If you’re going to read one article about this gun control debate…this is the one:
Larry Correia @ Monster Hunter Nation:
I didn’t want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I’ve been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.
A little background for those of you who don’t know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.
I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.
I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.
I have been a firearms instructor, and have taught a lot of people how to shoot defensively with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. For a few years of my life, darn near every weekend was spent at the range. I started out as an assistant for some extremely experienced teachers and I also had the opportunity to be trained by some of the most accomplished firearms experts in the world. The man I stole most of my curriculum from was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces, turned federal agent SWAT team commander. I took classes in everything from wound ballistics (10 hours of looking at autopsy slides) to high-speed cool-guy door-kicking stuff. I’ve worked extensively with military and law enforcement personnel, including force on force training where I played the OpFor (i.e. I got to be the bad guy, because I make an awesome bad guy. You tell me how evil/capable you want me to be, and how hard you want your men to work, and I’d make it happen, plus I can take a beating). Part of this required learning how mass shooters operate and studying the heck out of the actual events.
I have been a competition shooter. I competed in IPSC, IDPA, and 3gun. It was not odd for me to reload and shoot 1,000 rounds in any given week. I fired 20,000 rounds of .45 in one August alone. I’ve got a Remington 870 with approximately 160,000 rounds through it. I’ve won matches, and I’ve been able to compete with some of the top shooters in the country. I am a very capable shooter. I only put this here to convey that I know how shooting works better than the vast majority of the populace.
I have written for national publications on topics relating to gun law and use of force. I wrote for everything from the United States Concealed Carry Association to SWAT magazine. I was considered a subject matter expert at the state level, and on a few occasions was brought in to testify before the Utah State Legislature on the ramifications of proposed gun laws. I’ve argued with lawyers, professors, professional lobbyists, and once made a state rep cry.
Basically for most of my adult life, I have been up to my eyeballs in guns, self-defense instruction, and the laws relating to those things. So believe me when I say that I’ve heard every argument relating to gun control possible. It is pretty rare for me to hear something new, and none of this stuff is new.
Armed Teachers
So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.
Now when I say teachers carrying concealed weapons on Facebook I immediately get a bunch of emotional freak out responses. You can’t mandate teachers be armed! Guns in every classroom! Emotional response! Blood in the streets!
No. Hear me out. The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again.
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.
But this leads to the inevitable shrieking and straw man arguments about guns in the classroom, and then the pacifistic minded who simply can’t comprehend themselves being mandated to carry a gun, or those that believe teachers are all too incompetent and can’t be trusted. Let me address both at one time.
Don’t make it mandatory. In my experience, the only people who are worth a darn with a gun are the ones who wish to take responsibility and carry a gun. Make it voluntary. It is rather simple. Just make it so that your state’s concealed weapons laws trump the Federal Gun Free School Zones act. All that means is that teachers who voluntarily decide to get a concealed weapons permit are capable of carrying their guns at work. Easy. Simple. Cheap. Available now.
Then they’ll say that this is impossible, and give me all sorts of terrible worst case scenarios about all of the horrors that will happen with a gun in the classroom… No problem, because this has happened before. In fact, my state laws allow for somebody with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun in a school right now. Yes. Utah has armed teachers. We have for several years now.
I strongly urge people to read the entire article. And thank you, Curt, for providing this. It answers many of the proposed “solutions” that the gun-control crowd are pushing.
One comment, down the page, asked for the author to provide his own solutions. I had to laugh as the entire piece was about the author’s solution, though the commenter didn’t realize it. I’m sure that our own gun-control people here, who actually take time to read the entire piece, won’t realize it either.
Outstanding find of this article. I wish I could have written it as well. The real enemy as the author states is ignorance. We have seen that displayed in the posts here. I live in a rural town that votes nearly all red. You do not see thieves from the city breaking in to homes here because they know nearly everyone here has a gun that they know how to use to defend themselves.
Deer and elk hunting in Colorado is a lesson in how to prevent crime. If you travel through the camping sites during hunting season, you will find thousands of dollars of gear unsecured out in the open. Some hunters put their tents up for the early season and leave them up for the several months of the hunting seasons. No one steals anything. Is there a special code among hunters or is it the fact that the hunter on the adjacent slope with a .30 scoped rifle may own the gear at that camp? Compare that to camping at a National park. Camps are regularly pilfered if the gear is not locked up! Do only good people go hunting and bad people go camping in National Parks or do you think that the potential for bodily harm deter crime at hunting camps?
I once followed a bull elk into a canyon with the hopes of a good shot. I followed him for hours. When I decided to quit, I found I was out of water and still had miles to get back to camp. I ran on to a hunting camp with a water bag hanging from a tree branch. I carefully laid my rifle on the ground, took out my canteen and raised the canteen and both hands above my head. I slowly turned around and walked slowly to the water bag and filled my canteen with enough water to get back to camp. I was real careful. Knowing that someone has the ability to defend themselves and their property makes all but the truly ignorant careful and cautious.
Well done Curt, thanks.
Mike McDaniel is a former police officer and SWAT leader, and is currently an English teacher in a American high school. He is a “no punches” sort of blogger, who calls it like he sees it, especially when it comes to law enforcement/educational topics.
He currently wrote this article that appeared on PJ Media:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/until-u-s-understands-police-limitations-some-will-put-faith-in-gun-control/
We send our children to schools assuming that the teachers, and the school administration, will be responsible for our kids and keep them safe from all harm. But we have learned that they are not capable of doing that, so the nation made stricter gun laws, installed metal detectors in schools, sealed the windows of the school house so kids could not climb/fall out. We had speakers who lectured us on bullying, which made them quite popular and pretty wealthy. We used the same useless tactic of “duck and cover” that was used to teach kids in the ’50’s how to be safe during an atomic explosion with the same stupid logic that was pushed 60 years ago. And now we hear the demand that we “do something” that will probably have the same lack of results as anything else we as a nation have done. Another school shooting will happen and more cries for even more strict gun laws will be shouted, more demands that we load schools up with non-productive safety standards and more cries that we should be a gun free nation. Can anyone name one thing that we have done just since Columbine that has produced a positive result?
CURT
thank you for giving us LARRY CORREIA, A REAL EXPERT,
and what I retain from him , is to have a person in school, he said a teacher,
I HAD IN MIND A VETERAN WHICH KNOW THAT KIND OF KNOWLEDGE, AND WHY NOT A VETERAN TEACHER?
they deserve a job as they return, and those who are looking to hire cannot afford to be cheap and trying to save on the choice,
BUT A TEACHER WILLING TO BE A CARRY CONCEALED FROM ALL EXCEPT THE TOP PERSON IN THAT SCHOOL, WITH THE SAME TRAINING EXTENSIVE AS MR CORREIA COULD GIVE HIM OR HER, AND REMAIN INCOGNITO AS TO HIS STATUE,
YES SAVE TIME IS THE PRIMARY EFFECT ON THE DEFENSE, WHERE DID I READ THAT TIME IS OF ESSENCE,
THERE IS ONE OTHER NOTE I TOOK IN, THAT IS THAT CHOSEN PERSON, AS SOON AS HE SHE
MAKE THE FIRST MOVE WHICH LET KNOW THE BAD GUY OR GUYS, OF BEING ARMED,
ARE BECOMING INSTANTLY TARGET AND IF THEY DON’T HAVE THE SURE HAND, THE SURE EYES, THE QUICK DECISION TO SHOOT, AN ABILITY THAT NOT ALL HAVE, THEN HIS LIFE IS ON THE LINE,
THAT’S WHY I WAS THINKING OF A PERSON WHO HAVE THE TRAINING IN WARZONE BECAUSE THEY KNOW WHAT IS A LIFE THREATENING DECISION MEAN, EVEN IF THEY WHERE YEARS WITHOUT USING THEIR WEAPON, THEY HAVE DEVELOP THE INSTINCT, THE GUT’S FEELING TO DECIDE TO KILL,
IT HAS TO BE FROM THE FIRST EYE CONTACT, ON THE SITE,
WHICH IS LESS THAN A SECOND ON THE CLOCK, SO TO SAVE HIS OR HER PRECIOUS LIFE
AS A PROTECTOR, A UNIQUE PROTECTOR, WHERE ALL PETRIFIED HUMANS ON THE SCENE OF TERROR WILL LOOK FOR ANY ORDER COMING TO THEM ALSO.
WHAT A SPECIAL PERSON IS THAT ONE TO GET THE JOB,
and that person to be protected from all justice pursue,
in the time of his work even if he kill or miss or whatever happen, he is given total law to move as he please,
and free from the federal scrutiny. in writing
and I don’t know if one gun is enough for him to do job,
if the bad guy is accompany, and if they have
more powerful weapon,
I don’t know about other BLOGGERS,
BUT MY MIND WAS GOING TO THE TRAGEDY OF THE CHILDREN
WHEN I answered on the other previous comment,
but I realize there is all different scenarios to evaluate on a crime stage,
like LARRY CORREIA MENTIONNED,
AND other also might be concentrating on the last tragedy,
which add up to the extensive demand from the chosen guardian,
which is versatility, of any other scenario,
“A big obstacle to commonsense gun control is the Right’s false historical narrative that the Founders wanted an armed American public that could fight its own government.”
This article shows why the left is wrong on gun control
@ilovebeeswarzone:
1) Alternet = garbage and dishonest moonbat
2) The majority of Constitutional scholars agree the 2nd Amend is an individ ual right and that the founding fathers wanted an armed populace.
Hard Right
hi,
I am trying to understand your previous words,
I don’t believe that I mention that word ; alternet, because I don’t know it,
I never heard it,
bye
@ilovebeeswarzone:
Hi bees. It’s the site the article was linked to. Think rabid, foaming at the mouth leftist. That’s who runs the site. Also, that describes Robert Parry, who wrote the article. Well that and dishonest historical revisionist.
His article is little more than a collection of flimsy, mostly unsupported claims. I noticed all the far left sites are posting it. Mindless “groupthink” without the thinking that is.
Here’s an example of his “brilliance”.
“In the United States today, there is a massive infrastructure for spreading lies and distortions–a right-wing media machine that reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to cable TV, talk radio and the Internet.
By simple repetition, this machine can transform any crazy theory or bald-faced lie into something that many Americans believe.”
Ummm yeah, that is why people are moving further to the left and re-elected obama twice. He is a very mentally ill individual.
Hard Right
I never been on that site ALTERNET, IS IT THE LINK FROM GREG
OVER YOUR COMMENT?
YES THE LIBS CANNOT TAKE ALL THE TRAFIC COMING ON CONSERVATIVES SITES TO EDUCATE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ONLY ON THE DEMOCRATE SITE USUALY,
NOW THEY WANT TO KNOW FROM THE TRUTH AND ONLY CONSERVATIVES HAS THE INFO,
WHICH IS THE REAL MC COY, AS WE SAY IN FRENCH, MEANING THE REAL DEMOLITION OF DEMOCRAT TALKING HEADS ON GUNS.
BYE
Bees, it is the link in greg’s post. I wouldn’t bother going there as it is for people like greg.
It seems that the left, having gotten crushed by the common sense thinking of the unwashed masses, has decided to return to a battle they have previously lost- the intent of our founding fathers.
So Mr. Parry trots out his revisionist tripe to give them something to regurgitate in debates. It’s spreading like wildfire to the loony left sites. And they have the nerve to say we need others to tell us what to think.
Hard Right
I think they are doing that crazy dance on purpose to make CONSERVATIVE ANGRY
so that one CONSERVATIVE would create an event out of anger,
but they don’t think that the best self restraint is on the side of the CONSERVATIVES,
WE never heard a CONSERVATIVES SAY, VOTE FOR REVENGE,
OR , IF THEY BRING A KNIFE , BRING A GUN,
we know where are those LIBTARDS who make fits uncontroled, and that link show it,
no I wont go see it, those are not link interesting for me, they are derange and promote sicko to come out of their hole, those link incite people to be angry, and the libtard are an angry mob already.
it tel us A LOT OF THEM MORE THAN THEY WANT US TO KNOW.
BYE
@Hard Right, #9:
You’re not taking on the article with any sort of a rational rebuttal, are you? You’re not denying the historical facts it references. You’re simply attacking the source, and suggesting that people not read it, because you don’t like what’s being said:
Good idea. Allow teachers who want to be armed to be armed. Now THERE’S a sensible thought.
The notion of REQUIRING teachers to be armed, as some have suggested, is absurd. It assumes that all teachers opt for the “kill” option in a “kill or be killed” situation. Did it ever occur to those folks that some teachers would NOT fire a gun even if it meant certain death for themselves?
In addition to the voluntary arming of teachers, I would add placing police and/or National Guard personnel in every school. This will be costly, but incredibly effective on more levels than possibly thwarting the occasional psycho shooter that emerges once in a blue moon. It will go a long way to instilling in young children that law enforcement and military are POSITIVE members of society. Inner-city kids won’t wind up hating police, because they’ll know the NICE police officer they’ve said hello to every morning at their schools since they were five.
A cop or soldier in school would also ensure fewer gangfights or violent acts that take place every day, but because they don’t involve mass murder, we don’t hear about them.
Those two aspects, taken together, would go a long way to solving the problem.
GREG
DEMONSTRATING HOW IT HELP THE GOVERNMENT YOU SAID THAT,
well is in it suppose to help the citizens instead who rebel because the GOVERNMENT IMPLEMENT TO MUCH ON THEM
AND THAT IS WHY THE FRAMERS WROTE IT TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE AGAINST ABUSE FROM
GOVERNMENT
NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND,
MILITIA IS FOR THE PROTECTION OF PEOPLE, ORDER BY PEOPLE NOT GOVERNMENT OWNING A MILITIA, THEY AS YOU SEE MORE WITH THIS TRAGEDY, THEY ARE MORE PROTECTED THAN THE PEOPLE NOW,
GOOD LORD WE HAVE THE GUN CARRIER CONCEALED MINGLING IN CROWD IN ANY PLACE THEY ALSO NEED TO GO, TO BUY THINGS, BECAUSE IF AN CRIMINAL INTENT TO DO ARM WITH A WEAPON , THE GOOD GUN CARRIERS WILL ACT AT ONCE, IF THEY ARE THERE.
and don’t let anyone forget that the GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE ONE WHO HELP YOU WHEN THE NEED COME,
ASK THE STATEN ISLAND PEOPLE,
NO IT’S THE PEOPLE CARRYING WEAPON.
LOOK AT THE LOOTERS AT THE DEVASTATED STATEN ISLAND,
Dino
you got it perfect
thank you.