storm in October that stretched across Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. It was so big that it could be seen from space.

(Satellite photograph of Kansas obtained from: http://thinkprogress.org)

               The most important question here is whether in the face of food inflation, heightened taxes, fewer jobs, mandatory health insurance, etc. whether a continued drought and an inability to farm using best practices would result in a Dust Bowl scenario of some type of fashion, today.  These are simply more reasons to stock long term food.





To Watch Surviving the Dustbowl:

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/dustbowl/


More pictures and more information:

http://www.dustbowltough.com/shows.html

http://thinkprogress.org

http://www.myfoxaustin.com/story/20328448/weather-facts-could-the-dust-bowl-recur-today

Boo Hoo, Matt Lauer

                

   It is not like me to poke a bear with a stick, or to kick someone when he feels he is down, but I read something yesterday in a number of news outlets.  Since this has appeared in so many places, there is likely to be some element of truth in it.  Apparently, Today Show anchor Matt Lauer is deeply upset that a large number of Manhattan-ites have jeered him or given him a hard time over the firing of Ann Curry.
                     I used to watch the Today Show, and frankly, the only person on it who did the job of being a responsible journalist was Ann Curry.  She not only objectively reported the news worldwide, and went places I would be afraid to go, but she spoke with people with intelligence and respect.  She didn't ask stupid questions of people who'd just watched a family member get killed. She also did some very good human interest stories which were well composed and well shown. She also worked hard to keep her biases, if she had them, in her desk drawer, and not in the report itself.

Being a mediocre journalist and then pushing to have those who are not removed, has its consequences.

 



                     In multiple reports, it appears that Matt Lauer renewed his 25 million dollar contract with the Today Show on the condition that Ann Curry be let go.  I suppose we can't have an actual journalist doing the job right along side the incredibly biased Matt Lauer Show, in which Mr. Lauer pushes to advance his ultra liberal agenda.  The last interview I saw Matt Lauer do with President Obama was so biased in Obama's favor, that I was surprised it didn't conclude with Lauer giving a back rub to Obama !   The Today Show has become news stories in which Matt Lauer advances a highly liberal agenda, mixed with often mindless pieces where thin young women talk about how one might make a poorly conceived dining room centerpiece which would fail next to the work of most fourth graders.  I can look at the Lands End catalog for the fashion drama provided on this program.   The program is only fluff with the occasional celebrity interview where they don't let the person talk.

Gosh, she looks good for 56 !

 

                   How out-of-touch must Mr. Lauer be to be surprised that he is perceived as a biased, out of touch, greedy person who wishes to use his position to advance an agenda that most Americans don't want ?  How could he think that he could muscle out Ann Curry, with absolutely no feedback from others ?
Apparently, this is translating into poor ratings for the Today Show as others are beginning to realize what I did a couple of years ago.  Others at the Today Show have suggested that perhaps Ann should have lunch with Matt Lauer, showing all that there are no hard feelings.   Ann, you should have lunch with whomever you want. I don't think you should feel particularly obligated.

The Value of a Dog

Angus, in his kennel with Rosheen, as seen from kennel middle hallway, in happier days.

      

    One of the most valuable and important gifts God has chosen to provide to me in this life have been my dogs.  I have had a dog of one kind or another since I was a small child, and the only genuine criticism I have for them is that their life spans here on Earth with us, simply aren't long enough.  When I was much younger than this, I recall praying to God asking why people, who are often hostile and self centered may live to a hundred, and many dogs are lucky if they live as long as fourteen.  It took years before I believe He answered me, and when He did in a dream, He related that human beings require many years to learn all that is needed about love and loyalty, and that dogs know all that is important relatively quickly.  I have taken that to be true, and not simply a creation of my own mind in sleep.
           Now that I am half way through a century myself, and we have raised our own large family and lived on two farms, I have had an awful lot of dogs over the years.  The farm needs a number of different types of dogs for many different purposes, and we have been fond of taking many of them, often purebred varieties, from pounds and rehabilitating them.  Of course, the pedigreed varieties often  lack the mongrel resilience of others, and I have often wound up with an animal with a significant medical problem which requires injections or anti-seizure medication a couple of times a day.  Still, I can convince a dog of my good intentions within an afternoon, and having been a foster mother, I can assure you that human beings take much longer to trust other human beings, if in fact, they ever do.
          This month has been particularly difficult on the farm.  Angus, was a small bi-color beagle who came to our original farm some years ago and would watch us.  It took a year before he allowed himself to be captured and served a meal, some water, and within a day or so, a rabies shot.  (Rabies is endemic here and we cannot have an animal in close proximity without proper protection.)  Even then, the vet indicated that Angus was very very old.  He was likely one of the hunting dogs which had found its way to our property and then was never picked up again.  He had no collar, and no microchip.   He adapted to our farm in 2000 and having spied on us for just over a year.  We know that he had been abused in a prior home, because he could cowar when we raised our hand to pet him, and then he would remember that we meant no harm and he would allow us to touch him.
          Rosheen  (Irish Gaelic spelling is actually Roisin) was a Jack Russell terrier mix who came to our farm in 1999. In 1999, after we moved out to the country to our first farm that we built, my daughter and I went out one day to the edge of one of the cities which is within a days commute. While we were there we stopped at a Dairy Queen which has long since closed and been replaced by something else.   My daughter and I each got a small cone, and the woman who has working the DQ that day asked us if we wanted a dog. We told her the truth which was that we already had several dogs on our farm and didn't really need any.  She proceeded to tell us that a female Jack Russell Terrier mix had been dropped off at her apartment complex, and that she didn't want to take her to the pound, but couldn't keep her.  She proceeded to take us to her car where the dog was "napping".  How bad could a napping dog who waits for you to finish working really be ?  When the woman got to the car, she found the interior of her (thankfully) older car, chewed to bits !  The woman was upset, and I had plenty of places we could station a small watchdog, and so we brought her home.  Our daughter named her Rosheen, (written for pronunciation) although the Irish Gaelic spelling is Roisin.  The dog has been a great joy to our daughter, to all of us, and also to our young son Daniel who passed suddenly at the beginning of the Christmas Season now four years ago.
         Although we had Angus neutered and Ro was spayed, they were like an old married couple.  They shared a kennel room in our kennel, and this year had been together for ten years. They fought over a milkbone from time to time, but their relationship was congenial and devoted.   We were aware that the vet believed that Angus was in excess of twenty years old.  We knew his passing was coming, especially since the vet warned us of it, each Winter.  We also inherently knew that Rosheen would not do well following Angus' passing.  We knew she was now fourteen, and we tried not to contemplate this much, and we hoped the other larger dogs would help her in that event that he passed before she did.
          On December 1st, Angus passed quickly of a stroke. We moved him to the finished warm barn. He was alive for a few hours and we had a chance to sit next to him as he slept and eventually died.    Ro, initially seemed alright, but one never knows how much they do, and do not grasp. A couple of weeks later, we could see that she too was depressed. She was showing clear signs of Canine Cognitive Dysfunction or more commonly "Doggie Dementia". She initially drank well, but almost seemed to have forgotten how to eat, or that she needed to eat at all.  She enjoyed our interaction, but she was not the same dog. It was as if all of her energies were set on joining Angus in whatever Heaven our Lord sees fit to provide for his youngest children.

Rosheen, also in happier days.

           Tonight, at 5:15 pm on December 28, 2012, Rosheen drew her last breath.  This week has been spent tempting her with turkey, chicken broth, a couple of flavors of gatorade, all manner of food, specialized soft dog food in cans, and ultimately simple rehydration solution in plain water. My Christmas was spent walking her, playing the radio to her, and having each of the kids including my daughter, (who was really her owner), spend time with her. Today, I spent as much time with her as I could, and then returned about every forty minutes when her respirations grew shallow.  Ro waited until I was there and took one last breath.
             I have been so honored to have had all these dogs as my friends. Angus and Rosheen are just two in a long line of very special devoted friends who have shared important parts of our family life. I am going to miss them both so much, even with seven different breeds and types of dogs remaining.    Medical care, chux, special bedding, blankets, medication, food, feeding syringes, for Rosheen's last days were about three hundred dollars.  Dogs: Absolutely priceless.   Yes, our friends are priceless.

        
         

On Hostility

(Photo: thebriolife.com)

       
        On blogs all over the world, and of late, the US blogs as well, people are complaining that others have "gone crazy". Some have noticed that some people making physicians appointments are rude and demanding.  They have noticed that people in shops have been not only hostile to shopowners, but also to others who are also shopping in the same store. What I notice most of all, since I live so far from civilization, is that drivers are not only discourteous, but show a wanton disregard for their own safety, and for mine as well.  This is always doubly amazing to me when I see children in their car !  I report my share of dangerous drivers to law enforcement, and they catch a few, but most seem to get away.  One of my sons was recently hit in his car by a woman he says must have hit him deliberately.  She made eye contact and then still continued forward and hit his car. (She has since paid dearly when her insurance company couldn't get her to communicate with them afterward, and so they paid for my son's repairs and dropped her insurance afterward.)
              Although I do carry a weapon, this doesn't mean that it's okay to allow situations with rude people to accelerate into shouting matches or hostility.  Whenever we can, we should let hostile or disturbed people go ahead and get out of our way. We don't need to win all our arguments, and we don't even need to launch them with people we will likely never see again, and don't really care about anyway.
               I don't pretend to have answers as to why "the world has gone mad".  I think some of my friends would equate this with End Times Prophecy, but I don't know.  Seems to me that the "End Times" related to us from a heavenly perspective could last quite a long time from our own. Perhaps it that people are more pressured by having "nowhere to hide". Wherever we are, cellphones, landlines, televisions, and news bludgeons us with their sensationalized versions of the days news and sometimes we have had enough.  The ever shrinking world economy and predictions for the same don't help. I actually live very simply and so I feel a measure of protection from some of this. However, even I have grave concerns as to how my children will do in a world in which there are very few jobs that would support a family.
               Sadly, the president touted as the person who would repair the last remaining racial disagreements in the United States has proven to be a divisive figure himself.  I don't care at all about his ethnicity, but I think he is incompetent and inexperienced. This draws me fire in some circles where they think any criticism of "their savior" is tantamount to racism.   Some groups think Obama's presidency means they will get everything they wish. Others believe that it could spell the death knell for our nation and its Constitution as we know it.  Al Jazeera News yesterday had a very interesting discussion on the Obama administrations monitoring and potential imprisoning of American citizens for an indefinite period without trial. Apparently, this has been possible for the last year, yet conventional US news outlets have failed to mention it.
              The electronic and information age has created a lot of hullabaloo and discomfort for a lot of people. It has also taken people from reading newspapers and really understanding some of the issues in our world, to being a sound byte generation.  Many people know very, very little of the workings of their nation, or the truth of any political or national issue.  I think the same is coming soon to other nations, also slaves to the electronic age.
             All over the world, there is open hostility for those who practice another faith.  In the words of someone whose family used to own the land I am sitting on,

" But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

            So long as extremist Muslims don't plan to behead me, why would I care that they worship a God they call by a different name than I call mine ?

               I think all we can do, is keep reading.  Try to balance a certain amount of reading from a variety of sources.  I will keep listening to the admittedly biased Russia Today and BBC. I will listen to the Israeli News when I can get them, NHK News, and Al Jazeera, which has become quite good.   I will listen to less and less of the biased and inaccurate Good Morning America, and other newslets designed for the terminally ADHD adult.  Take care of yourselves out there.

Merry Christmas to All

                  
 


      My family and I wish everyone who reads this blog a very Merry Christmas.

   Please stay safe, stay well, and approach the year with gladness and enthusiasm despite the world's challenges.    Each day is a gift and an opportunity, and a reminder that God says, the world should go on.

Happy Holidays to those readers who celebrate another Winter holiday.

                Love and best wishes to all our readers !

Boy Defends Sister and Himself from Repeat Home Invaders

I first learned of this at:

http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2012/12/boy-uses-dads-ar-15-to-shoot-invader.html



The incident described in this newsclip happened a year ago. I am certainly glad the fifteen year old boy had access and experience with the AR-15, and was able to defend himself and his sister. I hate to think what may have happened if he hadn't.











An AR-15 doesn't look like an "evil weapon" to me. I suppose it depends whose holding it, just like a knife, a drill,a scalpel, or a circular saw.

Why Foreigners Might Not Understand US Gun Culture

          

My family and I have spent a great deal of time acquiring excellent skills including firearm safety.

 

   It must be really difficult for people who live in other nations to understand the United States and why we have a Constitutional Amendment which allows us to own and use guns.  When I have traveled to other nations, I was struck by how little most Americans understand about different cultures in other lands, but also how little even educated people in other lands, understand about the culture of the United States.    First of all, the United States is quite vast, and many states have vastly different populations, educational levels, climates, problems and issues.   People in Hawaii have different problems and different challenges, than people in Massachusetts. People in Florida can't fathom some of the challenges in Alaska !  California is almost it's own little country with coastal citizens living very differently than those in the agricultural areas and differently still from those in Northern California.  Puerto Rico might be joining us soon, and their inhabitants would find culture shock in Virginia, North Dakota or Wyoming.      In some ways, we share some similarities with Russia. We are home to many different cultures and in different parts of our country, things are done very differently.  For example, in Moscow, which is European Russia, motorists drive on one side of the street, and in Vladivostok, Asian Russia, motorists drive on the other.   Our Northern neighbor Canada also has such diversity.  Alberta has different challenges than Nova Scotia, for example.
                   Last time I was in London, I remember some Londoners questioning why anyone would ever have a weapon of any kind anywhere.  They forget that the Swiss and the Israelis all train in the military mandatorily, and they do retain their weapons afterward.
                   I can't hope to be anything as approaching as knowledgeable or as interesting  on the subject as Larry Correia, but I can tell you why I am a gunowner.   First, although areas like mine don't get much television airtime, there are lots of areas in the US just like my own.   Our farm is intensely rural, and then heavily forested beyond the pastured areas.  Although all of our personally owned mammals are immunized in accordance with law for rabies, wild animals are not,and in such a vast nation,  rabies is endemic here. For those of you who aren't familiar, rabies is a viral infection that is generally considered to be fatal to animals and humans 100% of the time.  In the past couple of years, a  rabid ground hog attacked a county official within a short distance to our courthouse.  My eldest son has been challenged by a rabid fox as we walked out our front door.  We do have coyotes here, and occasionally packs of wild dogs.  We presently have the largest bobcat we've ever seen (larger than many fairly large dogs) who stays pretty much on our property, that we have ever seen anywhere.  One of our vets saw a mountain lion near here, and the official word from Game and Inland Fisheries of Virginia is that "we don't have those here".  They had to rethink that stance when the local taxidermist got one from a farmer who shot one about three miles from here.  In the summer, we have aggressive large black snakes, poisonous and numerous copperheads, and the occasional rattlesnakes.   We also have no less than 17 known black bears very close to us, some of which we see with fair frequency. We coexist with these beautiful large animals, who move much more quickly and smoothly than their size would suggest.  Most of the time, we live in our home, and we care for our livestock which include dogs, rabbits, ducks, chickens and alpacas, and soon a horse.  Sometimes a dangerous animal threatens us close to our farmhouse.  Animal control personnel here handle only big issues, and cover a huge area. Many times, they are simply unavailable. Citizens are encouraged to learn to use firearms correctly and to have them properly maintained on farms.  To get an idea of the scale of things here, our own farm is larger than the entire village/town in England, outside London, where I attended school as a teen.
                 Each year, several of us make it an expedition to walk out a section of the farm and forest which we own.  We make sure that no one has come here to plant marijuana trees. (Yes, they can grow to tree size) and that no one has been altering property boundary markers, or setting up illegal hunting tree stands here.   One year we found an illegal timberer stealing valuable trees from our neighbor.  Had my son and I each not been armed, we could likely have been killed at that location, and probably never found again. The illegal timberer has been imprisoned by local authorities.  Several people from this area, have in fact, disappeared never to be seen again. It may be wild animals or it may be the two legged kind of predator.
                We have a sheriff and deputies in this county, but they handle many things including rural car accidents. There have been times over the years, like the time some citiots thought our farm road might be a nice place for a high level, high volume, drug deal, that we could not have gotten a law enforcement officer out to even take a report before next Thursday.   We have since developed working arrangements with the DEA, the State Police and we stay in touch with our sheriff and his deputies.   We were encouraged to train and receive Concealed Weapons Permits by our sheriff.  He knows that we, like most rural landowners, are good stewards to our land, the animals, our farm, and that we are trained and safe with our firearms. Many localities won't come out anymore for anything but what they call a "blood crime".   
               Several years ago, a realtor was murdered in our county. She was not armed.  In rural areas particularly, robberies, home invasions, abductions, child snatchings by known sex offenders, stalkings by the insane, all occur.  When we lived in another part of Virginia, and our youngest son Daniel was an infant, people with an out of state license plate tried to abduct him.  Like it or not, having a gun and being competent in its use, as all of our adult family members are, may be all that prevents anyone from becoming a murder or robbery statistic.  The law here allows me to shoot to stop anyone who breaks into my house.  This makes sense because anyone who walks fifty acres in to us, locates a wooded glen where a house exists, defeats a security system, in an area of farms where home invaders have been shot, is not here to have tea or get an autographed copy of my book.  They are here to rob, rape, torture, kill or maim, and I am not going to allow an invader to do that to me in front of my children.  Keep in mind, that most of the psychiatric hospitals in the US have been closed years ago due to budget cuts and a philosophy that "everyone deserves to be free" even if they have schizophrenia and a documented history of violence as well.   Although no gun proponents are fond of quoting the number of people injured or killed with guns in our huge nation, they fail to indicate that annually, many many shootings, abductions and killings are prevented by law abiding citizens holding guns, both with and without concealed weapons permits. The news does not report all of these, and so Europe doesn't hear them, and lacks this perspective in a major way.
                 Lastly, here in the United States we are, and have always been mindful that the reason that our nation was freed from the English king, and the reason that the United States was a part of rescuing the world from the likes of Hitler is that all over our nation, we have perfected the ability to use firearms competently.  The second amendment which allows us to bear arms, exists so that we can prevent tyranny when it once again raises its ugly head.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and others all knew that to live in this land, we would have to have access to personal protection of our land, our animals and our families.
                So, in future, just as I would not tell the Russian orphanages what to do with their children with regard to forest walks as they seek to avoid being eaten by the remaining Siberian tigers, and I would not tell the British what to do with their immigration, I would appreciate the consideration of your knowing as a European that I live a very different life than you.  I have carved out a life in an intensely rural region where there is no mail delivery, because spending gas money to deliver mail daily to so few people, would be unreasonably cost ineffective.  I can't walk to a store or a police precinct.  I am fifty miles from most things.  When someone is badly hurt here, a medical helicopter is called, generally at the expense of the person who will use it.  If you can't fathom what it's like to make your own bread or to freeze store bought loaves from fifty miles away to keep through winter, how can you possibly have any understanding of the challenges with regard to independent farm living ?   If you have never been without power for three weeks after a storm then you have no conception of the challenges here.  In addition, there are many places in the US which are far more difficult and complex in which to live than this one.

A Perspective on Guns

This is one of Larry Correia's books. You can receive a signed copy from amazon.com

 

 I had to share this very important and lengthy post with all of you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   The following post is the sole work product of author and gun instructor Larry Correia.

 Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling author of the Monster Hunter International series, the Grimnoir Chronicles, and the thriller Dead Six. My next novel, Monster Hunter Legion, became available in September 2012. All of my books are available in eBook format, but currently only from www.baen.com's webscriptions. (cheap and DRM free!) Audio versions of most of my books are available from www.audible.com.

 

An opinion on gun control

Posted on December 20, 2012 by correia45

I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.

A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.

I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.

I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.

I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate and studying the heck out of the actual events.

I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and 3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the populace.

I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.

Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things. So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and none of this stuff is new.

Armed Teachers
So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.  Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!
No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.
But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.
Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.
Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.
When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.
I personally taught several hundred teachers. I quickly discovered that pretty much every single school in my state had at least one competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and capable. Good for them.
After Virginia Tech, I started teaching college students for free as well. They were 21 year old adults who could pass a background check. Why should they have to be defenseless?  None of these students ever needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy to say that a couple of rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my time well spent.
Over the course of a couple years I taught well over $20,000 worth of free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds of teachers, students, and staff. All of them were responsible adults who understood that they were stuck in target rich environments filled with defenseless innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line of defense. It was the least I could do.
Permit holders are not cops. The mistake many people make is that they think permit holders are supposed to be cops or junior danger rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple. If someone is threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm, and that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner which suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is allowed to use lethal force against them.
As of today the state legislatures of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are looking at revamping their existing laws so that there can be legal guns in school. For those that are worried these teachers will be unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in those states who’d be willing to teach them for free.
For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and demand that they allow concealed carry in schools.

Gun Free Zones
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.
Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.
The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.
I testified before the Utah State Legislature about the University of Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley Square shooting in Salt Lake City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started shooting up this mall. He killed several innocent people before he was engaged by an off duty police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off duty Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a customer of mine) I sent one of my employees down to Trolley Square to take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I then showed the picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS ALLOWED.
The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.
There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.

1. Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.
2. Texas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.
3. Connecticut. GUN FREE ZONE. Shooters kills until the police arrive. Suicide. 26 dead.
4. China. GUN FREE COUNTRY. A guy with a KNIFE stabs 22 children.

And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.

The Media
Every time there is a mass shooting event, the vultures launch. I find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people get murdered, and the same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They strike while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen it succeed here before.
Yet when anyone from my side responds, then we are shouted at that we are blood thirsty and how dare we speak in this moment of tragedy, and we should just shut our stupid mouths out of respect for the dead, while they are free to promote policies which will simply lead to more dead… If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty monsters, and if they don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt. It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted monster (the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry because they are promoting policies which are tactically flawed and which will do the exact opposite of the stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.
But that’s not why I want to talk about the media. I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.
The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected, have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking back at their peer group.
These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your nose.
If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear.
You are a star.
Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and his struggles.
And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.
They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them faster.

Mental Health Issues
And right here I’m going to show why I’m different than the people I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to know how to fight them better.
So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment… Oh please, if only some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand that the bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the same.

Gun Control Laws
As soon as there is a tragedy there comes the calls for “We have to do something!” Sure, the something may not actually accomplish anything as far as solving whatever the tragedy was or preventing the next one, but that’s the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and preferably we have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.
The left side of the political spectrum loves it some gun control. Gun control is historically extremely unpopular in red state and purple state America, and thus very hard to pass bit stuff, but there’s a century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones. There have been a handful of major federal laws passed in the United States relating to guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily been enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the BATF related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the average American is extremely uneducated about what gun laws already exist, what they actually do, and even fundamental terminology, so I’m going to go through many of the things I’ve seen argued about over the last few days and elaborate on them one by one.
I will leave out the particularly crazy things I was confronted with, including the guy who was in favor of mandating “automatic robot gun turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a teacher CCW, so let’s put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented yet) in schools. Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.
We need to ban automatic weapons.
Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much did that in 1934. The National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a machinegun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machineguns for civilians to own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo. Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a cop.
Now are machineguns still used in crimes? Why, yes they are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective government bans are.
When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machinegun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.
Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!
Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers.  It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.
Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.
Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.
We should ban handguns!
Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under my shirt.
Concealed Carry works. As much as it offends liberals and we keep hearing horror stories about blood in the streets, the fact is over my lifetime most of the United States has enacted some form of concealed carry law, and the blood in the streets wild west shootouts over parking spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At this point in time there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue states and all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime, where once again, the criminals simply don’t care.
For information about how more guns actually equals less crime, look up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts, look up the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work of any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother Jones.
As for why CCW is good, see my whole first section about arming teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture. Basically bad people are going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to hurt you and take your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career, and they are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere they think they can get away with it.  We fixate on the mass shooters because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running in to one of them is tiny. Your odds of having a violent encounter with a run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes higher.
I do find one thing highly amusing. In my personal experience, some of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever associated with will usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if something bad happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and naïve that is.
We should ban Assault Rifles!
Define “assault rifle”…
Uh…
Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around a lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created back during the Clinton years. It was one of those tricks where you name legislation something catchy, like PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed through while emotions were high and nobody was thinking, go figure).
To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of weapon which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed, select fire (meaning capable of full auto), intermediate cartridge (as in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come back to that later) infantry weapon.
The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary.
I had somebody get all mad at me for pointing this out, because they said that the term had entered common usage. Okay… If you’re going to legislate it, DEFINE IT.
And then comes up that pesky problem. The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it said that it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns) And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon.
Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.
One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic. See above. Hard to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun in the world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then what if it takes a detachable magazine! That’s got to be an Evil Feature. And yes, we really did call the Evil Features. I’ll talk about magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to ban something that common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide mission.
For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. Let’s say having a flash hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil feature. Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. EVIL.
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!
It has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied “I think it is the shoulder thing which goes up.”  Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime, but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.
Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry though, because the same people who fling around the term assault weapons also think of scoped deer rifles as “high powered sniper guns”.
Basically, what you are thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.
Now, the reason that semi-automatic, magazine fed, intermediate caliber rifles are the single most popular type of gun in America is because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking about fun, or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you, in order to make them stop trying to hurt you. These types of guns are superb for defending your home. Now some of you may think that’s extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights comes from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/carbine-vs-shotgun-vs-pistol-for-home-defense/
I had one individual tell me that these types of guns are designed to slaughter the maximum number of people possible as quickly as possible… Uh huh… Which is why every single police department in America uses them, because of all that slaughtering cops do daily. Cops use them for the same reason we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an attacker quickly in a variety of circumstances.
When I said “stop an attacker quickly” somebody on Twitter thought that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s just a euphemism for kill!” Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker surrenders or passes out from blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I care about is making them stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which caused me to shoot them to begin with.
The guns that many of you think of as assault rifle are common and popular because they are excellent for fighting, and I’ll talk about what my side really thinks about the 2^nd Amendment below.
We should ban magazines over X number of shots!
I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer rounds, ergo then he’ll not be able to shoot as many people.
Wrong. And I’ll break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in our gun, second why tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and third, why stopping them is a logistical impossibility.
First off, why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more.
The last assault weapons ban capped capacities at ten rounds. You quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. Legally, you can shoot them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in mind that what normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I used to tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.
Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The more you train, the better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”
So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.
Now tactically, let’s say a mass shooter is on a rampage in a school. Unless his brain has turned to mush and he’s a complete idiot, he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.
In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
A good friend of mine (who happens to be a very reasonable democrat) was very hung up on this, sure that he would be able to take advantage of the time in which it took for the bad guy to reload his gun. That’s a bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that addresses that sort of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has sort of made the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot  So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.
Finally, let’s look at the logistical ramifications of another magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over ten rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it was a felony to possess those.
Over the ten years of the ban, we never ran out. Not even close. Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal.
Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out either. And if they did, like I said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get or make more. If you can cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old company designed a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy, spent $20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This could’ve been done out of my garage.
Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.
Once the AWB timed out, because every politician involved looked at the mess which had been passed in the heat of the moment, the fact it did nothing, and the fact that every single one of them from a red state would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went away. Immediately every single gun person in America went out and bought a couple guns which had been banned and a bucket of new magazines, because nothing makes an American want to do something more than telling them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up ever since. If the last ban did literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even less. (except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get to that below).
I bought $600 worth of magazines for my competition pistol this morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my rifles. Gun and magazine sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician starts to vulture in on a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this, but Barack Obama is personally responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time gun purchases, than anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had a picture of him on the wall and a caption beneath it which said SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.
So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you can confiscate them all, but I’ll talk about confiscation later.
One last thing to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this is something all gun people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When you put an artificial cap on a weapon, and tell us that we can only have a limited number of rounds in that weapon, we’re going to make sure they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody bought 9mms which held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can only have ten rounds, they’re going to be bigger, so we all started buying 10 shot .45s instead.
You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!
Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2^nd Amendment being for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2^nd Amendment is about bearing arms to protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.
Spare me the whole, “You won’t be happy until everybody has nuclear weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms, as in things that were man portable. And as for the founding fathers not being able to see foresee our modern arms, you forget that many of them were inventors, and multi shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day, arms included cannon, since most of the original artillery of the Continental Army was privately owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees with me. See DC v. Heller.
Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to murder people!
It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.
I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.
Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.
So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.
So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns.  http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.
But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.
So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.
Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and take them all away like a civilized country.
Well, I suppose if your need to do something overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.
Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened America.
Because once again, repeat it with me, criminals simply do not give a crap.
That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder to get, and explosives become the weapon of choice. Please do keep in mind that the largest and most advanced military coalition in human history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group using high school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.
The biggest mass killings in US history have used bombs (like Bath, Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub) or airliners. There is no law you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which will make some not be evil.
And all of this is irrelevant, because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national suicide.
You crazy gun nuts and your 2^nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.
Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2^nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.
We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2^nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened.   That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2^nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in.  The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?
Boo Evil Gun Culture!
Really? Because I hate to break it to you, but when nearly six hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun Free Chicago, that’s not my people doing the shooting.
The gun culture is all around you, well obviously except for those of you reading this in elite liberal urban city centers where you’ve extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends, relatives, and coworkers. The biggest reason gun control has become increasingly difficult to pass over the last decade is because more and more people have turned to CCW, and as that has become more common, it has removed much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of elite urban liberal city centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The gun culture is simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their lives and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who tries to victimize them.
The gun culture is who protects our country. Sure, there are plenty of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and who use it as part of their job who could care less. However, the people who build the guns, really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and usually end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the gun culture.
The media and the left would absolutely love to end the gun culture in America, because then they could finally pass all the laws they wanted.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally succeeds in utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi terrorists simply walked into town and started shooting people. It was a rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted, simple terrorist attack. They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has incredibly strict gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.
That’s not my point this time however, I want to look at the response. These ten men shut down an entire massive city and struck fear into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS. Depending on where this happened in America it would have been over in three minutes or three hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked. The marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and completely fell apart.
In talking afterwards with some individuals from a small agency of our government who were involved in the clean-up and investigation, all of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they told me the problem was that the Indian police had no clue what to do because they’d never been taught what to do. Their leadership hated and feared the gun so much that they stamped out the ability for any of their men to actually master the tool. When you kill your gun culture, you kill off your instructors, and those who can pass down the information necessary to do the job.
Don’t think that we are so far off here. I recently got to sit down with some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police departments in America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all of them were gun nuts who practiced on their own dime, and all of them were intimately familiar with real violence. These are the guys that you want responding when the real bad stuff goes down.
What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly liberal and extremely anti-gun, just like most big cities in America. They walked me through what their responses were supposed to be in case of a Mumbai style event, and how their “scary assault weapons” were kept locked up where they would be unavailable, and how dismal their training was, and how since the state had run off or shut down most of the gun ranges, most of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify anymore.
So now they were less safe, the people they were protecting were less safe, the bad guys were safer, but most importantly their leadership could pat themselves on the back, because they’d done something.
Well, okay. You make some good points. But I’d be more comfortable if you gun people were force to have more mandatory training!
And I did actually have this one said to me, which is an amazing victory by internet arguing standards.
Mandatory training is a placebo at best. Here is my take on why.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/mandatory-training-for-ccw/

In conclusion, basically it doesn’t really matter what something you pick when some politician or pundit starts screaming we’ve got to do something, because in reality, most of them already know a lot of what I listed above. The ones who are walking around with their security details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys, they care about giving themselves more power and increasing their control.
If a bad guy used a gun with a big magazine, ban magazines. If instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple guns. If he used a more powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he used hollowpoints, ban hollowpoints. (which I didn’t get into, but once again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses them). If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free Zones. If he killed a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the innocents even harder for next time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns that weren’t even involved in any crimes, just because they’re too big, too small, too ugly, too cute, too long, too short, too fat, too thin, (and if you think I’m joking I can point out a law or proposed law for each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes some politician irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.
They will never be happy. In countries where they have already banned guns, now they are banning knives and putting cameras on every street. They talk about compromise, but it is never a compromise. It is never, wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable solution to ending mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always, what can we take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some federal apparatus?
Then regular criminals will go on still not caring, the next mass shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the most famous person in the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the people who actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing actually changes to protect our kids.
If you are serious about actually stopping school shootings, contact your state representative and tell them to look into allowing someone at your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to install some speed bumps.
EDIT: I have been stunned by the level of response on this post. I wrote it so that it could be shared, but I had no idea just how much it would be, so thank you. I have received hundreds of comments, emails, and I don’t even know how many Twitter and Facebook messages. It is heartening that this made many people think about the issues in a new way.
I will try to respond and answer questions as I can, but there are a LOT of them, so I will probably take the most common ones and do another blog post when I have the chance. If your comment doesn’t appear immediately, that is because I have to approve first time posters manually to make sure they are not spambots.
 If I had realized 30,000 people would read this today I would have proof read it. When you find a typo or something that seems a bit rough, I wrote this 10k word essay from 9pm to 1am and posted it the next day at lunch.  

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End of Opinion by Larry Correia/    
              http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/