Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

The dude in the SUV has just killed the other dude lying there on the street, and he's going to shoot the third dude, the one who's taking the photo, through both legs, shattering one of his femurs.

The story turned up in my Xhitter feed the other day as a "OMFG CRIME IN PORTLAND!!!" headline (except without the actual headline, of course,  because Elmo don't roll that way anymore...).

It linked to this story in the digital version of our "local newspaper", which you can't read because it's behind a fucking paywall - local news, my ass - but trust me; it plays all the hits; it mentions "downtown violence", "unrest", "drug use" and "homeless".

In the Xhitter comments we filled in the last of the bingo card: "Democrat city" and "gun control" (as in "how's that gun control working out for you now, libs?!?")

Y'know what it DIDN'T mention?

"Financier". (or "Banker" or "Rich Prick" - y'know, coded words for "wealthy white dude"), or

"Legally owned handgun".

 Because that kinda kills the whole Portland Is Over - Downtown Hellscape Edition vibe, dunnit?

You can't gin up the whole Scary Doper (Probably Colored) Hoboes theme if the nutter shooting is being done by some rich white normie with a legally-obtained concealed carry permit who's just a fucking hair-trigger asshole with an anger problem and a round under the fucking hammer, amiright?

So it's critical to rope in all that other stuff, so the rubes and MAGAts and the other FAUX-addicted ClackaCrackers can continue seamlessly hating on Portland, liberals, and the smelly poor.

But I might as well ask a dog to stop licking it's balls as expect the so-called "news" media to stop throwing this red meat to the numbskulls. I've been ringing this bell a loog, looooong time. It does no good at all. The 2nd Amendment has become why people like this rich fuckstick get to drive around fully loaded and kill people.

And, short of solving the sort of people who keep voting for "2nd Amendment Rights" over everything else?

It's not going to be solved, either.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition)

 

Over at Nancy Nall's place the inevitable discussion about who gets to get shot down in the streets (grocery stores, rub-and-tug-shops...) because freedum!!! 

One of the commentors made the following remark:

“…let’s give the olde white guys credit in 1787: they’re thinking about muzzleloading black powder rifles…”

To which I replied that I think it’s even simpler than that; these guys were thinking with their wallets. And, to a great extent, their “republican” ideology. It wasn't the weapons. It was the fiscals and the politics.

The thing the gunsuckers always elide is the first section of that amendment: “A well-regulated militia…” The rich guys who wrote the foundational documents 1) were appalled at the expense of a standing army (and navy, which is insane when you think of how important maritime commerce was to the infant U.S., but, Jefferson, FFS…) and 2) were deeply committed to the idea that a standing army was a “danger to liberty”. All those soldiers with no citizen cred, just waiting for the demagogue to come along and coup with them? 

No way, Citizen Jose’!

So their idea was that the Good People of the country would flock to the standards when danger threatened and form “the nation in arms” (and keeping in mind that their model were the colonial militias, which largely kept their weapons (and almost all their propellant – the black powder) in a local “magazine” where it would be issued when that alarm was sounded).

So it wasn’t even the notion of every swinging richard running around with a military-grade firearm that would have bugged them. It was the notion that that firearm was for using on their fellow citizens for random whackadoodle reasons and that wasn’t a good reason to keep those firearms locked up in the magazines.

And let’s not EVEN go into the notion that they wanted every Joe and Molly to have a bang-stick to prevent “tyranny” coming from the new U.S. government, because the moment that happens Shay’s and the whiskey rebels will need a moment to whip the fuck up on your head.

Nope. The current firearms priapism is a symptom of the prion disease that has eaten the brains of waaaaayyyyy too many Americans, including nearly all “conservatives”.

 You'd think that at this point...

 But, no. I mean, Sandy Hook! Rando homicidal looney guns down adorable kiddies. That doesn't shake you? You insist it was a fake, or "crisis actors", or whatever?

The crazy has gone too deep, and there's no digging it out now. 

(And the title of this post comes from Jim Wright's series on this whole nonsense. They're archived here and are all worth a read, as is his "Bang Bang Sanity" essay that discusses some commonsense ideas that will help put a lid on this nonsense. 

Not that We the People will.)

More fucking thoughts and prayers

I see it's time to drag this one out.

Again.

I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.

Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.

Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.

So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.

But who gives an actual fuck?

Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.

So, fuck it.

Here's a fucking cute picture of a cute fucking cat.

Bearing Arms, Badly

One of the things about the Second Amendment crowd that kind of irks the shit out of me is how bad they are at this "keep and bear arms" stuff. Today's case-in-point of an Armed But Stupid Fucking Citizenry is Ms. Jamie Gilt of Jacksonville, Florida:

"Jamie Gilt, 31, who posts about firearms on her social media accounts was driving through Putnam County, Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday in her truck when she was wounded after the toddler picked up the weapon and shot her in the back. Her four-year-old son picked up a loaded .45 semi-automatic handgun from the back seat, pointed it towards his mother and pulled the trigger. The powerful round went through the front seat and passed through Gilt's body. Gilt and her son had been traveling to pick up a horse from a relative when the accident happened."

The weapon used by young deadeye when he put one through mommy's eight-ring was a "Kimber" M1911 knock-off, and that in itself makes me really pretty pissed off.

Because the M1911 and its variants may be the most mechanically safe handguns ever constructed.

Unlike most semiauto pistols that have no more than a single pushbutton or trigger safety the M1911 has three: a thumb safety (which is the equivalent of most modern semiauto's pushbotton/trigger safety), a half-cock safety (a very old-school sort of mechanism that was really a 19th Century military firearm hangover) and a grip safety, which requires a firm stock-weld with the firing hand to allow the hammer to fall.

The M1911 is a damn safe weapon, is what I'm saying. Even moreso if you follow Rule 1 of Handgun Safety; Never Chamber a Round Until You Are Ready To Fire.

It's really that simple, and the fraction of a second it takes to work the slide is not going to make half a nickel's worth of difference in "defending yourself". If the person threatening you has the drop on you to the extent that you can't chamber a round? You're pretty much fucked, anyway. But no more fucked than you are walking around with a live round under the hammer, as Mommy Gilt found out when little Chuckles picked up her hogleg and ventilated her ass.

In order to enable her spawn to put a live joe through her Mommy Dumbass must have, at the very least, had a live round in the chamber. The rest of the sequence is hard to figure out. Assuming the the hammer was uncocked little Nemo must have cocked it, which seems unlikely, so strike two against the Stupid Mother of the Year; she must have cocked it.

The other thing that the kid had to do was somehow grip the stock hard enough to engage the grip safety, which seems hard to believe for a four-year-old. Had Mommy gimmicked the grip safety somehow? If so, strike three, Mommy, and you're out with a bullet through the back.

So it's not their guns I fear. It's them. These fucking people. They're like an avalanche of Stupid, and they're Armed.

Did you think of that, Mister Madison? I sure as hell wish you had.

Update 3/23: So even in Florida you can be too goddamn stupid to carry a firearm. Turns out that the Mother of the Year is going to be charged under some kind of child-endangerment statute (I think...). But the new explanation - that Mombo had her hogleg lying around on one of the front seats, it slid under the seat (or possibly through the seat between the back and the cushion) into the back footwell where little Bubbles had unbuckled his carseat belt - still begs the question. Dumbass still had to have had a round under the hammer. I can't imagine that the little bastard knew to thumb the hammer back so the hammer must have BEEN back and the thumb safety off. And how the heck the kid managed to engage the grip safety I still don't know. The whole thing stinks, frankly, and just reminds me that this woman has NO business within the same grid square as a firearm.

Straining at bullets, swallowing glaciers

A friend of mine linked to this video:

Fighting Back Against A School Shooter

Fighting back against a school shooter:

Posted by TheBlaze on Monday, March 7, 2016

It's apparently a clip from a much longer training film that argues for a more active, aggressive defense against school shooters.

And y'know what? In a perfect world I'd be all about this.

For one thing, the whole "duck and cover" response to danger kind of pisses me off. Run away? Fine. Fight? If you want to. But cowering in hopes of being overlooked? Seems like a pretty miserable way to die, if that's how you're gonna go.

But.

We don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where we have to make choices about how we spend our resources.

And I have two problems with this little video.

First of all, it's a school shooter video. It assumes from the jump that school shooters are a thing, a horrible, omnipresent, immediate, clear-and-present danger thing that must be aggressively confronted. I talked this to fucking death damn near ten years ago, but as horrible as the cable news people try and make it, the simple fact is that mass murder just isn't that big a threat in the US in 2016. IT's not like dying of dysentery was on the Oregon Trail back in the day.

You're more likely to get run over by a bus than you are to be killed by a madman with a gun in your school, kids. Seriously; Uncle Chief has done the math. Turns out that about 14 kids a year get squarshed by those ol' yella-dog buses. But about 297 people total - that's adults AND kids - got shot in school between 1980 and 2012 when Sandy Hook brought the whole "school shooter" thing back into fashion. That's about 9.3 people a year; the third of a person was either a really little kid or possibly a Donald Trump voter, but, whatever.

So throwing a lot of money at school shootings is like throwing money at ballistic missile defense or alien invasions; not a good return-on-investment thing.

Second of all, while it looks and feels nice, I think it completely mistakes the point of the "lockdown huddle".

The trainer of the video assumes that the point of the huddle is "protection" or something. He's right...assuming that the "main problem" is trying to cut down the casualty count and not actually control the kids' panic.

If I had a bunch of troops I had confidence in, and felt were both cool-headed and trusted each other I'd use his methods. My problem would be that...that's what I'd do with trained, confident troops. I'd trust them to stay still and silent until they had to take aggressive action. That's what good troops do in an ambush drill, which is basically what this is; a plan to ambush the shooter.

My problem would be that if I didn't trust my troops, or trust them to trust each other, spreading them out makes it much more difficult for 1) them to combat their own panic and 2) me to control them and prevent them from doing something panicky and dangerous.

So spreading them out makes it MUCH more likely that the most panicked one will bolt for the door and try to escape, or start screaming and crying, thus both alerting the nutter that we're there in the room and, possibly, unlocking the door for him.

It's a great idea, but it requires a HELL of a lot of training and a really high level of confidence and aggression in the kids.

Meaning that to do this successfully you'd have to...you knew it, right; spend a hell of a lot of time and money training kids and teachers to do this.

It seems to me that for some reason We the People are more and more inclined to do this stuff; worry and fret ridiculously about madman bullets, tiny, horrible problems that have a miniscule probability of harming us...while ignoring things like the melting glaciers that warn us of global climate change that have a real serious likelihood of fucking up our entire world.

I don't know why we do this. It kind of pisses me off, and I wish we'd stop. But it seems to be a people thing and no amount of pissing and moaning on my part will do anything about it.

Some ruminations on nutter shootings

Look, people. Death is all around you. We're BORN owing God - or Nature, or whatever - a death. As my old drill sergeant used to say, the single most fucked up thing about Life is that NOBODY gets out of it alive.

If you're going to get all freaky worrying about your safety or groveling on your knees begging God to save you because anti-abortion propaganda drove some loony to shoot up medical clinics, or because some asshole with a religious mania, or a nasty personality, shot up his workplace's Christmas party you're worrying about the wrong thing.

An e. coli bug, or a drunk driver, or that third goddamn Hostess Ho-ho you just ate is gonna kill you long before some Islamic nut or some rightwing manic.

So...you could get all freaky about what seems like a mad orgy of death and destruction and the end of times and OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!

Or. You can listen to an old Army sergeant.

You're gonna die. Yep. Some day you're dead meat. Pinin' for the fjords. Ceased to be. Expired.

But.

Until then every day you live you are a gift of love.

So hug your children. Drink something strange, and adventurous. Sit out under the stars and watch the universe wheel overhead. Hold someone dear to you very, very close and still, so still that all you can hear is your heartbeat and theirs. Kiss their skin softly, sweetly, and inhale their scent and stop and remember; every day you live you are a gift of love.

Someday you will die.

But not today.

And speaking of mistakes...

...the latest round of stupidity from this season's GOP candidate field comes from surprisingly ignorant Ben Carson, the climate change/evolution-denying physician.

"I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.'"

Okay, fine; you first, asshole. I'm going out the window.

This latest incident of what Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station likes to call Bang Bang Crazy has brought all the usual idiots out of the woodwork to recommend that the solution to moar gunz is...wait for it...moar gunz! Because...

Good guys with guns! Amirite, hunh? Hunh?!

Sheesh.

Look, I may have been just a simple grunt medic, but I was smart enough to figure out that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a fucking battery six with HE-quick in effect. Except you can't fucking do that in a shopping mall or a theatre.

And short of that, you're pretty much just tossing the dice.

Teaching a human being to take effective deadly action is a damn difficult thing. We spend weeks and months training Joe and Molly to do that and the statistics show that we only succeed in about 30-50% of the time. Most people - even most trained soldiers - react to danger by getting their heads down and trying to stay in defilade.

But let's assume that the training works and our hero heads towards the sound of shooting.

What does he or she encounter?

Fucking chaos, that's what. The nutter is the center of it, shooting left and right...but everyone else is amplifying the chaos; screaming, running, dying...it's total mayhem. Into this comes our hero, trained but not experienced - one hopes - in this sort of bloody mess. How's that likely gonna work out?

First of all, one of the hardest parts of learning to be lethal in combat is making sense of it. We humans are used to an orderly world, a world that moves in a linear sort of way at a relatively leisurely pace. Suddenly - and with our own reactions and judgements spazzing as adrenaline turns our brains into an arcing circuit board and our firing arm into a licorice whip - we step into a world gone mad.

Is this guy running screaming at us the shooter in a kamikaze rage or a target trying to escape? Is the dude over by the wall still and silent with terror or does he have his pistol down by his leg waiting to fire again?

Noise, random movement, incoming fire...it takes an assload of training to even begin to sort this stuff out, and without experience the likelihood of sorting it wrong is damned likely; that's why we try and make veterans into our combat NCOs. Because they've had to sort through this gibbering chaos and hopefully - seeing as they're still alive - have gotten it right.

But there's another, even more complicating and difficult factor here.

This isn't a straightforward military red-on-blue. There's at least four factions; the "bad guy" shooter(s), the prospective "good guy" shooter(s) - if more than one made more fraught by having no connection or experience working together, meaning just as likely to mistake each other for the "bad guy" - the people being shot at...and the police.

The coppers have NO idea who the "bad guy" is. To them anyone with a weapon out is just as likely to be the murderer, which has, in previous massacres, nearly led to blue-on-blue gunfire.

So. You have a nutter firing right and left. You have "good guys with guns" firing at the nutter...but also possibly each other, seeing as unless they were on-scene when the shooting started don't know which armed citizen is the nutter. You have the coppers, when they arrive, shooting at the nutter...and possibly at the "good guys", since they have no way of telling that they are good guys when they roll up.

I'm sorry. That's fucking nutzoid land. Makes the Battle of Ia Drang look like a sorority pillow-fight.

The idea that We the People are happy with one of these nutter shootings happening every month or so seems just as nutzoid. If you told me that without my knowing anything about this country I'd laugh in your face.

At the same time I have the utmost confidence in my fellow citizens to do absolutely nothing to change anything. And that's just really, really depressing.

Update 10/12: As you might expect, Jim Wright takes down the Mad Doctor more completely than I ever could.

American Skin

In case you're wondering what prompted the violent posts of the past several days, this is my daughter's classroom Friday, the very same day that a nutter took his Bushmaster .223 to a school very like it, and a classroom very like it, and killed children and teachers very like the ones you are seeing.

Now speaking generally I have never understood the "need" for anyone to own one of these military-style weapons. Frankly, an old-school Ruger 10/22 would seem perfectly capable of killing as many first-graders as you need to feed your sickness and has the added feature of being terrific for hunting squirrels when society collapses in the wake of the Zombie Apocalypse.

And I've never understood the idea that you can't legislate the type and number of arms that We the People can bear. How many fuckin' GI Joe look-alike Bushmaster .223's do you need? Christ, one is too many. The fuckin' deer and squirrels have yet to shoot back. And cricket bats and Winchesters work just fine on the zombies; you've seen Shaun of the Dead, right? What, a bolt-action Mauser isn't cool enough for ya?

But far beyond and above all the bloviating, this is what matters to me. She is half of my skin in the game.

If she, and millions like her, can be 0.001% less likely to capped by some nutter with a bad attitude and an autoloading rifle by the hard graft of separating the two then to me the benefit is worth the cost. Mental health? Don't make me laugh. I'm an old sergeant, and I do simple, easy, and certain. I know with dead solid surety that it's simpler, easier, and more certain to take the weapon out of the hands of the asshole nutter than take the nutter out of asshole nutter with Prozac and a couch.

I don't pretend to have an unbiased opinion on the subject. If you're coming here for that you are in the wrong place. On this subject I am in full-rant mode.

I am tired of the lies about tyranny prevented and the evasion of real death and maiming done to innocents. I am tired of people with vested interests in weapons lying about how regulation equals confiscation. I am tired of the endless blaming of the nutters and not the admission of how much more difficult it would be for them to indulge their murderous nuttery if they had to do it with a kitchen knife.

But to me what is the most important thing is that these children, that MY child, benefit from increasing the chance that the next nutter won't be able to lay his hands on a Bushmaster .223 before he walks through the door of this classroom.

If this be tyranny, I will make the most of it.

Requiem for Kindergartners

Away with us, he's going,
The solemn-eyed;
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hill-side.
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast;
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than
he can understand.

~ W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child

I really cannot speak further on this subject.

On the madness of mixing madness and autoloading weaponry I cannot convince anyone who cannot be convinced by dead children.

Mr. Yeats has said it already, and better than I ever will.

This Pretty Much Sums Up The "Gun Control Debate"

Wherein I am prescient.

Two days ago I wrote this:

"Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that. This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say."

And sure enough, like a deadly Fairie Queen in a pantomime, comes another.

I cannot really add to what I said at the end of the comments for the earlier nutter-shooting: "There will not be any change in the nutter-shooting situation until some advocacy group - "Mothers Against Autoloading Weapons" ("Maaw" or some damn thing) - begins doing what MADD did for drunk driving and jams the 2nd Amendment sideways up the NRA's ass.

Period."

But, honestly? I'm betting you that this will be off the heavy-rotation news cycle by NEXT Friday and forgotten by next week.

Sigh. Fuckin' people...