A Dixie Carpetbagger

I’d love to see a pro-gun group do a parody of this:

“You don’t need a gun to defend your kid… because they should already have one.”

(Scene cuts to little Suzy in a parking lot, BIG BAD GUY about to grab her when she spins around and draws) “STOP!  FREEEEZE!” (Sounds of gunfire are heard)

(Scene cuts to Suzy sitting on her car hood, pointing a revolver at a wounded BIG BAD GUY holding his belly and bleeding.  She’s calling 911 on her cell)  “Hello, 911?  I’d like to report an attempted kidnapping.  Yeah, he’s still here.  Nope, he’s down on the ground bleeding.  Okay, I’ll stay on the line.  Can you have the officers grab something to eat?  I’m starving.  Oh wait, I got a beep, hold on a second…”

——-

Seriously?  You don’t need a (big, bad, scary) gun to defend your kid… because you can get an Amber Alert?  What’s that saying again?  You know, the one about the moral superiority of a murdered rape victim?

(H/T Breda)

One of Weer’d's readers left him a comment on one of his DGU (defensive Gun Use) posts.

Funny story. I tell my GF I want a gun because I follow this blog, but she tells me she doesn’t want me carrying it around her. She argues that pepper spray or a taser would be equally effective. Thoughts?

Weer’d responds here with some videos and facts.  His points, in short: tasers and OC (Oleoresin Capsicum) spray are nice, but they only for cops.  As to why, I’ll quote Weer’d himself:

You see as a civilian I have one dichotomy when it comes to personal defense. Deadly force, and no Force.

Which ties in with something Bob S. wrote:

What level of violence is acceptable when fighting back against a criminal intent on harming me or mine?

I answered in the comments with something I’ll expand here, the “Axe Theory.”

The philosophy of the Soviet General Staff is no different from that of the horsemen (The Magnificent Seven –ed.) whom I had watched riding the desert. `If you want to stay alive, kill your enemy. The quicker you finish him off, the less chance he will have to use his own gun.’ In essence, this is the whole theoretical basis on which their plans for a third world war have been drawn up. The theory is known unofficially in the General Staff as the `axe theory’. It is stupid, say the Soviet generals, to start a fist-fight if your opponent may use a knife. It is just as stupid to attack him with a knife if he may use an axe. The more terrible the weapon which your opponent may use, the more decisively you must attack him, and the more quickly you must finish him off. Any delay or hesitation in doing this will just give him a fresh opportunity to use his axe on you. To put it briefly, you can only prevent your enemy from using his axe if you use your own first.

[...]

Many years passed and I became an officer serving with the General Staff. Suddenly, as I studied American theories of war, I came to an appalling realization. It became clear to me that a modern American cowboy who is working up to a decisive fight will always expect to begin by spitting at and insulting his opponent and to continue by throwing whisky in his face and chucking custard pies at him before resorting to more serious weapons. He expects to hurl chairs and bottles at his enemy and to try to stick a fork or a tableknife into his behind and then to fight with his fists and only after all this to fight it out with his gun.

This is a very dangerous philosophy. You are going to end up by using pistols. Why not start with them? Why should the bandit you are fighting wait for you to remember your gun? He may shoot you before you do, just as you are going to slap his face. By using his most deadly weapon at the beginning of the fight, your enemy saves his strength. Why should he waste it throwing chairs at you? Moreover, this will enable him to save his own despicable life. After all, he does not know, either, when you, the noble hero, will decide to use your gun. Why should he wait for this moment? You might make a sudden decision to shoot him immediately after throwing custard pies at him, without waiting for the exchange of chairs. Of course he won’t wait for you when it comes to staying alive. He will shoot first. At the very start of the fight.

This is why police officers draw their weapons.  This is also why so many people who try to use “less than lethal” force end up in hospitals… or the morgue.  If you have a good tool, use that good tool.  If a guy is attempting to beat down your door in the middle of the night, don’t try to build up to things… go for broke.  After all, he might get phased when you crack him over the head with a frying pan… or he might get pissed off and hurt you.

Remember, most DGUs result in no shooting.  Which of the following is the better scenario:

1. You are exiting a Quickie Mart one night when a rough-looking gentleman in a T-shirt and shorts accosts you for your wallet.  Observing that he is holding a knife, you pull your OC spray and dose him.  He begins to fail about, and then charges you and stabs you.  You end up in the ICU with multiple knife wounds.

2. You are exiting a Quickie Mart one night when a rough-looking gentleman in a T-shirt and shorts accosts you for your wallet.  Observing that he is holding a knife, you draw your sidearm and aim it at his center of mass.  He holds his hands up and surrenders, and you hold him until police arrive.

I know which one I’d rather participate in…

For humor: here’s how scenario one would play out, and how I feel about OC spray.

Ninjas rescue college student from muggers… in Australia.

Muggers thought they had an easy mark, but they made one major error in that they “failed to notice a ninja, Nathan Smith, standing in the shadows outside the dojo. Mr Smith immediately alerted his sensei, or teacher.”

Make no mistake… he wasn’t standing in the shadows, he was waiting there– waiting for his chance to use his skills for good.  The story ends with the muggers running scared from a group of ninjas (did no-one have a shuriken handy?) only to be caught by police.

I wish I had ninja guardians…

(H/T Uncle)

Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.
– Capt. John Parker, 19 April 1775

Many people know a little about Patriots’ Day, and a little about what happened that day at Lexington and Concord.  The full story is both sad and inspiring.

He [Capt. Parker] was in poor health from consumption (tuberculosis) on the morning of April 19. [...] He witnessed his cousin Jonas Parker killed by a British bayonet. Later that day he rallied his men to attack the regulars returning to Boston in an ambush known as “Parker’s Revenge.”   This was his only military action in the American Revolutionary War. He was unable to serve in the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, and died of tuberculosis in September. — Wikipedia, “John Parker”

In the end, I can’t add that much to these events, or their telling.  I’ll close by quoting two poets, one telling this story, one telling a much older tale.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
– Thomas Babington Macaulay,
“The Lays of Ancient Rome”

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

A sentry gun.  As of right now, it only fires paintballs.  Of course, with a little work, it could fire PepperAmmo… (steeples fingers and begins evil laughter)

Now, the action video!

And in case you’re wondering what the sound clip is when the control laptop fires up, here it is.

“I see you!”  Heh.

(H/T ENDO)

Tam has tips on preparing for emergencies.  It’s something I’ve always done.  (Not so surprising, being the kid of a Depression era child and a kid raised on a farm before rationing was phased out… )  To these tips, I have some to add:

• Your house is bigger than it looks.  You have dead space– behind furniture, unused rooms, crawlspaces, the attic (but please watch the weight), unused cabinets.  Heck, if you have a garage workbench with cabinets underneath you never use, you have tens of cubic feet of storage.  You can put stuff away, just be creative and the space can be found.
• Organize.  Tip 1 doesn’t help if you can’t find anything.  In my house, everything is sorted by type– canned foods, dry foods, liquids, supplies, clothing, etc.
• Hunt around.  There are companies out there that make food designed for long term storage.  There are also companies that make good, cheap water filtration units.  Here’s the UGA guide to what you need.

Now, you don’t have to prepare for Armageddon… but preparing for say, a month without power is a good point to start.  Here is a kit that will feed one person for 60 days.  Two should feed four people for a month, and take up a mere 7 cubic feet of space.  That’s 3.5′ x 2′ x 1′… which is the dead space under a bed.

Alcohol can make you do weird things.  Flirt with barflies, wake up in odd places, even try to perform CPR on possums.

Wait, what?  Dear Lord…  Not to mention that said marsupial had been dead… dead long enough that CPR wasn’t gonna help.  Like I said over at Wyatt’s… mead or ‘shine had to be involved.  I refuse to think about someone drinking both in one night.  (Mead is evil.  I don’t know a single beekeeper– me included– who makes mead… and I know some hard-drinking beekeepers.  Mixing mead and ‘shine would be… disastrous.)  (H/T Sebastian)

Armed citizen shoots axe-wielding robber.  Why include this in a post about drunkards, you ask?  Turns out the guy was trying to rob a junkyard.  No, booze totally wasn’t involved…  Oh, and I found a picture of the perpetrator.

Sebastian, discussing training versus skill in the shooting world:

Shooting is the same. I can spend an afternoon and give someone enough knowledge to go out and become a safe shooter, and that’s really all training can do. Shooting, and shooting safely, is a skill. Skills must be practiced, over and over again, until they are muscle memory. Firearms training is a good thing, because it can impart knowledge, and help you on your way to skill, just like piano lessons can help you learn how to play piano. But proficiency, and safety in the case of shooting, are entirely up to the person to develop. If you aren’t committed, and don’t practice, you’ll never be any good at either piano playing or shooting.

Colonel Cooper also used a musical analogy to describe this– having the object (guitar, piano, gun) does not make you a proficient user (guitarist, pianist, shooter) of the object.  This is why I constantly remind my gunnie friends that they need to practice, and that if they can’t remember their last training session, they need to have one.

Why?  Muscle memory.  It takes almost a thousand repetitions of an action to make it an automatic action that the brain can do without thinking about it.  As the Wikipedia article points out:

As one speaks, one usually does not consciously think about the complex tongue movements, synchronisation with vocal cords and various lip movements that are required to produce phonemes, because of muscle memory. In speaking a language that is not one’s native language, one typically speaks with an accent, because one’s muscle memory is tuned to forming the phonemes of one’s native language, rather than those of the language one is speaking. An accent can be eliminated only by carefully retraining the muscle memory. It is said that it takes about 740 of the same motions for your muscles to “memorize” the movements almost perfectly.

This is also why just going to the range and shooting is almost useless– you must consciously work on the repetitions until you get it right.  If you are repeating a flawed action (flinching, improper grip, slapping the trigger, etc.), you will ingrain that action so that it becomes automatic.  To paraphrase the old drill instructor’s lament: “Learn to do it right, and you’ll do it right every time.  Learn to do it wrong, and you will screw it up until you learn to do it right!”  In that spirit, use this target the next time you train.  (Okay, so these targets might be more useful.  Less funny, but more useful.)

(H/T Uncle for the targets.)

Via Breda, a producer for a radio law show is learning about guns.  Nice article, and has a very positive tone to it.  I also love the fact that the producer wants to face her fear: “I don’t have a direct relationship with guns, and I think that’s one of the reasons I’m afraid of them. And it’s one of the reasons I want to learn more about it.”

If only more people were like her.  But I do have to highlight one quote and respond to it: “She said she’s not necessarily scared of using guns, just scared of the power they have and how she would react to them.”

1) The converse of power is responsibility.  Hence the four rules and the laws governing concealed carry.  You’ve been given power, and you have to accept the resposibility that goes with it.

2) Everybody reacts to guns.  Physically, even expert shooters blink and twitch during shooting.  Emotionally, we all respond.  Gun control advocates respond with anger and fear, and those inside the gun community react with more positive emotions.  Yes, they’re machines, but who doesn’t ooh and aah over a ’65 Mustang, or a fully restored P-47… or a pre-war Hi-Power?

Spot the three levels of win in this photo.

1) Teamwork.  2) Zombies.  3) Red velvet cake.

The only thing that could make this more awesome would be if the groom was dressed like Tallahassee from Zombieland.  The only negative to this cake is… why isn’t there a pile of spent brass and two empty guns lying at the feet of the Mr. and Mrs.?

(H/T Tam)