Time to get off the sofa....

Do you read biographies? If not, it is high time you do...or at least watch some on the Biography channel.

Watching or reading a Biography does not mean you wish to live your life vicariously through someone else who has "made it " big enough to warrant a biography. No, it is far more important than that. After wading through a few biographies you will find that there is a very strong theme that runs through most of them. It is that theme that we should be looking for, and seeking an understanding of that can be adapted to our own lives and our own success.

If you want to know how to become a rock star, read rock star biographies. A businessman? Read biographies. A great teacher...biographies. Every possible success can be found in Biographies.

And don't forget the old adage, do not reinvent the wheel. If you want to be successful, copy what successful people have done.

OK..so I like biographies. But why do I find them so interesting?

Lets take a quick look at one person who has seen success....Danny DeVito.

Now Danny was the youngest of 3 children, having two sisters 16 years and 10 years older than him. (Maybe a change of life baby?) He was basically raised by his sisters, and went to work as a hair stylist in his sisters salon.

He was very good at it and was much in demand from the customers. His sister suggested he learn cosmetology and he decided that was a good idea, so looked for a make-up school. The only one was with an acting school and he had to qualify as an actor to do the classes in film makeup.

He liked acting so much that he went full time to acting school. He got a role in a small play where he met someone who would be significant in his career. That person was Michael Douglas, and they shared an apartment in New York until Michael Douglas got the gig with Streets of San Francisco. (Even though Douglas was in California he still sent his share of the rent back to DeVito who was still in New York.)

DeVito got his first break when he got a role in the Oscar winning move, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with Jack Nicholson. Danny really expected that the amazing success and critical acclaim of this movie and his role would launch his career, but it was not to be. His career languished for many years, with the occasional bit parts and little else. His stature was an issue for him and he was even told that "nobody wants a 5"0" character actor".

At the age of 34 his career really started with a starring role in the TV show, Taxi. His stature and agressive New York style made him a very appealing character in a show with many stars. When Taxi finished its run after 4 or 5 years, DeVito was again unemployed with a career that appeared to be going nowhere.

But he refused to give up. He wanted to be more than just an actor. He also wanted to be a director and a producer. Michael Douglas was a significant part of the next step in his career. Wanting to produce a movie, Douglas got together with DeVito and did Romancing the Stone, such a huge hit that it was followed with Crown of the Nile. DeVito had really arrived now, and strung together a list of hits including his directorial debut in Throw Momma from the Train.

DeVito around this time was looking at Producing more movies and saw a film by a young relatively unknown director that he found so appealing that he paid the director $900k for the rights to produce the next movie that director was planning. The film that struck DeVito so much that he handed over $900k sight unseen for the next project, was Reservoir Dogs by the relatively unknown Quentin Tarrantino. His next movie, Pulp Fiction was a huge success, produced by DeVito's company.

OK. So, DeVito started as a hairdresser and become a multimillionaire film producer. Did he stop there? No.

He has now gone back to his roots and turned full circle to once again starring in a TV show, "It's always sunny in Philadelphia."

So what can we learn from this short biography of DeVito?

1. stature is more about who you are than how you look. At 5 foot tall DeVito lacks physical stature, but makes it up in ability, determinatioon, and creativity. Never think you can't do something because you are too tall, too short, to heavy, too light, too dark, too white, too bald etc etc. The only people who think that are those willing to live by other people's rules. Live by your own and you never know how you can change the world.

2. every person you meet is a possible ally for you. Never assume that the person you are talking too is not someone who can help you in the future. Treat everyone as if they are important to you, as a person first, and then that will usually come back to help you in the future. Treat someone like crap, and it will usually come back to bite you in the ass when you are not looking! DeVito struck a friendship with Douglas when both were struggling poverty stricken young actors. That friendship paid off big time.

3. from humble beginnings, great things can emerge. DeVito was a hair stylist. His sister gave him the confidence and encouragement to succeed. Just as auctioneers are fond of saying, it does not matter where you start...it is where you finish that counts.

So get off that couch, stop finding excuses, and go be who you want to be.

.....devereaux

Going Galt....

Disgust.

That is the only word I can find right now.

For the last several weeks I have been thinking very carefully about what this blog should be doing for the coming 4 years…and as I watch the Liar-in-Chief and his machinations in the White House, as I watch his lies, his deceptions and his attacks on the Constitution I am thankful that at least conservatives hold the House and can put up a fight against this crap.

And then I understood.

The House has no more interest in stopping the march toward tyranny than I have in living in North Korea.

We hear the obligatory bleat from Boehner as he finds a way to increase the debt limit.

We hear the conservatives say that by doing this we can regroup and reduce spending next time around.

I hear the democrats laughing their asses off as they watch the GOP disintegrate in front of their very eyes.

Their mocking is loud and clear as the President suddenly becomes a keen shooter…the White House propagating that lie by taking a picture of his highness holding a shotgun as only a person who has never shot a shotgun in his life could.

And meanwhile every possible move is being made to restrict our 2^nd amendment rights.

While the Conservatives in Congress find a way to appoint John Kerry as Secretary of State…notwithstanding his dishonor of the State in the past. How soon we forget that this excuse for a man threw his medals away…or just pretended…either way he is a disgrace to this Nation and has no right to be anointed Secretary of State. Just another liar. And yet, with nary a question he marches to his new role and states “I have big heels to fill”…well, John Kerry, you better come out of the closet, put on your pumps and start selling America down the Muslim Brotherhood path. ‘Cause if you don’t, there are plenty of Obama disciples in the wings who will do that for him…best watch your back and do his will lest you become just another useful idiot discarded in the street, having to learn to dance in those pumps and fishnets just to make a living!

Over these last few weeks I have struggled to understand how America has reached this point.

And frankly, I have no idea. 

Education? Maybe.

 Intimidation? Definitely. 

The “have nots” outnumbering the “haves”? Certainly.

But none of this explains the absolute lack of backbone shown by conservative politicians. None of this accounts for the total lack of political savvy within the minds of conservatives in Congress. None of this accounts for the cowardice, poor judgment, and lack of knowledge displayed by those we have elected to represent us.

And therein lays the problem.

These are the men and women we have chosen to represent us…and we have selected fools and cowards (not necessarily in that order).

There is no doubt in my mind that we get the government we deserve…but to think that we have elected a bunch of Lilly-livered pathetic, inarticulate and scared little children as the men and women we hope will stand up for us is insane.

We are the problem…we elected children to fight liars and egomaniacs. Why would we expect anything different to what we have?

And so I am disgusted.

For once it is not with Obama…he is exactly who 51% of the population voted for, and while I immensely dislike the person, he is who he is by nature. I hate what he has done to the Office…and he will one day answer for the irreparable damage he and his followers, his disciples, have done to this country…but that will not be anytime soon.

No, I am disgusted with the conservatives in this country who continue to elect a core of intellectually and morally bankrupt pretenders to Congress. People who secretly harbor white man’s guilt and love Obama on the throne. They are scared of being called racists…and are terrified of the union thugs.

They no longer know what is right, nor if it is even worth fighting for…the only survival they know is to put on the Nike’s and run as fast as they can when Obama says “Boo!”.

Disgust!

So what can we do?

Well…I for one, am ashamed of the people of this country. I am tired of fighting an overwhelming force of evil. My wounds run deep…my faith in the conservatives in this country is sorely shaken.

I no longer feel qualified to be a part of the charge to rightness, let alone a leader.

I need to regroup…to step away…to accept that this battle is lost and to determine how the war can be won. Being involved on a daily basis does not allow me to see the big picture. Being consumed by doubt, anguish, and yes, fears for the future of this country, does not a leader make.

And so I am letting go for now. Call it going Galt if you will.

I am stepping away. I am licking my wounds to fight another day.

So what will I be doing?

I will be doing what Obama hates most…I will be making money. I will be preparing for the safety of my family. I will not be caught unawares if the shit hits the fan.

Yes, I am arming myself. I am ensuring adequate supplies of guns and ammunition and food and water are available at all times.

I hope I won’t need them.

And I will continue to write…perhaps not here on this blog, although I may from time to time. Certainly not as regularly as I have done.

I will ration my media. Very little news, very little politics will enter my home.

I am becoming the hermit who cares not for the world outside. We have made our choices and now have to live with them as best we can. Life is too short to spend in grief. I am going to live mine by choice…my choice.

Perhaps in doing this I will become the very thing that Obama fears most….a free man.

Perhaps we should all do the same.

…..devereaux

Newsflash! Devereaux supports Obama!

Well…it seems to have happened.

All my friends warned me that if I keep watching politics it would eventually happen. Leftists have been convinced for years that I would one day see the light…a future I could not only not imagine, but one that would turn my stomach to goop and send me running to the nearest bathroom so I could expel it!

Even my enemies warned me that one day it would happen.

Well…it seems that that long awaited day has arrived.

Before I go any further, are there any volunteers out there who are willing to take a short trip to hell to see if it has frozen over?  I saw an advertisement on TV the other night that clearly showed a pig flying, so it appears that weird things are happening.

And the weirdest of them all?

I found something that I and President Obama agree on!

No way?

Yep. Way.

So what is this amazing thing?

Obama has been getting grief over his lack of consideration for race and gender when selecting candidates for his cabinet. Yep…he has decided that neither race nor gender is a good indication of ability. THIS IS WHAT I AGREE WITH.

Unfortunately my agreement seems to stop there.

You see Obama has gone further and determined that neither race nor gender NOR ability is important for his candidates. He is an equal opportunity recruiter of incompetence…but his doting fans are critical of his sexist and  racist agenda.

After all…he has just selected four white guys to be his Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Treasury Secretary and head of the CIA.

“Where are the women?” the women scream.

“Where are the blacks?” the blacks scream.

“Where are the Latino’s?” the Latinos scream.

And the stupidest comments of all?

The makeup of Obama’s cabinet should look like America. It should represent the diversity of which America is so proud.

So, that got me to thinking….if incompetence is a pre-requisite for appointment, well, there are a number of things that can be done to assure that the US government looks like America.

Just a little side trip here…for those of you who doubt that incompetence is a pre-requisite….just take a look at Holder, Sebelius, Solis, Chu and Napolitano to name a few.

So, in the spirit of enlightenment that creates a Cabinet that looks like America I have come up with a simple plan of action.

This Obama guy is all about fairness…so my plan builds that into account. It also acknowledges that elections have consequences…so the makeup of the Cabinet must reflect the makeup of the voters that elected the president. Therefore we can ignore anything about people who voted for Romney.

Let’s see what we can find out Obama voters:-

It will be too time consuming to actually do the research but since this is merely an example of “how” my plan would work, estimates are fine…

1.       Blacks – Obama got 93%

2.       Latino – Obama got 71%

3.       Young voters – 60%

4.       Women – 53%

5.       Jews – 69%

Now we have to make some assumptions for the purposes of explanation.

Let’s assume that Obama’s voters look like this:-

Blacks 15%

Latinos 12%

Women 15%

White men 10%

Students/young people 45%

Old white guys 1%

Others 2%

Remember these are merely an example of what the Obama numbers MAY look like.

SO…lets get back to diversity.

If government was being fair…then Obama’s cabinet should comprise the identical breakdown as his voting base.

We need a new government department…perhaps called “The Department Truth and Diversity in Political Appointments”. This cabinet position will be tasked with ensuring that the Presidential appointments to his cabinet match the same diversity as his voters. (A big advantage is that billions of dollars will be needed to fund this department…and it will employ thousands if not millions of people to conduct exit interviews of all voters so that it can statistically calculate the diversity program at each election cycle.

After all…we must be fair with all government actions.

The Department of Truth and Diversity in Political Appointments is tasked with ensuring the correct diversity.

For instance…there are currently 16 Cabinet level departments.

According to the numbers above the heads of these departments MUST be:-

15% Black (2)

12% Latino (2)

15% Women (2)

10% White men (2)

45% young people/students (7)

1% Old white guys (0)

2% Others (0)

So that comes up to 15….of course a black female student falls into three categories, thus leaving two extra spaces on the roster!

If this was instituted maybe we could get a cabinet that looks something like this?

Secretary of State – someone who is good at international stuff, enjoys travel and can be looked up to on the international stage….ummm….how about Beyonce? She fits those requirements and fills one of the black slots perfectly. Also much easier to look at than that piece of crap we currently have!

Secretary of Agriculture – someone with knowledge of food and where to get it, and how to use it…Rosie O’Donnel is the natural choice…and ticks off one of the women’s slots.

Secretary of Energy – a no brainer…Matt Damon – gets the Hollywood folks on Board and fills the white man slot.

Secretary of Education – not a hard one….just go down to the unemployment lines and recruit anybody with a liberal arts degree to fill the slot .

You see how it will work?

Of course, there are many MANY departments and agencies that have to be treated in the same way…and then the employment within those agencies have to be diversity checked too.

And then we get to the real dilemma…so far, The Department of Truth and Diversity in Political Appointments has an easy job…but what about Congress? Surely Congress should also represent the diversity of America…we need to somehow examine the voters preferences and disbar people that do not meet the diversity criteria….but what do we do to be fair?

This is sticky…so I think the Department of Truth and Diversity in Political Appointments should be given broad powers to prevent the appointment of any elected official in congress if his or her appointment would mean the balance of diversity in each house of Congress is not maintained. In the even that an elected official be blocked by the Department, they have the power to appoint someone of their choosing to fill the vacancy and ensure diversity balance is maintained.

The Head of the Department of Truth and Diversity in Political Appointments is a cabinet level position and therefore appointed by the President.

Elections have consequences!

So, Mr. President, your refusal to allow race or gender to have any impact on your selection of incompetent folk to your cabinet is a good thing.

About the only good thing I have seen to date from you.

But I forgot one thing…

How could I forget this?

How does the Department of Truth and Diversity in Political Appointments deal with the two major groups that swung this last election for Obama?

The illegal immigrant is clearly a problem…as estimates are difficult to obtain of their numbers. To be on the safe side the Department may have to ensure the President goes down to the local Home Depot and recruits Jose while he waits for a day labor job….he can Secretary of Homeland Security! That solves that problem.

The other group is the dead…even harder to be fair to.

Let me see…

I would gladly buy Obama a one way ticket to…the place he is carrying America in his hand-basket…perhaps while there he could count the voters….

On second thoughts…does it really matter? His current cabinet is brain dead already…

So there you have it.

For once Obama got it right….if he didn’t the Department of Fairness and Diversity in Political Appointments would be visiting a polling booth near you and making sure that illegals and dead folk have a say!

Stupid is….

…..devereaux

Ignorance...way to go America.

Ignorance – “lack of knowledge, information, or education; the state of being ignorant”.

Wake up America!

You have chosen to elect ignorance as your salvation. You have chosen ignorance as your leader. You have determined that a life of ignorance is more valuable than a life pursuing knowledge.

There is no other explanation for the stupidity of the last couple of months.

You elected a man as President who has absolutely no interest in what is best for the country. He neither knows nor cares.

You have elected a Congress that has absolutely no interest in steering the country forward (with a few exceptions)…a Congress that cares only about their re-election prospects.

Other explanations could include lunacy, insanity, greed and selfishness…but I find it hard to believe that so many people would fall into one of those categories (although it is clear that greed and selfishness played a big role in the last election cycle. After all, one candidate promised jobs, while the other promised free gifts. One suggested working for a living while the other said he would look after you. One has a record of job creation while the other has never created a job in his life. And many people said…why should I work for a living? I will vote for the guy that doesn’t want me to work!

They don’t know his name, nor did they care. They just wanted more phones, more unemployment checks and more freebies.

But not everyone who voted for the piece of crap in the Whitehouse today falls into that category.

Many are educated…may have degrees…many are not ill-informed. So why did they vote for Obama?

Ignorance!

You see ignorance is not just a result of being uneducated. It is also the result of poor education…or the result of a planned dumbing down of the population.

You think I am over-reaching?

How about this…

The Common Core standards are an effort to nationalize the standards and assessments upon which every public school in America would base its curriculum. The Obama administration has poured billions of dollars into the effort via federal “Race to the Top” grants. Under the guise of Standardizing education, they are in fact dumbing down the students.

How?

English teachers are being told that 50 percent of their course material must be derived from “informational texts.” (Actually, the informational text requirement starts at a “mere” 25 percent of reading material for kindergarteners. It rises to 70 percent for high school seniors.)

Among recommended “informational texts” on the national standards list we find The Federal Reserve Bank’s “FedViews,” “The Evolution of the Grocery Bag,” and “Health Care Costs in McAllen, Texas.” And, roll over “For Whom the Bell Tolls” it’s time to make way for that GSA classic: “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management.”

If you have ever read any of these documents you will know that they are not exactly what one would define as literary classics. There is nothing like government publications to redefine the meaning of words, make up new words, and totally misrepresent the truth in every way imaginable.

And the plot usually sucks, the narrative is less than creative and any dialogue is completely irrelevant.

Government publications, or information texts, as they are now described, offer nothing of the creativity or wordsmithing of classic literature.

And this is considered the gold standard for education?

The Obama administration has invested millions of your dollars to promote the use of government propaganda as a replacement for classic literature.

If you are having trouble believing this disgrace, simply Google “Common Core Standards” and you will find more research material than I want to read!

So…starting with the children we not only dumb them down by not concentrating on classic literature in English classes but we are encouraged to indoctrinate them with government double speak!

No wonder we have a generational issue with ignorance.

And the sad but complete truth is that both Democrat and Republican administrations are to blame.

On the economic front we pass a bill that not only raises the tax rate on individuals earning over $400k ($450 for families) but include enough pork to more than use all the increased tax revenues. 

This is how the Republicans decide we should resolve the financial cliff issue?

The Republicans have become the party of bend over and take whatever is coming…when the bell rings turn around!

I can’t wait for the next round of serious negotiations over the debt limit.

The only question that remains in my mind is whether it takes until the 11^th hour for the Republicans to wave the white flag…or whether they will just save everyone a whole lot of anguish and just roll over now.

As far as I am concerned, the American people deserve better than the farce the Republicans are giving them….it is not even entertaining or good theater!

But then again….we will always get the Government we deserve.

And when ignorant people vote, we get ignorant government.

Stupid is…..

And there is plenty to go around.

…..devereaux

What to do......

While the shock and horror of the Newtown shootings lingers, the politicians are screaming that we “must do something”. Obama is blathering that we “will do something” and the liberal anti-gun brigade are using every tired and wrong argument possible.

I hate that so many innocents were slaughtered. My heart goes out to the families, friends and associates of those who lost their lives. My tears for America roll down my cheeks with every thought of what took place in that Newtown school.

And I am convinced that the solution is NOT more gun control.

I have not written until now because I was unable to express my thoughts…and it took until now for me to find someone who was better able to express my own thoughts…that someone is 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, will be available 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. 

This is what Larry has to say….

 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.

….Larry Correia

Well said Larry….if we could all discuss as clearly as you, the anti-gun lobby would disintegrate.

Well done!

…..devereaux