A graduate student was stabbed and decapitated in a restaurant on the campus of Virginia Tech this week. It’s been a decade since Columbine, a couple years since the mass murders at VaTech, and just a year since the killing at Northern Illinois University. What have we done to fix the problem? Nothing. Hand-wringing and memorials to the victims don’t help protect our young students.
The whole idea of gun-free zones must be eliminated from our collective thought or we’ll just continue to see more such tragedies. We must be allowed to take responsibility for our own protection. Campus cops obviously aren’t up to the job.
Today my family had an experience that should wake up other parents, as it did me.
As she does every day, my wife picked our kids up from their schools. Just after picking up my son, a 13-year-old who naturally thinks he’s invincible, they drove past an apartment complex where a rather nasty fight had erupted. My son started yelling at my wife to stop the car. He wanted to get out and stop the fight and, at one point, yelled at his mom that this was why she needed to carry a gun (she doesn’t…yet). He was rather irate when she did the right thing (in this situation), pulling the car into a safe place before calling 911 but not intervening directly. Now those of you who have been exercising your 2nd Amendment right for any length of time know the foolishness of my son’s reaction, but in his naive, “I’m Clint Eastwood” (insert whoever’s current in movies…Vin Diesel maybe?) mentality, my son didn’t. When I arrived home my wife apprised me of the situation so, after supper, I sat the kids down and had “the talk.” No, not that talk. The one I should have had with them earlier. We discussed the huge responsibility it is to carry with you the power of life and death, and how easy it can be to make the wrong decision. When he saw the fight, already in progress, did he know who started it? Who was in the right? If the combatants were armed? And so on. Anyone who has been through a basic CCW course knows the scenarios. My son, of course, didn’t. After going through a number of them with the kids, he became rather thoughtful and wanted to chew it over for a bit. I obviously have more work to do with the kids. We need to cover how they should react in a dangerous situation (e.g., don’t yell, “Dad, shoot him!”). My kids have been to the range with me often, so they have the skills, but do they have the knowledge and judgment? Nope. And that’s my responsibility. So parents, don’t put it off or think your kids will just pick it up from you automatically. You must take the time to talk with your kids about what it means to be a responsible armed citizen.
What happens when you disarm society…including your police? The cops flee from a rioting crowd they should be controlling. Watching the decline of England from a strong nation to one in which something like this can happen has been truly sad.
Read more…
Think you’ll be safe calling 911 when you’re attacked in your home? Brittany Zimmerman did, but police didn’t show up for nearly an hour. By that time she was dead.
Although the dispatcher claimed later to have heard nothing, the 911 tape captured screams, gasps and what sounds like a struggle, according to the court documents.
Your safety is your responsibility. This poor girl did what she had been taught to do and paid for it with her life. It is truly saddening to see the number of good people who die every day because they believe someone else—like the police—will protect them.
Read more…
A small town in Massachusetts is considering the idea of teaching children to fight back against armed attackers in the classroom.
Georgetown Police Chief James E. Mulligan told FOXNews.com the proposed technique was intended to be a “last ditch” thing to be used in cases where a gunman has been able to thwart police and get inside a classroom alone with students.
At least they’re moving outside the victim mentality which hampers real security in our schools. We should certainly teach our kids to defend themselves. This, however, is the wrong tack. A child with a book or backpack has a very low likelihood of thwarting a determined attacker who has a gun. The correct response is to allow concealed carry permit holders—staff and parents—to carry their own weapons on school campuses. As it stands, the only people in our schools who have guns are the bad guys, who ignore gun-free zone laws. Allowing responsible, licensed citizens to be armed on campus will only increase the safety of our children.
Read more…
A breath of fresh air and sanity from across the pond. It’s sad that it took the massacre in Mumbai to bring about a piece like this in a major British paper. Maybe they’ll come around to reason after all. Some day.
Personally, I’m glad I have the Second Amendment on my side. I exercise it every day and wish more of my fellow Americans did as well.
A company in New Jersey is coming out with a small, single-shot “Palm Pistol” which is intended to be easy for the elderly or disabled to use. While I do believe this market segment has a need for reliable self-defense, this just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. A single shot just isn’t going to cut the mustard in many situations. Such a gun would certainly be better than nothing some of the time, but for just a little more money (less than $500) you can get a decent .380 semi-automatic which has a reasonable trigger pull, acceptable power (with hollow point ammunition), and low recoil. Those characteristics would provide a much better self-defense weapon for most of this market.
Read more…
In an interesting development, a group of India’s wealthy have filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to protect them from the terrorists in Mumbai.
It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens’ right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.
According to some reports (like this one), there were armed police forces in the area who simply cowered during the attack and refused to challenge the terrorists. So it does seem some, ahem, improvements are certainly in order. But the real problem is that the citizens of India have abrogated all responsibility for their protectiion to the government. Government police forces cannot, however, be omnipresent and so can’t prevent or protect from all such attacks. Individuals must be capable of defending themselves and must have the mindset to do so instilled within. A disarmed populace is nothing but a herd of sheep with no defense against the wolves that will inevitably attack.
Despite “expert” security the hotels in Mumbai were an easy target for terrorists. Why is this so, when hotels have increasingly come under attack, particularly in Asia? The experts seem to be throwing their hands up.
P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said at a news conference over the weekend that he had directed his company’s hotels to step up security after the Islamabad bombing. The Oberoi banned anyone from parking in front of its hotel here for fear that a car bomb could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby, a risk at many hotels.
But those protections did not deter the attackers, who entered the Oberoi on foot.
Mr. Oberoi questioned whether any hotel could defend against such an assault.
Well, certainly not the Oberoi. Their “security” officers are unarmed! Now how does Mr. Oberoi expect his staff to protect his customers if they aren’t even armed? By the time the government could respond, the situation was already completely out of hand. All they could do is clean up the mess and count bodies.
There really is a simple solution: trust ordinary people. Fortunately, here in the U.S., most states do. The principle is enshrined in the Second Amendment and lived out by those of us who choose to carry arms (and further choose to live in states that allow concealed carry). A disarmed populace is nothing but a nation of victims. Would the attacks have been thwarted if there had been armed security officers and citizens? Not necessarily, of course, but it could have made a significant difference. An armed civilian may not survive such an attack, but it’s certain at this point that a couple hundred unarmed victims did not.
The officer was about to clean his gun after giving his daughter a safety lesson! Apparently he skipped class when they covered the first rule of gun safety: treat every gun as if it loaded (until you personally verify that it is not). Good grief! Now the gun grabbers are going to yammer away again about how unsafe guns are.