A shooter and scientist formerly of Arizona, now living in California
It’s amazing how many people I know that are experts in firearms, legal policy, comparative religion, hostage rescue tactics, and anti-terrorism.
Here I was thinking they were ordinary people at ordinary jobs, but after a terrible event they all seem to declare knowledge such things.
Go figure.
What appears to have been a tragic murder-suicide took place yesterday at UCLA. Terrible. I can particularly relate, as I myself am involved in academia, am a father, and am only a few years younger than the victim.
As you likely know, California has some of the strictest gun control in the nation, concealed carry permits are rarely issued in Los Angeles, campus carry is strictly forbidden, and UCLA is a gun-free zone. Once again, it turns out that declaring a place to be “gun-free” doesn’t accomplish anything, since bad people doing bad things will simply ignore those policies. Big surprise.
Instead, the whole campus goes into lockdown only to discover that many of the doors don’t actually lock from the inside. Worse, many of the doors open outwards, making it difficult for the students to barricade them: several news reports show students using electrical cords to tie doors to chairs and tables that are bolted to the floor, using belts to secure hydraulic door closers, etc.
While I applaud the ingenuity of the students solving a problem under pressure, the fact that the doors can’t be locked from the inside is absurd.
Next, some minor criticism of the cops and their response. I don’t mean to armchair quarterback, but, to use a biology reference, the response of the cops seems more along the lines of an allergic reaction rather than a beneficial immune system response. Tons of local and federal (federal agents as first responders at a state university? That seems a bit odd to me.) SWATed-up cops swarmed the campus. They did door-to-door checks of rooms on campus to ensure they were secure, but it seems that they failed to announce themselves as police first, to the terror of students and staff in the rooms who only saw unknown heavily-armed men jiggling door handles trying to get into room. When you have overwhelming force, it can’t hurt to be polite and at least announce yourself as police.
When the police make students line up on their knees with their hands on their heads before being searched and allowed to leave may be practical from a safety standpoint, but it presents a chilling, disturbing image that sits very poorly with me.
Anti-gun folks are already using this incident as an example of the risks of campus carry. On the contrary, this is an example of the folly of gun-free zones and the benefits of campus carry.
One of the commonly-expressed concerns about campus carry is that a student upset about a particular topic or grade will threaten or shoot a professor: it’s clear that this can happen regardless of state, local, or campus rules prohibiting guns on campus or in certain areas, let alone laws against assault, threats, murder, etc. It should be evident that such policies serve only to leave ordinary, non-criminal people defenseless in the face of violent criminals.
Still, carrying is not a panacea: it’s certainly possible for a bad guy with the element of surprise to get the drop on someone, but after that things become much harder for the bad guy if they are intent on causing mass casualties — instead of potential victims hiding helplessly in rooms, they can arm themselves and present a much more effective defense in the event they’re attacked. Why anyone would be opposed to this is beyond me.
Lastly, anti-gun folks often say that “guns don’t belong on campus”, that somehow the presence of concealed firearms carried by “good guys with guns” will upset some campus-specific qi and make the campus more hostile, and that guns won’t solve anything. If guns in the hands of good guys aren’t a good thing or if guns don’t solve anything, why call for armed police in such a situation? Guns are already present on campus — whether lawfully carried by campus police officers for purposes of good, illegally carried by criminals for nefarious purposes, or by honest-but-technically-law-breaking people unwilling to risk their safety by going unarmed — and barring the occasional act of criminal violence, the academic environment seems to handle it just fine.
This incident should be a call for action in support of campus carry and the removal of useless, dangerous gun-free zones. Call your legislator today.
Everyone has their own pet political issues that they’re particularly passionate about. My political interests, like my hobbies, are many and varied, but two particularly stand out as critical in my mind:
Indeed, crypto rights are something I’ve been passionate about since before I got involved with guns. Those two issues are those that I will not ever agree to compromise on, since I believe both to be fundamental to liberty.
Both topics make great litmus tests to determine how a government regards its citizenry: a government that respects its citizens and treats them as reasonable, honest adults will trust them to be responsible with potentially-dangerous items like firearms and with private (and potentially-dangerous) communications and thoughts that it cannot monitor.
A government that doesn’t, wont.
Without privacy and the ability to defend oneself from threats, how can any individual or civilization survive?
What about you? What issues do you think are critical? Why?
It turns out gun control and telling people you’ll do stuff like you did in Baltimore isn’t really a major selling point. Who knew?
At least that’s one anti-gun politician out of the running. Who’ll be next?
The LA Times surprised me by breaking with the President and saying that yes, people listed on the no-fly list shouldn’t have their rights infringed without due process. I’m sure the President, Senators Feinstein and Schumer, and the various gun-control groups aren’t super thrilled.
Full article here.
This paragraph sums up the whole article:
One problem is that the people on the no-fly list (as well as the broader terror watch list from which it is drawn) have not been convicted of doing anything wrong. They are merely suspected of having terror connections. And the United States doesn’t generally punish or penalize people unless and until they have been charged and convicted of a crime. In this case, the government would be infringing on a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution ? and yes, like it or not, the right to buy a gun is a constitutional right according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
They even point out that the majority of people on the list are foreigners who are already prohibited from buying guns legally in the US:
Of those, the vast majority [of people on the list] are noncitizens living overseas; the number of American citizens on the list is believed to be fewer than 10,000 people.
That’s important because federal law already bars gun sales to most people who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents or holders of valid visas, which means the vast majority of the people on the suspected terror list would already be barred from buying a firearm in the U.S. even without Feinstein’s law. That leaves us with about 10,000 American citizens (and some legal residents) who, under the proposed law, would be barred from exercising a constitutional right. That gives us pause.
Of course, just because the LA Times supports due process doesn’t mean they support gun rights. It’s wise to keep?Maxim 29 of the Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries?in mind: “The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.”
Supporting gun rights is?a bridge to far for the LA Times, and they still strongly support stuff like bans on popular firearms and other measures. Still, they recognize that, like it or not, people have a right to own guns and so long as that right exists the government shouldn’t infringe on it:
Truthfully, no one should be allowed to buy assault rifles or other military-style firearms, and the country would be better off with much stronger gun control laws for other firearms than exist now. What’s more, this page disagrees with the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual the right to own a gun. But that is a recognized right, and we find it dangerous ground to let the government restrict the exercise of a right based on mere suspicion.
[…]
Ending gun violence is critically important, but so is protecting basic civil liberties. Although we agree to the ends here, we object to the means.
Still, it’s better than?sycophantically supporting gun control no matter what, so I’ll take it.
It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically ? eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.
[…]
Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
– “The Gun Epidemic“, December 5th 2015 Editorial, New York Times
Hey, look at that. They?do want to take your guns (and ammo!) away.
Of course, we knew that all along, but it’s nice for them to finally come out and say it.
It’s long been the case that firearms have been classified into various categories.
For example, “handguns” describe relatively small firearms like semi-auto pistols, revolvers, etc. that can be held with a single hand.
“Long guns” like rifles and shotguns are typically larger and are intended to be operated with both hands.
The media recently — and accurately — reported that the San Bernadino shooters used “long guns” in their attack. This is true: they used rifles (DPMS and S&W AR variants, according to the news) in their attack and possessed, but apparently did not use, handguns.
Shortly thereafter I saw idiots on social media wondering, “Why does anyone need a long gun? They should be banned!”
*facepalm*
Adding to the facepalm were claims that since the original name for Smith & Wesson M&P guns comes from “Military & Police”, there’s no reason for private?citizens to own such firearms even though they’re essentially identical to every other AR out there.
Evidently the bad guys wore?”assault clothing” which allowed them to be much more deadly than if they wore, for example, jeans, t-shirts, and?fishing vests. I had no idea that “assault clothing” was a thing.
Finally, I’ve seen feverish calls to ban the private ownership of body armor. Why? I have no idea. Armor is purely defensive and cannot be used to harm someone, so why would it pose any threat? I suppose one could whack someone with an armor vest or bonk them with a helmet, but come on…
Honestly, where do people come up with such idiocy?
I’ve seen people claim that having an armed citizen engage an active shooter in self-defense would somehow make things worse.
How? Isn’t an active shooter targeting innocent people without resistance already one of the worst things possible?
I don’t get that thought process?at all. Why would someone not want themselves or others to have a fighting chance in?the event of violent attack? I can’t wrap my mind around that thought process at all.
There’s no guarantees that the armed citizen will succeed in stopping the bad guy, but at the very least the bad guy would be distracted and need to respond to the armed citizen, giving others the opportunity to escape, move to a safer location, or fight back.?Sure, the armed citizen may miss and might hit innocent bystanders,?but the same could be said about police, and those people may well have been intentionally shot by the bad guys regardless.
In the wake of the San Bernadino shooting I have several long-time friends on the Book of Face calling for more gun control as a means of stopping such tragedies.
One person proposed “common-sense” things like “banning assault weapons, closing the gun-show loophole, universal background checks, restricting magazine capacity, waiting periods, training requirements, safe storage laws, actively taking guns away from people no longer eligible to own them, licensing, registration” and so on. They failed to realize that every single one of those things is already the law in California and did nothing to prevent the bad guys from carrying out their terrible crime.
Another went so far as to say that the country should ban bullets, since banning guns is legally off the table. <sarcasm>Right, because that’ll totally work, no court would ever have a problem with that, there’d be no incentive for criminals to illicitly produce or import cartridges using the same methods?used for human or drug smuggling, and nobody can possibly make bullets, powder, and primers from scratch.</sarcasm>
*sighs*
The anti-gun-rights side is getting desperate at their near-complete inability to restrict our rights at the federal level, with only slightly more success at the state level. We have the Brady Campaign calling the NRA “terrorists” and we have?Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo coming clean with something that pro-gun folks have known for a while: they actually do want to take our guns. He even says as much in an earlier article: “Yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them.”
As long as it seemed possible to pass regulations limiting the most egregious abuses of gun ownership, there was some political logic to accepting the gun culture basically on its own terms and advocating for specific fixes. These include limitations on weapons designed for or less exclusively mass violence, basic background checks on gun purchases, perhaps waiting periods for purchasing a firearm, etc.
Getting those sorts of limited, incremental restrictions passed would certainly be harder if gun advocates knew that the gun control supporters actually wanted or were building toward more dramatic efforts to take guns out of circulation, require licensing – in other words, to fundamentally change the nature of gun ownership in the country.
(Bold added by me. -AZR)
Sorry, Josh, we’ve known that was endgame for you and others who feel the same as you?for decades. It hasn’t fooled anyone, no matter how many times the Brady Campaign or Bloomberg’s groups change their names.
It’s now clear that even the most innocuous restrictions on guns – simply requiring real background checks, restrictions on big magazines which let you snuff out more people before someone at your school massacre tackles you – are not even up for discussion or any good faith bargaining. No restrictions are allowed. Period. This present reality has to be accepted and understood.
Glad to see he recognizes that our?rights aren’t up for discussion or bargaining away. Sorry, you get nothing, nor should you.
I’m under no illusion that there’s any political will at the moment to dramatically reform private gun ownership in the country. But precisely because no reforms are possible today it makes perfect sense to flesh out the alternative – not minor restrictions on the margins but a society which has dramatically fewer guns, where private ownership was limited and regulated like how you would in a civilized society and one in which we took seriously limiting the needless deaths and suffering guns cause today.
You want to take my guns away.
I won’t give them up.
Your move.