A candle to end violence
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it….”
John 1:5
My plan for ending violence:
My M&P .40 Pro Series, Blade-Tech holster, and some Hornady Critical Defense. The picture is terrible inasmuch as I have no artistic sense. But it’s not meant to be pretty; it’s meant to give comfort, and to remind me that I have nothing to fear.
And when she heard what I was doing, the little one wanted to get involved:
That’s her Ruger Bearcat .22. She’s small, but mighty.
Carry your guns, people. They are a lighter burden than regret.
Gun Safety
I wanted to touch on one more aspect of Sean’s post which bears consideration. Sean on the notion that North Carolinians Against Gun Violence is a “gun safety” organization:
That’s a laugh. Gun Safety is taught by people who instruct others in safe gun handling techniques. The NRA teaches gun safety and so do many others. Gun Safety is mostly a matter of learning to apply Jeff Cooper’s 4 Rules.
I’m an NRA certified pistol instructor, and I’ve taught a few dozen people to shoot safely. I’m the graduate of several shooting schools, including Gunsite, where they invented those four rules. I’d suggest that I know quite a bit about gun safety, certainly more than Mr. Fitzsimon. I can prove that what NCAGV is advocating is less safety, not more.
There is one specific place that I have to go every day, and I have to go unarmed, and that is to my daughters’ school. I drive her to school each morning. I am on the school grounds for approximately three minutes. I never leave my car. And yet, if I drop her off with a gun on my person, then I am guilty of a felony. (And a federal felony, for that matter) Taking a gun onto school grounds is one of the few (in fact, I believe the only) permit violations that is a felony rather than a misdemeanor.
Consider case one: I get up in the morning, I put my concealed carry gun in it’s holster, and go about my business. The gun in it’s holster is perfectly safe. It is pointed in a safe direction, and the trigger guard is covered, and thus the gun will never go bang. I get in my car and drive V to school. Again, trigger guard is covered, gun is pointed in a safe direction. The gun won’t go off unless I pull the trigger. Even if there is some mechanical problem that drops the striker (essentially impossible in modern guns, and certainly in my M&P, but lets assume for the sake of argument), it doesn’t matter. The gun is in a safe direction. 100%, perfectly safe. I drive up to the school, kiss my kid goodbye, and drive off. Simple, easy, safe.
Now lets look at the current situation. I put my gun on in the morning like always. It goes in the holster. I drive V to school. Now I have a problem. I can’t bring my gun on school grounds, which means that I can’t drive onto school grounds, which means that I can’t park on school grounds. So I have to find a place nearby to park. Now I have to take my gun off, while it remains concealed, so I either need to get out of the car, draw the gun, set it down, take off my holster, put the gun back into the holster and lock it up, all without letting anyone see the gun or pointing the gun in an unsafe direction. The second alternative is that I try to take the gun off in the car, which makes it much easier to conceal, but much harder to keep pointed safely. (An experiment for the reader: put on your holster and unloaded firearm. Go to you car. Sit down. Now try to get the gun out of the holster without muzzling yourself or your passengers. Good luck with that.)
Now, because we have safe storage laws in NC, I can’t just leave the gun in it’s holster in the car. I have to lock it up, unloaded. So now I am unloading the gun, still in the car mind you, and still trying to manipulate the gun without muzzling myself or my daughter, who is sitting next to me. Now I have to lock it up and walk her to school.
Of course, when the gun is on my hip, it’s chance of being stolen sits right about at zero. When I leave it unattended in my car, the chance of it being stolen rises quite a bit, especially if anyone saw me unloading my gun and locking it up.
And then, once I return to the car, I get to do the dance all over again, this time getting the gun loaded and back into the holster. For folks who don’t know, re-holstering is one of the more dangerous things that you can do with a pistol. You are driving the pistol downward into the holster. If anything gets caught between the trigger and the holster, your gun will go bang.
A US Airways pilot found this out the hard way on a flight to Charlotte. But the accident as caused by poor holster design and, more importantly, stupid rules that forced the pilot to fiddle with his gun. Just like the stupid rules that make citizens fiddle with their guns around schools, putting people at risk.
So you tell me, NCAGV…which is safer? And which of us is really lobbying for gun safety?
The problem of defense
Jennifer posts a story of a a colleague who is confident that her attitude is going be an effective defense.
Here’s the problem with that strategy. A confident look will deter attackers who are deterred by a confident look. It may encourage a goblin into finding a different prey item. But then again, it may not. And then you are left without much place to go.
This is the exact same problem that we face with pepper spray, stun guns, brass knuckles, harsh words, angry gestures, and self-imposed vomiting. They all work…until they don’t. And when they don’t, you are awfully likely to find yourself without a lot of good options.
Folks, I’m going to let you in on a set of uncomfortable realities:
- You may, at some point in your life, be required to defend your life or the life of someone you love.
- There is no way to predict when or where you might need to do this.
- When that moment comes, you will have seconds to take action
Once you come to terms with this uncomfortable reality, why on earth wouldn’t you choose to have the tool that would be best able to do the job? Namely, prevent your death and/or maiming, or to prevent it from happening to someone you love?
The fight isn’t over
Weer’d Beard has a great post up riffing off a post of Sean’s dealing with the problem of what to do with the problem of muggers. Specifically, what to do with the Hobson’s choice of “Your money or your life”?
The crux of the problem, of course, is that there is no guarantee that the guy threatening your life will abide by his half of the bargain. The deal can very quickly turn into “Your money AND your life,” and as Sean’s post points out, this happens more often than you might like to think.
The key to surviving this kind of encounter is to remember that you are in a lethal force encounter. The face that the person threatening your life says that they will stop if you give them your property is irrelevant. You need to respond the way you would in any lethal force encounter. That might mean cooperating. But rememeber, if you choose to cooperate; the fight isn’t over. It’s not over until you are safe. The approach might be to throw your wallet and run. Or is may be to throw your wallet, then draw your gun when they are picking it up.
Remember, the fight ain’t over until it’s over. I had this beaten into me at Gunsite. When I took 350, we had a force on force scenario. In mine, a man burst out of a room, stabbing someone and shouting. I pulled my gun, shouted at him to drop the knife, then shot two rounds center mass. (I know, mistake one…shoot until they are down.) Stabber starts shouting “Ow! You shot me…why did you shoot me?” I keep repeating “Get away from that knife!” and I came out a bit from behind my cover (mistake two), and of course I caught two rounds, one in the thigh and one just under my arm when the stabber pulled his gun.
In retrospect, I could have made a bunch of choices differently (which is the point of the training, I suppose). I could have walked away, I could have put more rounds into the bad guy initially or I guess I could have shot him again when he ignored my commands to stay away from the knife. The reason that I didn’t shoot him on the ground, however, was because I kept thinking “I can’t shoot him…he’s on the ground….how would it look if I shot him again.” And that got me shot, becasue I thought the fight was over.
My instructor, Charlie McNeese, debriefed us after the drill. His feedback to the class was “most of you didn’t have a plan, and when you have to make it up as you go along you are going to make mistakes.”
Remember, fight, cooperate, or run away…the fight ain’t over until it’s over.
More on Costco
Apparently, Sailorcurt is right…carrying in a Costco can get you killed.
More here.
The four rules
RobertaX reminds us of the importance of the four rules.
Hostage Taker Takeaway
By now, most people have probably heard that a wackjob took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel.
There are two takeaways from this event. The first comes from Weerd Beard:
And one final word, its hard for a nut to take an armed hostage hostage….
But the second comes from the text of the article:
Melissa Shepard, 32, of Peterborough, N.H., a consultant who works in the building, said she was on the third floor when someone announced over a loudspeaker that there was a situation in the lobby and people should stay at their desks.
After some time, they were told to move to the other end of the building. She said she was among a dozen workers who went into an office, shut the door and turned off the lights.
Then she said someone knocked on the door and told them to leave the building. She said there was some confusion as they were told to go to an upper floor or down the stairs.
“Finally, I screamed, ‘Tell us where we need to go! … I just want to get out of there,’” she said. “I was shaking. … I was like, ‘What do we do? What do we do?’”
If you don’t have a plan, people, this is how you end up during a crisis. Blubbering and looking for direction.
Second…don’t sit around and wait! When you hear that there is an “incident” over the loudspeaker do you:
a) Shut the door and turn out the lights and wait to die
b) Get the hell out of there
If it’s me, I choose b.
A difficult lesson
I’ve written in this forum before that one of the hardest steps in becoming an armed American is internalizing the knowledge that there are people out there who don’t think like you do. They don’t see fellow human beings, they see resources to exploited. Robbing or maiming or even killing you is just like picking an apple from a tree. Alan at SnarkyBytes has a link to the story of a man who learned this fact the hard way.
Like Alan said…pay attention to what is going on around you.
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Do your part!
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