Tag: Awakenings

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

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Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

Worshipping nature is, as far as I’m concerned, a perfectly understandable thing to do. We are, after all, the product of it. But forgetting (or ignoring) that Nature can be a coldhearted bitch is something that many people learn is a very bad idea, each and every year.

Nineteen year-old up-and-coming Folk singer Taylor Mitchell learned this lesson yesterday. It was one of the last lessons of her short life:

Coyotes kill woman on hike in Canadian park

Two coyotes attacked a promising young musician as she was hiking alone in a national park in eastern Canada, and authorities said she died Wednesday of her injuries.

The victim was identified as Taylor Mitchell, 19, a singer-songwriter from Toronto who was touring to promote her new album on the East Coast.

She was hiking solo on a trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia on Tuesday when the attack occurred. She was airlifted to a Halifax hospital in critical condition and died Wednesday morning, authorities said.

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Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokeswoman Brigdit Leger said other hikers heard Mitchell’s screams for help on Tuesday and called emergency police dispatchers.

Police who were in the area reached the scene quickly and shot one of the animals, apparently wounding it. But the wounded animal and a companion coyote managed to get away.

Paul Maynard of Emergency Health Services said Mitchell already was in critical condition when paramedics arrived on the scene and had multiple bite wounds over her entire body.

“She was losing a considerable amount of blood from the wounds,” he said.

Those beautiful wild animals aren’t Disney Audio-Animatronics. While this was in Canada, do you really have to ask why people want to be able to legally carry a firearm in a National Park?

Awakenings

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Awakenings

Captain in Somali pirate drama mulls career change

UNDERHILL, Vt. — He’s got a book deal, and a movie could be in the works. He’s been to the White House to meet the president, to the Queen Mary ocean liner for a vacation and back to his modest 1830s Vermont farmhouse. He gives motivational speeches on the lecture circuit.

Now, six months after his high-seas drama with Somali pirates finished with a happy ending, Capt. Richard Phillips is contemplating calling it quits with the sea.

“I have been doing it for 30 years. Maybe it’s time to do something else,” he said Monday, sitting for an interview in his living room.

Phillips, 54, was the captain of the Maersk Alabama, a U.S.-flagged cargo ship hijacked April 8 off the coast of Somalia.

But here’s the point I want to emphasize:

One of the first things Phillips did once he got home was learn how to use an AK-47.

Capt. Phillips now understands that he is the person responsible for his protection.

Interesting that the AP printed that.

Backlash?

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Backlash?

In Part II of the “Dangerous Victims” trilogy I quoted something I found over at Samizdata:

Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians. Over-stimulate self-assertion, and for the arbitrament of the Courts you substitute the decision of the sword or the revolver. – The Law of the Constitution, by A.V. Dicey (MacMillan, London 1885).

Yesterday I found this story (sorry, I don’t remember where I found the link that took me there) from Saturday’s Daily Express:

TIME TO TACKLE AN ACUTE CRISIS IN BRITISH POLICING

REPORTS of the law-abiding being serially neglected by the police when their property comes under attack are proliferating. Every day brings new stories about people who have been let down by constabularies that always seem to have higher priorities than protecting the public.

It appears that far from being an occasional aberration, such neglect is the norm in many parts of the country.

Too many forces have fallen under the command of politically correct top brass who think officers should be at best neutral when they intervene in altercations between harassed householders and gangs of thugs.

The latest examples are all too typical. In Lincolnshire, Ted Nottingham has felt compelled to advertise a reward for the capture of yobs who have vandalised his car more than 40 times and have now wrecked his neighbour’s vehicle.

In Stourbridge, disabled widow Brenda Hill has been forced to put up notices in her car, begging vandals to stop smashing it up after five attacks in the past year.

She knows who the culprits are and so do the police but nothing has been done to stop them.

We cannot go on like this. The current public outcry must be the catalyst for fundamental change. There is no more important task facing the police and the courts than reclaiming the streets from young hoodlums.

There must come a point when offering understanding and support to the fractured families of the underclass is not enough.

The time has come for the police to get tough and give decent people their neighbourhoods back.

I’d like to think the unspoken next sentence reads “Or we’ll take them back ourselves,” but I’m not sure there are enough dangerous victims left in (formerly) Great Britain.

But I can hope.

UPDATE: Reader “teqjack” links in comments to the latest bit of insanity from across the pond:

You can’t expect the police to be heroes: Public want too much, says health and safety report

The public have ‘ unrealistic expectations’ that police will put themselves in danger to protect ordinary people, according to new safety guidelines for officers.

The Health and Safety Executive caused outrage by declaring that officers confronted with dangerous situations-while fighting crime or trying to guard the public ‘may choose not to put themselves at unreasonable risk’.

Its guidance published yesterday firmly plays down the need for officers to show bravery in the course of their duty if they make a ‘personal choice’ not to.

It states: ‘There is often an unrealistic public expectation that officers and staff will put themselves at risk to protect the public.’

The document concedes that ‘very occasionally in extreme cases’, police may be justified in putting themselves in jeopardy – in which case they may be let off without being prosecuted under health and safety laws.

The report – which has the backing of senior police chiefs – prompted anger and astonishment last night.

Paul Beshenivsky, whose police officer wife Sharon was shot dead by armed robbers in 2005, condemned the HSE as ‘meddling do-gooders’, saying: ‘At the end of the day a police officer’s job does involve putting your life on the line. Sharon knew that, and she got killed.’

He told the Mail: ‘The public are not allowed to take the law into their own hands, and now the crazy health and safety brigade want to stop the police dealing with criminals as well.

“Where would you draw the line? Would you say, “That shoplifter that looks on drugs, he might have a knife, I’ll walk away from that one?” The whole thing is madness.’

Police forces have been subject to health and safety legislation since 1998.

But it is the latest document’s advice on risk-taking by individual officers that has caused anger.

The report says police officers ‘may, very occasionally in extreme cases, decide to put themselves at risk in acts of true heroism’.

In these ‘rare circumstances’, the HSE adds, ‘it would not be in the public interest to take action against the individual’.

But it adds: ‘Equally HSE, like the Police Service, recognises that in such extreme cases everyone has the right to make personal choices and that individuals may choose not to put themselves at unreasonable risk.’

The guidelines have been backed by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the rank-and-file Police Federation.

But Sid Mackay, a retired Met Police Chief Superintendent whose daughter, PC Nina Mackay, was stabbed to death on duty in 1997, said: ‘They claim it is “unrealistic” for the public to expect the police to face danger, but that’s what the public believe the police are for, and rightly so.

‘The HSE will never understand, because they are completely risk-averse, but they have got their fingers into operational policing and they think they’re the experts.

‘The police are choking on paperwork, carrying out endless risk assessments for every operation, and then we wonder why they have become so cautious.’

Anthony Ganderton, the stepfather of ten-year- old Jordon Lyon who drowned in Wigan in 2007 after he jumped into a pond to save his stepsister, also attacked the guidelines.

Two police community service officers who arrived at the scene stood on the bank and radioed for help instead of jumping in to rescue the children, because they were not appropriately trained so risked breaking health and safety rules.

He told the Mail: ‘The point is they should do whatever they can to help people in trouble, especially when there are children involved.’

HSE chairman Judith Hackitt said yesterday: ‘This statement will assist senior police officers in balancing the risks involved in their duties to fight crime with meeting their health and safety obligations to their own employees and the public.’

The Home Office said: ‘Health and safety laws are there to protect the police as well as the public, but they must never hinder officers in the execution of their duty.’

They’ve gone completely batshit fucking insane over there.

Get out. Get out now.

Quote(s) of the Day

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On the near-simultaneous reference by Michael Bane and Glenn Reynolds, I ordered a copy of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neil Strauss. I’m about halfway through it at the moment, and I have to say that so far it’s been fascinating, especially since Mr. Strauss is about my polar opposite from a political perspective. His interpretation of the world is, naturally, colored by his worldview, but a lot of what he says is pretty interesting. Here are just a few quotes from the book so far:

Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitability tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

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One of the most unsettling things about Adolf Hitler is that he wasn’t an imperialist, like Napoleon or William McKinley. He wasn’t just trying to subjugate other countries. His goal was to cleanse them, to wipe out the so-called weak races and speed the evolution of the human species through the propagation of the Aryan race. And for seven years, he got away with it. Few of the most brutal periods in medieval history – from the sack of Rome to the early Inquisition – were as coldly barbaric as what happened in our supposedly enlightened modern Western civilization.

And though I left the (Holocaust) museum with the reassuring message that the world stood up and said “never again” to genocide, it only took a minute of reflection to realize that it happened again – immediately. In the USSR, Stalin continued to deport, starve, and send to work camps millions of minorities. As the bloody years rolled on, genocides occurred in Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in 1975, Rwanda in 1994, and in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.

All these genocides occurred in ordinary worlds where ordinary people went about ordinary business. The Jews were integrated into every aspect of the German social and professional strata before the Holocaust. The entire educated class in Cambodia – teachers, doctors, lawyers, anyone who simply wore glasses – was sent to death camps. And as Philip Gourevitch wrote in his book on the Rwandan massacre, “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.”

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So what I ultimately learned at the Holocaust Museum was not “never again,” but “again and again and again.”

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The lesson of Katrina wasn’t that the United States can’t protect its own. It was that no country can protect its own.

No place is safe, and no government can guarantee the well being of its citizens.

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The fears of Americans change over time. In late 1999, we feared the collapse of our computer system. Then it was terrorist attacks. Then it was our own government. Then it was global warming. Today it’s economic collapse. Fear, it seems, is like fashion. It changes every season. And even though threats like terrorism persist to this day, we eventually grow bored of worrying about them and turn to something new. Ultimately, though, every fear has the same root: anxiety about the things we take for granted going away.

Let me add to the list:

Nuclear holocaust / nuclear winter

Population bomb / world famine

Peak Oil / energy crisis

Etc., etc., etc.

Although a gun can’t do much harm in a locked box in a plane’s cargo hold, I had no idea it was this easy to fly with a firearm. It was the first time since I began this journey that I discovered a freedom I didn’t know I had, rather than a new restriction.

—

Nearby, a group of (Gunsite) students and instructors were making fun of Democrats, gun control laws, and anyone from California. “There’s no constitutional amendment that’s been more crippled and regulated than the Second Amendment,” a competitive shooter was saying about the right to keep and bear arms.

After eavesdropping a while, I began to realize that all my life I’d been a hypocrite. As a journalist I’d always supported the right to free speech, but been opposed to guns. However, by playing favorites with the amendments, it wasn’t the founding father’s vision of America I was fighting for – it was just my personal opinion.

So far it’s been an interesting read. Given the path that Strauss has detailed through the first half, I’m a little concerned as to where he’s eventually headed, but I’ll soldier on to the end and report what I find.

Oh, and given that first excerpt, you might find this interesting: Future Present

Reasoned Discourse and The Other Side

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Reasoned Discourse© and The Other Side™

There’s been some discussion around the gunblogosphere recently about the typical Reasoned Discourse we experience with the gun-control side of the argument, but Xavier has found a video of someone who truly put her beliefs to the test. (In associated news, Morgan Spurlock is not, apparently, a complete wanker.) As Xavier put it:

Got 42 minutes and 32 seconds?

It’s worth your time if you’re any kind of activist at all.

My favorite part? Seeing the difference between the activist’s first shot (with a shotgun) and her later emotions when she was learning to fire a handgun.

“Make ’em Mad” Dept.

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“Make ’em Mad” Dept.

Via Dave Hardy:

I blogged about his case a few days ago — Mr. Dominguez is a law-abiding construction company owner, who owned a registered “assault rifle,” which in California he could legally take from his house to a shooting range. He was going shooting with a friend who was arriving by plane, and was arrested at the airport on the apparently claim that by stopping at the airport in the middle of that drive he broke the law.

The update notes that they followed with a SWAT raid on his house and seizure of all his (legal) firearms, and those of his family.

Fortunately, he’s got some first rate firearm attorneys.

RTWT, including the message from Mr. Dominguez.

When You Can’t Have a Gun . . .

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When You Can’t Have a Gun . . .

. . . it must be nice that you can afford a bodyguard.

Players taking security measures after murders

MIAMI — Frightened NFL players are carrying guns and hiring bodyguards as they seek to avoid becoming victims of violent crime which has already claimed the lives of two players.

Seven players told the latest edition of ESPN The Magazine, to be published on Friday, that the murders last year of Washington Redskins Sean Taylor safety and Denver Broncos’ defensive back Darrent Williams, had raised the alarm among some of the country’s toughest sportsmen.

“We are targets, we need to be aware of that everywhere we go,” said Tampa Bay Buccaneers corner Ronde Barber.

Taylor was shot during a botched robbery at his home in South Florida while Williams was shot and killed outside a nightclub in Denver on New Years Eve, 2007.

This year, Oakland receiver Jevon Walker was robbed and beaten unconscious in Las Vegas and Jacksonville Jaguars lineman Richard Collier had to have his leg amputated after being shot and left paralyzed below the waist.

The response has been an escalation in security for the players and NFL Players’ Association president Kevin Mawae, of the Tennessee Titans, estimates half his team mates carry guns.

“If I had to guess about our locker room, I’d say it’s 50-50 when it comes to gun ownership,” he told the magazine.

50% is supposedly significantly higher than the national average. But then the national average is based on a survey, and Mr. Mawae actually works with the people he’s talking about.

“I don’t own a handgun. I have a hunting rifle. My job is to protect my family. If someone comes into my house? Game’s on,” he said.

Fred Taylor, a Jaguars team mate of Collier, said that not being able to carry guns at the team’s facility makes him feel vulnerable.

ARMED ROBBERY

“I have all the security measures at my house — systems, cameras, I can watch everything from my computer but I still don’t think I have enough. Who knows what is enough?

“League officials tell us we need to take measures to protect ourselves. But the NFL says we can’t have guns in the facility even in the parking lot. Crooks know this. They can just sit back and wait for us to drive off, knowing we won’t have anything in our vehicle from point A to point B,” says(sic)

Same for all of us working stiffs who work for companies with similar policies. Like Wal*Mart, for instance. Of course, many would argue that a Wal*Mart employee isn’t as likely to be targeted as a healthy, hulking NFL player in the 99th percentile of human size and strength. Just ask Joyce Cordova or the two other employees shot while collecting carts in the other story at that link. Or Megan Leann Holden.

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger told the magazine that he now has a bodyguard with him at all times.

“The one time I was scared the most, I didn’t have anybody with me. I don’t want to relive all the details, but this guy brandished a weapon in my face. I kept my cool and talked my way out of it. People showed up and helped get rid of the guy. That’s when I decided to have someone with me all the time,” he said.

Why carry a gun? An entire cop is too heavy. And for most of us, an entire bodyguard is too expensive.

Houston Texans cornerback Dunta Robinson suffered an armed robbery at his home, having a gun pointed in his face and being tied up, and says that was proof that even stay-at-home players, not just those who enjoy nightlife, can be at risk.

“It was the scariest moment of my life. You hear lots of stories of guys getting robbed and you say ‘Man, what were they doing, how did they get into that situation? Flashy guys. Rude Guys, Guys who act like they’re better than everyone. I don’t roll like that and it still happened to me,” he said.

Big salaries and high profiles, along with easily available travel schedules, make the players, easy targets but Dave Abrams, appointed as head of Denver’s security following the murder of Williams, worries their families may soon be prayed upon.

“What’s the next layer? Wives and children: a kid kidnapped for ransom, or some other kind of craziness. I’m scared to death that’s where criminals perceive the next vulnerability is for our players: their families.”

More people waking up.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Gun sales in Wisconsin up 82%:

Katherine Boldt of Mukwonago said she and her husband started researching handguns the day after the election, visited a couple of stores and purchased one Thursday night.

“We are not hunters, and this is our first gun purchase. We do not fear for our safety but rather wanted to make sure we took advantage of our right to bear arms, before the possibility of that right being taken away from us,” she said in an e-mail.

Somebody else wakes up.