Tag: rampage shootings

Still the Man Hears What He Wants to Hear and Disregards the Rest…

KevinLeave a comment

(with apologies to Simon & Garfunkel)

Markadelphia dropped this in a comment on the post about the school shooting in Portsmith Ohio:

So, there were guns there and nothing could be done to stop it. Having people armed in schools will prevent nothing. While I think that if many people here were armed in a school would be responsible, most Americans, unlike Israelis, are fucking morons who jump at their own shadow and would probably shoot someone by accident. Simply put, I don’t trust most American and I don’t think you do either, Kevin, as evidenced by your writings.

Let us parse:

So, there were guns there and nothing could be done to stop it.

Really? You again exhibit your God-like powers of prescience and prognostication. Wherever do you find those? Is there a pill?

Having people armed in schools will prevent nothing.

Is that so? Well it is difficult to “prove a negative.” The probability that such an incident doesn’t happen because a gunman was dissuaded due to the fact that one of his victims might shoot back (or first) is, admittedly, impossible to calculate. Oregon school teacher Shirley Katz seems to believe with a weapon she could prevent her ex-husband from doing something unpleasant to her (since restraining orders are essentially tissue paper and she knows it), but the law requires her to be a disarmed target while she’s at work.

Just like Christi Layne.

However, it’s never really been that much about prevention, Markadelphia, it’s been about attenuation. Only two things will stop a rampage shooter – either he (or she) decides they’re done, or someone with a gun stops them.

As Tam put it so eloquently after the Montreal college shooting in 2006:

I ain’t goin’ out like that. Whether it’s some Columbine wannabe who’s heard the backward-masked messages on his Marilyn Manson discs, distressed daytrader off his Prozac, homegrown Hadji sympathetic with his oppressed brothers in Baghdad, or a bugnuts whackjob picking up Robert Frost quotes transmitted from Langley on the fillings in his molars, I am going to do my level best to smoke that goblin before my carcass goes on the pile. I am not going to go out curled into a fetal ball and praying for help that won’t arrive in time.

—

Even if the police are right there, it might not do me any good. Heck, I might not do me any good. But, dammit, I am going to try. If a 51 year-old nurse can overcome a hammer-wielding psycho with her bare hands, the least I can do is go out on my feet. I’m not going to wait for the coup de grace under a desk; I’m not going get in the abductor’s car; I’m not going to comply with their demands; I’m not going gently.

Help in this case didn’t arrive in time to stop the shooter before he decided he was finished, nor did it in the Baton Rouge shooting yesterday, but it did in the City Hall shooting in Missouri. There’s no way to know how many people Charles Lee ‘Cookie’ Thornton intended to kill before he decided he was finished, is there?

But now we get to the heart of the matter:

While I think that if many people here were armed in a school would be responsible, most Americans, unlike Israelis, are fucking morons who jump at their own shadow and would probably shoot someone by accident. Simply put, I don’t trust most American and I don’t think you do either, Kevin, as evidenced by your writings.

Then you’ve not been reading what I’ve been writing. (There’s a surprise.)

Prior to Florida starting the current trend in 1987, there were eight “shall-issue” states, where citizens who applied for a CCW permit and who passed a background check and a minor licensing requirement had to be issued a permit. It was not at the discretion of local law enforcement to deny. Vermont has always been a “no permit required” state. Seventeen states were “no issue” – you couldn’t get a CCW at all. Since then the number of “shall issue” states has increased to 37, Alaska has joined Vermont in not requiring a permit, and only two states remain “no issue.”

In each of the states where “shall issue” is the law, approximately 1-3% of the eligible population jumps through the relatively minor hoops in order to get a permit. The number of people who actually carry is unknown. What we do know is that those people are remarkably law-abiding. They are much less likely to be arrested for anything than the general population.

In point of fact, they do not “jump at their own shadow” or “shoot someone by accident” – at least if they do shoot someone by accident, it’s at rates far below those of police officers. It is a fact that the worst thing you can say about “shall issue” concealed-carry legislation is that it might not have contributed to the decline in violent crime during the same period. In state after state, opponents to the laws have had to admit that none of the “blood in the streets” and “shootouts over fender-bender” fearmongering came true.

You’re right, Markadelphia, I don’t trust “most Americans,” and with reason. Apparently “most Americans” are like you. But I do trust those who get CCW permits far above and beyond “most Americans” because – for the overwhelming majority – they’ve given thought to their own protection, and understand that the police can’t be everywhere, all the time. They are connected to reality in a way “most Americans” really aren’t.

And if you’re interested in the efficacy of concealed carry, I suggest you peruse the archives of Clayton Cramer’s Civilian Gun Self-Defense blog. Admittedly, the number of CCW defensive gun uses are low, but they do happen.

Contrast Tam’s words above with these of Barry of Inn of the Last Home from a while back:

I just…I just blink my eyes in amazement everytime this crops up – actually watching people feel the need to carry a concealed weapon in public…

If I were to take a live, armed weapon and carry it on my person, in public, it would eat away at my sanity just as if it were emitting lethal radiation. To know that I carried an instrument of sure and certain death on my person, available and ready to be pulled out and used at a moment’s notice to possibly kill…a child. A homeless person. An innocent.

Obviously that is not your intent. You want to protect yourself – maybe that is how you feel in California. But being brought up in Eastern Tennessee I’ve never once felt the need to protect myself from imminent bodily harm in public. And if I were aware of a location that might be unduly hazardous – a dark alley, a badly lighted parking area – I would avoid it. I’ve never been mugged, nor can I readily pull up a name of any person I’ve ever met that’s been mugged or even bodily threatened in my whole life.

What scares me most is the arbitrary nature of self-defense. What line must be crossed to signal to you that there is imminent danger or threat? Is it a criminal pulling a gun on you? In which case, unless you’re a gunslinger, you’re not going to outdraw him. Is it someone pulling a knife? Threatening words? Bad language or rude gestures? Where is that one point where you decide, “Yes, my life or the life of my loved ones is in danger and I must now take it upon myself to take the life of another person.” What if the guy is reaching into his jacket, and you are sure, absolutely certain that it is a weapon. You pull your gun and shoot–and see he’s reaching for his wallet. Or worse, you miss and hit a child running in the street. Where is that line?

The radiation would rot my brain and I would never be able to live with myself.

Maybe it’s different in California. Maybe it’s different in Tennessee. Maybe I don’t love my family enough…maybe I love them too much. But I know myself, and know that if I surrendered to the paranoia – and I mean that in the most basic sense – there would be no turning back.

You can bet your ass I don’t trust him to make decisions for me.

UPDATE:  Original JSKit/Echo comment thread is available here. Thank you, John Hardin.

KevinLeave a comment

About the Recent Rampage Shootings.

in Nebraska and Colorado: While the Brady Bunch will, of course, blame the weapons (I understand a semi-automatic military-style rifle was used in each of the shootings, so the sunset of the “Assault Weapons Ban” that wasn’t must be at fault here), these shootings prove one thing conclusively: One thing and one thing only stops a rampage shooter before he has finished – another person with a gun and the willingness to use it in defense of themselves and others.

If what I heard on the radio this afternoon is correct, there were three armed security people at the church in Colorado Springs. Only one willingly engaged the shooter, calmly walking towards him, firing the entire time. Jeanne Assam fired approximately twelve rounds, and took down someone armed with rifle, shotgun, and pistol and who was reportedly wearing body armor. He killed two and wounded two or three more, but he was stopped by someone with a gun.

It’s not enough just to have a gun, the defender must be willing and able to use it.

The mantra of the opposition is that there are “too many guns” in the U.S. They also reassure us that they don’t really want to ban anything, they just want “common-sense gun controls.”

Sorry. Follow the logic. The only thing that can stop rampage shootings is a complete lack of firearms. That means bans. That means confiscation. And, regardless of the Constitutional question, it means disarming the victims first.

Say Uncle has a list of rampage shootings brought short by the presence of people with firearms and the willingness and ability to use them, and says

I like the odds more when good people are armed.

So do I.

KevinLeave a comment

Somebody Want to Comment on the School Shooting in Finland?

I mean, besides the fact that it’s America’s fault?

Though I must admit, I appreciated this comment:

I am a former Finn (now US Citizen) and I absolutely hate the fact that this has been turned to be somehow US’ fault or influence. Sick people live everywhere and the oppressive Social-Democracy (which is a thin wafer away from totalitarian fascism) make people go POP.

People in Finland should really look into the depressive culture created by the money-grabbing socialists. Seriously. Otherwise I am not surprised if someone blows up the parliament building there at some point.

I am very, very happy I got out of that place and I am very proud to be an American. Since I know the difference between Welfare State system and American Way, I pick the latter ANY DAY.

Why? ’cause here I am *FREE*!

— Posted by Former Finn

Then, of course, there’s this ignorant half-informed idiot:

Switzerland and Israel teachs most of its men how to use guns. But they don’t allow assault rifles as we do in the USA as if to say anything goes.

Would Nazi Germany have risen if every one had a gun?

The answer is universal militia training as in Switzerland and Israel.

— Posted by gerson jacobs

Well Mr. or Ms Jacobs, you’re right. Israel and Switzerland don’t allow “assault rifles” as we do in the USA. They get fully-automatic weapons, where ours are only semi-automatic. I guess that’s because we don’t get trained by the government. Of course, we have to buy ours, instead of having them issued by that same government.

Yeesh!

(h/t: TFS Magnum)

KevinLeave a comment

Express a Politically Incorrect Opinion, Lose Your Right to Arms.

Phil at Random Nuclear Strikes has a very, very important piece posted that everyone concerned with their right to arms needs to read: What is going on inside your head. If you’ve not heard the story of Hamline University student Troy Scheffler, you need to get up to speed quick. And when you look at some of the legislation proposed in the wake of the VATech massacre, you need to do it NOW.

After all, if newspaper editors can consider concealed-carry permit holders the equivalent of sex-offenders, it’s not such a stretch to consider them dangerous paranoids, is it? After all, some people already do.

DO SOMETHING! EVEN IF IT’S WRONG!

KevinLeave a comment

…which seems to be the battle-cry of legislators. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee called on Judiciary Committee Chair James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., to take “immediate committee action” in response to the mass school shooting at Red Lake High School.

“It is difficult for us to conceive of a more pressing public policy matter than protecting our children from school violence,” the Democrats wrote Tuesday.
The group, led by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the committee, identified a number of possible congressional measures, including enhanced child safety guards on guns, closing of gun law “loopholes,” renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, and limits on ammunition magazine capacity.

The Democrats also called for increased school security measures, and increased resources for state and localities to hire and retain safety officers.

Not to make this a partisan thing, but at least the Republican quoted had somewhat of a grip on reality:

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, interviewed on CNN, said he did not believe the incident could have been prevented by even “the most aggressive” gun control measures that have been proposed. He called it a “human problem.”

The Democrats fall back on their shibboleths of “gun control” and increased social spending. (Okay, I did make it a partisan thing.) But Pawlenty hits on a truth that most politicians simply want to ignore – it is a “human problem.”
There is, normally, huge social pressure to “DO something!” when a horrific incident occurs. I think that’s a natural human reaction. If it’s a natural disaster, the normal reaction of many people is a desire to send aid. If it’s a criminal act, the normal reaction is to want to capture and punish the criminal. But when it’s an incident like a school shooting in which the assailant takes his own life, the urge to “do something” is in some way thwarted by the fact that the perpetrator is a child or youth, and is dead by his own hand. There is no catharsis available, no way to find any resolution. We are left with unease and a lack of closure.

I am, as any reader of this blog knows, an ardent defender of the right to arms. I am aware that the incidence of “school shootings” is a relatively recent phenomenon. This table indicates that the first of the recent incidents was in 1979. The next occurred in 1985, then two incidents in 1988, one each in 1989, 1992, and 1993, one in the U.S. and one in Scotland in 1996, two domestic and one in Yemen in 1997, seven domestic incidents in 1998, five in 1999, and so on. (Not all of the incidents listed are what I would consider “rampage” attacks, but all are disturbing.)

Gun control advocates suggest that things like “enhanced child safety guards on guns, closing of gun law ‘loopholes,’ renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, and limits on ammunition magazine capacity” are needed to prevent these incidents, but as Gov. Pawlenty points out, even the most aggressive gun control will not prevent those intent on evil from carrying out their acts. Gun control advocates blame these incidents on “gun availability,” yet when I was growing up I and most of the kids I knew “had access” to firearms and ammunition. My father had three guns, and I knew where they were and where the ammo was. Same for a lot of my friends.

We just didn’t kill each other.

I had a discussion with a co-worker back about the time of the Columbine massacre. He’d been a hell-raiser in his youth, and a self-admitted bully at times, but (to paraphrase the conversation) he was glad he was not a younger man, because:

When I was growing up, you faced each other and fought fair, and when the fight was over you were friends again – or at least you respected each other. Kicking was for girls.

Then kicking was OK.
Then kicking when the other guy was down was OK.
Then using a stick, or a brick. Then a knife. Now it’s guns.

I quit when we got to sticks.

There is no doubt that there are a lot of lethal teens out there, where there once were not. The hardware is (and has been) available. Nothing up to and including door-to-door confiscation is going to change that, and we all know that’s not going to happen, anyway. Metal detectors at school entrances won’t stop it. John Lott, among others, recommends allowing teachers to carry concealed on campus as a deterrent. I’m not a big fan of Lott, and while it’s certainly possible that some of these incidents might be averted or ameliorated, I’m not even sure that armed security will stop them. It’s tough to dissuade someone willing, nay eager to die while taking as many with him as he can.

The question most people seem to want to avoid is why we have so many lethal teens? I mentioned a few days ago that I had picked up several books, one of which is Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. I chose this book for one reason because it is one of the few texts that actually addresses this question. I haven’t had time to do more than scan through it, yet, but Col. Grossman appears to have a compelling argument. The book covers the human aversion to inflicting injury on another, and the intense training required to overcome this aversion in combat soldiers, along with the mechanisms involved in that training to restrict the lethality of soldiers to the battlefield. Near the end of the book, however, he looks into the rising level of violence occurring in America. (The book was copyrighted in 1995, and does not reflect the last decade of decreasing criminal violence – but I think his observation that the level of aggravated assault, i.e. assault with the intention of committing severe bodily harm, has climbed dramatically as of late is still a valid one.)

Col. Grossman states:

The three major psychological processes at work in enabling violence are classical conditioning (á la Pavlov’s dog), operant conditioning (á la B.F. Skinner’s rats), and the observation and imitation of vicarious role models in social learning.

In a kind of reverse Clockwork Orange classical conditioning process, adolescents in movie theaters across the nation, and watching television at home, are seeing the detailed, horrible suffering and killing of human beings, and they are learning to associate this killing and suffering with entertainment, pleasure, their favorite soft drink, their favorite candy bar, an the close, intimate contact of their date.

Operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern armies, are found in the interactive video games that our children play today. But whereas the adolescent Vietnam vet had stimulus discriminators built in to ensure that he only fired under authority, the adolescents who play these video games have no such safeguard built into their conditioning.

He goes on to note the influences of gangs, drugs, poverty, etc., but this is a general observation about the general level of violence, whereas here I am focusing on the specific incidents of rampage killings in schools.

In all of these incidents the perpetrators have been social outcasts. We’ve always had social outcasts – it’s human nature, I think – but now the social outcasts aren’t just committing suicide, they’re taking their tormenters with them. I think Col. Grossman’s not far off the mark in finding that the human aversion to inflicting violence has been severely reduced by our culture, which seems to worship it. Acidman had a post yesterday on the TV classic Gunsmoke, where he noted:

I’ve kept my television tuned to “The Western Channel” for the past day and a half. They show a lot of “Gunsmoke” reruns on there, the old black-and-white episodes that I watched as a boy. Matt Dillon was my hero back when those stories first aired, but I look at his character today with different eyes.

Between yesterday and today, I counted 16 people that Matt Dillon killed. Festus threw two more into the body count. Stop and think about that for a moment.

James Arness was EXCELLENT as Matt Dillon, except for one thing. He never had the eyes of a killer. Anybody who shot as many people as he did could not sleep well at night unless he was a complete robo-cowboy, with no sense of conscience or regret.

Gunsmoke wasn’t the only western, or the only program where a lot of killing occurred, and the good guy only got “a flesh wound” at worst. The difference is, I think, is that topic I have commented on several times; the difference between violent and predatory and violent but protective. The one thing that all of these incidents share is no guiding moral hand on the shoulder of the perpetrators. There is nothing to direct them away from “violent and predatory.” Combining that with the cultural conditioning Col. Grossman describes that literally permeates our society, and that may very well explain why rampage shootings by youths are a wholly modern and far too common occurrence.

But it doesn’t bode well for any kind of solution other than arming responsible adults to avert or ameliorate the attacks.

And that isn’t “something” that the majority of the populace is going to be comfortable with.

Birchwood, Wisconsin is Not Hungerford, England

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By now certainly everyone has heard of the shooting of eight people in Wisconsin by a hunter armed with an SKS rifle. Six of the victims are now dead, two are in critical condition.

It took the Violence Policy Center about one day to start dancing in the blood of the slain so that they could rev-up their campaign to renew and strengthen an “Assault Weapon Ban.” Remember what the VPC had to say during the original fight to get a ban enacted:

Although handguns claim more than 20,000 lives a year, the issue of handgun restriction consistently remains a non-issue with the vast majority of legislators, the press, and public. The reasons for this vary: the power of the gun lobby; the tendency of both sides of the issue to resort to sloganeering and pre-packaged arguments when discussing the issue; the fact that until an individual is affected by handgun violence he or she is unlikely to work for handgun restrictions; the view that handgun violence is an “unsolvable” problem; the inability of the handgun restriction movement to organize itself into an effective electoral threat; and the fact that until someone famous is shot, or something truly horrible happens, handgun restriction is simply not viewed as a priority. Assault weapons – just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms – are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Yes, the VPC is truly interested in protecting the police and public. By disarming the public. The law-abiding part, anyway. “Assault weapons” first, “sniper rifles” later, handguns after that, and other weapons when they’ve accomplished those goals.

The new VPC piece linked above states:

So far in 2004, at least six law enforcement officers have been slain by SKSs.

Obviously this trend is horrible! So they want further SKS importations stopped and they want SKS rifles – and anything else they consider to be an “assault weapon” – banned.

Well, I’m sorry for the officers, their families and loved ones, but how about a little perspective? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics the number of officers slain in the line of duty – just like general violent crime figures – has been declining for the last decade. See these graphs:

The total number of deaths has been in continuous if not steady decline (not including the 72 officers killed in the World Trade Center attack, September 11, 2001). The supposed scourge of “assault weapons” hasn’t caused a sudden upswing in the statistics, either, as the VPC inadvertently illustrated in their paper “Officer Down.” This chart shows the number of officers slain with what the VPC labels “assault weapons” – including the SKS, M1 Carbine, and Mini-14 rifles which were excluded from the 1994 AWB – over the period of 1998 through 2001. Compare that to the FBI graphs.

The implication the VPC wants to make is that if those weapons had not been available, those officers would not have died.

But do you really believe that?

Had Chai Soua Vang been armed with a lever-action Marlin chambered for the .44 Magnum cartridge, would he have been any less lethal?

The VPC wants to use this crime to do what the British did in 1988 after a licensed gun owner by the name of Michael Ryan used a legally possessed semi-auto AK-47, an M1 Carbine, and a Beretta 9mm handgun to kill 17 people and wound an additional 15 in Hungerford, Berkshire, England before taking his own life. Parliament, with the outcry of the British public lubricating the wheels of legislation, shoved through the 1988 Firearms (Amendment) Act that banned all semi-automatic centerfire rifles and most semi-auto shotguns. Banned as in “turn them all in.”

Bear in mind, however, this followed literally decades of ever-increasingly restrictive laws and regulations on firearm possession. Licensing and registration were already facts of life. “Proof of need” was a prerequisite for acquiring a firearm. Letters of reference and membership in a shooting club, too. According to this site:

For a number of years prior to the Hungerford massacre many police chiefs had pursued a policy of reducing the numbers of certificates to the absolute minimum. The policy was often overt, the Police Review of October 1982 published an article which described this policy:

There is an easily identifiable police attitude towards the possession of guns by members of the public. Every possible difficulty should be put in their way. No documentation can be too rigid, no security requirement too arbitrary, which prevents guns coming into the hands of criminals.

In short, after England had enacted pretty much every law the Brady Center claims is “commonsense,” Michael Ryan still killed 17 people and wounded 15 more. So they banned “assault weapons.” And every legally owned, legally registered one was turned in.

In 1996 in Dunblane, Scotland, Thomas Hamilton took five legally owned, properly registered handguns to a school and killed 16 children and their teacher, wounding eleven more. So England banned handguns, and every legally owned, legally registered one was turned in.

These “commonsense” laws did have another effect. At the time of the Hungerford massacre there were only 160,000 people in England licensed to own rifles and handguns, and 840,000 licensed to own shotguns (and there must have been significant overlap in the two populations.) This is out of a population of perhaps 45 million, or, at best, an ownership rate of less than 2.5% of the population. The latest statistics show that there are now 118,612 firearm certificates and 561,762 shotgun certificates on issue in England and Wales. That’s nearly a one-third reduction in people legally licensed to possess firearms since 1988. Legal ownership has fallen to less than 1.4% of the population. Yet the rate of firearm involved crime there continues to climb.

There haven’t been any more mass-murders by firearm, but that’s of little comfort to the families of Charlene Ellis, 18, and Latisha Shakespeare, 17 who were gunned down by someone with a submachinegun in Birmingham in January of last year. Two other young women were wounded in that attack.

Fully automatic weapons were banned in England in 1937.

Such public enthusiasm for banning guns does not exist here. At best guess, one quarter of our population owns a firearm. It’s a guess because the overwhelming majority of us do not have to register our firearms. The VPC constantly touts that the majority of Americans support an “assault weapons ban,” but that the eeeevil NRA has a stranglehold on the Congress. Both are possibly true, but it’s also certain that the majority of the public – even the gun-owning public – does not understand the implications of a ban, while the NRA certainly does.

For example, from today’s New York Times:

“This is not a gun you go deer hunting with,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry trade association.
The reason the SKS is not used by hunters, Mr. Keane said, is that it is designed for combat soldiers and is therefore underpowered for killing an animal like a deer with a single shot, the goal of good hunters.
“The ethics of hunting are you don’t want the animal to suffer needlessly,” Mr. Keane said. Mr. Keane said he suspected that the man accused of the Wisconsin killings was not a trained hunter, since with the SKS he was carrying, he would have had to shoot a deer several times to kill it.

Surely Mr. Keane should know that the 7.62×39 Russian cartridge the SKS fires is approximately equal in power to the venerable .30-30 Winchester – a cartridge possibly responsible for the harvesting of more deer in the United States than any other? Surely Mr. Keane should know that the pointed bullet profile of the 7.62×39 round yeilds better downrange ballistics than the flat-pointed bullets used in the .30-30? Surely Mr. Keane should know that the average SKS rifle is more than capable of holding “minute of deer” accuracy out to 100 yards or more? And surely Mr. Keane should know that the SKS rifle is inexpensive and highly reliable – both of significant interest to new hunters?

The SKS is a perfectly adequate (and popular) deer rifle, yet a member of a group that supposedly supports gun rights plays directly into the hands of those interested in banning firearms.

We are often our own worst enemy.

But Birchwood is not Hungerford, and the U.S. is not England.

And we will not blame the gun for the action of the shooter, no matter how much the VPC et al. would like to stampede us into doing that.

UPDATE, 11/24: As I predicted, the Brady Center ran with Lawrence Keane’s quote from the New York Times in a press release yesterday:

The SKS rifle apparently used by the hunter to kill six other hunters in Wisconsin Sunday wasn’t banned under the Federal assault weapons ban that expired September 13, but it should be banned for civilian use. Designed for use in war, even the gun industry admitted yesterday that it’s not intended for hunting.

It may, in fact, be the first time the official spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation has admitted that any military-style semiautomatic assault rifle is inappropriate for hunting. Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the group, went further, and even told the New York Times that the SKS isn’t a humane weapon for hunting deer. “The reason the SKS is not used by hunters, Mr. Keane said, is that it is designed for combat soldiers and is therefore underpowered for killing an animal like a deer with a single shot, the goal of good hunters,” The Times wrote. “‘The ethics of hunting are you don’t want the animal to suffer needlessly,’ Mr. Keane said.

“Prior to the expiration of the assault weapons ban, the industry’s spokespersons were unified in describing these types of weapons as perfectly normal for use by hunters. It was one of the industry’s main arguments for letting the ban expire.

Since the ban’s expiration, high-profile crimes involving assault weapons have already become more commonplace. Plano, Texas police are searching for members of a bank robbery gang that have opened fire on police with AK-47s, and that same weapon is believed to be the weapon of choice of a killer or killers who have shot eight people in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Thank you so much, Mr. Keane for being an ignorant idiot.

FURTHER UPDATE: The Wisconsin State Journal, in an unsigned editorial (natch) regurgitates the Brady/VPC talking points in a call to (natch) renew the AWB and make it stricter. Now there’s a shocker. But get this error:

Americans already own an estimated 100 million guns of all types.

Err, no. About 260 million of all types. About 100 million handguns. Sheesh. I thought newspapers had editors?

Where the Hell are the PARENTS?

KevinLeave a comment

Suicidal Student Had Bag Full Of Guns At School

WELLSBORO, Pa. — A 12-year-old student who committed suicide in a middle school bathroom had brought more than one gun to school but only fired the shot that killed him, authorities said.

Elementary school and high school classes resumed Thursday in the Northeast Pennsylvania twon, and students were expected to return Friday for the last day of classes at the middle school.

Police haven’t said why the boy, a fifth-grader, might have shot himself.

(Sigh)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was growing up I “had access” to guns and ammunition. Most of the kids I knew did. And they didn’t do this shit!

“Gun availability” is not the problem! “Making guns safer” doesn’t address the problem. “Safe storage” won’t keep this from happening. And concentrating on these idiocies avoids the question of “what is the cause?” “Gun availability” hasn’t changed. What has?

What makes a 12 year old load a duffel bag full of guns and (I have to assume) decide to kill just himself instead of a bunch of other people first? What makes someone think this is an answer to anything? How can parents not notice that their child is that disturbed?

And, finally, was this kid on prescription drugs? Prozac? Xanax? Luvox? Ritalin? Paxil? Something else? Are we trying to replace parenting with chemicals? And are the chemicals at fault, or just a symptom of a bigger problem?

What the hell is warping our children?

Journalistic Consistency, or: “All the news we see fit.”

KevinLeave a comment

There’s an AP news story about the Case Western shooter. The headline reads: “Cleveland Shooter Had Military Training” (though they did leave off the hysterical exclamation point.) That’s good. That’s interesting. And it’s in keeping with the general liberal position that people who receive military training are all psycho-killers-in-waiting. The story relates:

The 62-year-old man accused of a shooting spree at a prestigious Cleveland university had military training with the Indian army and a grudge against an employee, authorities said Saturday. Ok, fair enough. But is it relevant? The article goes on to cover the fact that Biswanath Halder was wearing a “bullet proof” vest and some kind of helmet with a wig glued to it as he went through the building apparently firing indiscriminately. The story relates that “(Halder) never walked on the sidewalks, always down the middle of the street” according to one person interviewed. OK, that’s a little weird.

At the end of the article it states the source of the opening assertion:

The resume Halder posts on his Web site includes service in the Indian army, as well as experience in computer programming, designing electrical measuring equipment in Germany, real estate and financial planning. Very good – cite your sources.

Interest thus piqued, I ran a Google News search on Mr. Halder.

There was this story told us that 425 rounds of ammunition were found in his car,

this one that tells us all about the “poor man’s Uzi” that Halder used (and it – as most news stories do – gets crucial information wrong concerning guns and gun laws),

this one with the headline “Alleged Shooter Had Gun With 32-Round Magazine” (No exclamation point there either, but you know it’s implied.) The article discusses the ammunition used, saying: “The ammunition used were hollow-point bullets, designed for maximum amount of damage and minimal penetration.” Well, not exactly but then the press so seldom gets this stuff right anyway. Note too that the article quotes a “firearms expert” who says that the Cobray pistol Halder had “…could have a 32-round magazine in it and have 32 rounds in the gun.” Note that – COULD have. Did he, or didn’t he? Anyway, this article also contradicts the first story a bit, because the same expert is also denigrates Halder’s training. “Donnett said it’s clear that the alleged gunman had little training….’If this gentleman had really known what he was doing, the fatalities would’ve been way up,’ she said.” Harsh words for a man with military training.

(Oh, and there’s a photo on the site that’s apparently supposed to be the two guns in question. One of them might be a Ruger, the other is DEFINITELY not a Cobray. Guess they didn’t have one in their archives. I suppose I should be happy that they didn’t use a picture of a REAL Uzi.

Anyway, this story mentions Halder’s web site too. It says this:

Halder would write about destruction on his Web site, and there were anonymous postings calling him a moron, and a making fun of his fake hair and fake teeth.
One posting said, “People around you don’t like you, so take a hike and get out of our lives.”

This story has the headline: Case Western killing inflames gun opponents

Well THERE’S a surprise. But Halder’s a side-note in this story.

Then there’s this short blurb about the lawsuit over Halder’s web site that apparently sparked the shooting.

Anyway, it’s pretty apparent that the news organizations not only knew he had a web site, but where it was and what was on it.

So, why was there no mention of the fact that Halder was pretty rabidly against the war in Iraq, and a supporter of gun control? His site is down now, but it wasn’t immediately after the shooting or the media couldn’t have checked his resume. I got in before they firewalled the sites and looked.

It was apparent that the guy was one bat short of a full belfry.

Oh, right – Relevance.