by Larry Correia
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 machine guns, suppressors, 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 Columbine 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.
When I was a CCW instructor, I decided that I wanted more
teachers with skin in the game, so I started a program where I would teach
anybody who worked at a school for free. No charge. Zip. They still had to pay
the state for their background check and fingerprints, but all the instruction
was free. I wanted more armed teachers in my state.
I personally taught several hundred
teachers. I quickly discovered that pretty much every single school in my state
had at least one competent, capable, smart, willing individual. Some schools
had more. I had one high school where the principal, three teachers, and a
janitor showed up for class. They had just had an event where there had been a
threat against the school and their resource officer had turned up AWOL. This
had been a wake up call for this principal that they were on their own, and he
had taken it upon himself to talk to his teachers to find the willing and
capable. Good for them.
After Virginia Tech, I started
teaching college students for free as well. They were 21 year old adults who
could pass a background check. Why should they have to be defenseless?
None of these students ever needed to stop a mass shooting, but I’m happy
to say that a couple of rapists and muggers weren’t so lucky, so I consider my
time well spent.
Over the course of a couple years I
taught well over $20,000 worth of free CCW classes. I met hundreds and hundreds
of teachers, students, and staff. All of them were responsible adults who
understood that they were stuck in target rich environments filled with
defenseless innocents. Whether they liked it or not, they were the first line
of defense. It was the least I could do.
Permit holders are not cops. The
mistake many people make is that they think permit holders are supposed to be
cops or junior danger rangers. Not at all. Their only responsibility is simple.
If someone is threatening to cause them or a third person serious bodily harm,
and that someone has the ability, opportunity, and is acting in a manner which
suggest they are a legitimate threat, then that permit holder is allowed to use
lethal force against them.
As of today the state legislatures
of Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are looking at revamping their existing laws
so that there can be legal guns in school. For those that are worried these
teachers will be unprepared, I’m sure there would be no lack of instructors in
those states who’d be willing to teach them for free.
For everyone, if you are sincere in your wish to protect our
children, I would suggest you call your state representative today and demand
that they allow concealed carry in schools.
Gun Free Zones
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people.
Period.
Think about it. You are a violent,
homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected
loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals
is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all
these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes
Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies,
up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is
a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is
wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.
The only people who obey No Guns
signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on
rampages.
I testified before the Utah State
Legislature about the University of Utah’s gun ban the day after the Trolley
Square shooting in Salt Lake City. Another disaffected loser scumbag started
shooting up this mall. He killed several innocent people before he was engaged
by an off duty police officer who just happened to be there shopping. The off
duty Ogden cop pinned down the shooter until two officers from the SLCPD came
up from behind and killed the shooter. (turned out one of them was a customer
of mine) I sent one of my employees down
to Trolley Square to take a picture of the shopping center’s front doors. I
then showed the picture to the legislators. One of the rules was NO GUNS
ALLOWED.
The man that attacked the midnight
showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose
from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He
attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED.
There were four mass killing attempts this week. Only one
made the news because it helped the agreed upon media narrative.
- Oregon. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter confronted by permit holder. Shooter commits suicide. Only a few casualties.
- Texas. NOT a gun free zone. Shooter killed immediately by off duty cop. Only a few casualties.
- Connecticut. GUN FREE ZONE. Shooters kills until the police arrive. Suicide. 26 dead.
- China. GUN FREE COUNTRY. A guy with a KNIFE stabs 22 children.
And here is the nail in the coffin for Gun Free Zones. Over
the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every
single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a
place where guns were supposedly not allowed.
The Media
Every time there is a mass shooting
event, the vultures launch. I find it absolutely fascinating. A bunch of people
get murdered, and the same usual suspects show up with the same tired proposals
that we’ve either tried before or logic tells us simply will not work. They
strike while the iron is hot, trying to push through legislation before there
can be coherent thought. We’ve seen this over and over and over again. We saw
it succeed in England. We saw it succeed in Australia. We’ve seen it succeed
here before.
Yet when anyone from my side
responds, then we are shouted at that we are blood thirsty and how dare we
speak in this moment of tragedy, and we should just shut our stupid mouths out
of respect for the dead, while they are free to promote policies which will
simply lead to more dead… If the NRA says something they are bloodthirsty
monsters, and if they don’t say something then their silence is damning guilt.
It is hypocritical in the extreme, and when I speak out against this I am
called every name in the book, I want dead children, I’m a cold hearted monster
(the death threats are actually hilarious). If I become angry because they are
promoting policies which are tactically flawed and which will do the exact
opposite of the stated goals, then I am a horrible person for being angry.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be allowed to own guns at all.
But that’s not why I want to talk
about the media. I want to talk about the
media’s effect on the shooters.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of
these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching
bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how
the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile.
The vast majority (last I saw it was
over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years.
They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative
years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected,
have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They
are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking
back at their peer group.
These people want to make a
statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to
make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that
they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in
front of your nose.
If you can kill enough people at one
time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become
the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a
celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell,
the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will
drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your
actions, and he’ll even shed a single
manly tear.
You are a star.
Strangely enough, this is one of the
only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news
should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the
paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or
violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people
participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the
killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and
his struggles.
And then the cycle repeats, as the
next disaffected angry loner takes notes.
They should not be glamorized. They
should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not
powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be
remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize
them faster.
Mental Health Issues
And right here I’m going to show why
I’m different than the people I’ve been arguing with the last few days. I am
not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge
of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers
enough to know how to fight them better.
So since I don’t have enough
first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not
going to comment… Oh please, if only
some of the people I’ve been arguing with who barely understand that the
bullets come out the pointy end of the gun would just do the same.
Gun Control Laws
As soon as there is a tragedy there
comes the calls for “We have to do something!” Sure, the something may
not actually accomplish anything as far as solving whatever the tragedy was or
preventing the next one, but that’s the narrative. Something evil happened, so we have to do something, and preferably we
have to do it right now before we think about it too hard.
The left side of the political
spectrum loves it - some gun control. Gun control is historically extremely
unpopular in red state and purple state America, and thus very hard to pass bit
stuff, but there’s a century’s accumulation of lots and lots of small ones.
There have been a handful of major federal laws passed in the United States
relating to guns, but the majority of really strict gun control has primarily
been enacted in liberal dominated urban areas. There are over 20,000 gun laws
on the books, and I have no idea how many pages of regulations from the BATF
related to the production and selling of them. I’ve found that the average American is extremely
uneducated about what gun laws already exist, what they actually do, and
even fundamental terminology, so I’m going to go through many of the things
I’ve seen argued about over the last few days and elaborate on them one by one.
I will leave out the particularly
crazy things I was confronted with, including the guy who was in favor of
mandating “automatic robot gun turrets” in schools. Yes. Heaven forbid we let a
teacher CCW, so let’s put killer robots (which haven’t actually been invented
yet) in schools. Man, I wish I was making this up, but that’s Facebook for you.
We need to ban automatic weapons.
Okay. Done. In fact, we pretty much
did that in 1934. The
National Firearms Act of 1934 made it so that you had to pay a $200 tax on a
machine gun and register it with the government. In 1986 that registry was closed and there have been no new legal machine
guns for civilians to own since then.
Automatic means that when you hold
down the trigger the gun keeps on shooting until you let go or run out of ammo.
Actual automatic weapons cost a lot of money. The cheapest one you can get
right now is around $5,000 as they are all collector’s items and you need to
jump through a lot of legal hoops to get one. To the best of my knowledge, there has only ever been one crime
committed with an NFA weapon in my lifetime, and in that case the perp was a
cop.
Now are machine guns still used in crimes? Why, yes they
are. For every legally registered one, there are conservatively dozens of
illegal ones in the hands of criminals. They either make their own (which is
not hard to do) or they are smuggled in (usually by the same people that are
able to smuggle in thousands of tons of drugs). Because really serious criminals simply don’t care, they
are able to get ahold of military weapons, and they use them simply because
criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. So even an item which has been
basically banned since my grandparents were kids, and which there has been no
new ones allowed manufactured since I was in elementary school, still ends up
in the hands of criminals who really want one. This will go to show how effective
government bans are.
When you say “automatic” you mean full auto, as in a machine
gun. What I think most of these people mean is semi-auto.
Okay. We need to ban semi-automatic weapons!
Semi-automatic means that each time
you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun,
not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are
semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are
semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It
is the most common because it is normally the most effective.
Semi-automatic is usually best choice for defensive use. It is easier to use
because you can do so one handed if necessary, and you are forced to manipulate
your weapon less. If you believe that using a gun for self-defense is
necessary, then you pretty much have to say that semi-auto is okay.
Banning semi-automatic basically means banning all guns. I’ll get to the functional problems with that later.
We should ban handguns!
Handguns are tools for self-defense, and the only reason we use them over the more capable, and
easier to hit with rifles or shotguns is because handguns are portable. Rifles are just plain better, but the only
reason I don’t carry an AR-15 around is because it would be hard to hide under
my shirt.
Concealed Carry works.
As much as it offends liberals and we keep hearing horror stories about blood
in the streets, the fact is over my lifetime most of the United States has
enacted some form of concealed carry law, and the blood in the streets wild
west shootouts over parking spaces they’ve predicted simply hasn’t happened. At
this point in time there are only a few hold out states, all of them are blue
states and all of them have inner cities which suffer from terrible crime,
where once again, the criminals simply don’t care.
For information about how more guns actually equals less crime,
look up the work of Dr. John Lott. And since liberals hate his guts,
look up the less famous work of Dr. Gary Kleck, or basically look up the work
of any criminologist or economist who isn’t writing for Slate or Mother Jones.
As for why CCW is good, see my whole
first section about arming teachers for a tiny part of the whole picture.
Basically bad people are going to be bad and do bad things. They are going to
hurt you and take your stuff, because that’s what they do. That’s their career,
and they are as good at it as you are at your job. They will do this anywhere
they think they can get away with it. We fixate on the mass shooters
because they grab the headlines, but in actuality your odds of running in to
one of them is tiny. Your odds of having
a violent encounter with a run of the mill criminal is orders of magnitudes
higher.
I do find one thing highly amusing.
In my personal experience, some of the most vehement anti-gun people I’ve ever
associated with will usually eventually admit after getting to know me, that if
something bad happened, then they really hope I’m around, because I’m one of
the good ones. Usually they never realize just how hypocritical and
naïve that is.
We should ban Assault Rifles!
Define “assault rifle”…
Uh…
Yeah. That’s the problem. The term assault rifle gets bandied around
a lot. Politically, the term is a loaded nonsense one that was created back during the Clinton years.
It was one of those tricks where you name legislation something catchy, like
PATRIOT Act. (another law rammed through while emotions were high and nobody
was thinking, go figure).
To gun experts, an assault rifle is a very specific type of
weapon which originated (for the most part) in the 1940s. It is a magazine fed, select fire (meaning capable of full
auto), intermediate cartridge (as in, actually not that powerful, but I’ll come
back to that later) infantry weapon.
The thing is, real assault rifles in the US have been
heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and
politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term
for any gun which looks scary.
I had somebody get all mad at me for
pointing this out, because they said that the term had entered common usage.
Okay… If you’re going to legislate it,
DEFINE IT.
And then comes up that pesky
problem. The US banned assault rifles
once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was
totally, literally pointless. The special commission to study it said that
it accomplished absolutely nothing. (except tick a bunch of Americans off, and as a result we bought a TON more guns)
And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary
features which made a gun into an assault weapon.
Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun
functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run
of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly
that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part
where many law abiding citizens
accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature
which was now illegal.
One of the criteria was that it was semi-automatic.
See above. Hard to ban the single most common and readily available type of gun
in the world. (unless you believe in confiscation, but I’ll get to that). Then
what if it takes a detachable magazine!
That’s got to be an Evil Feature. And yes, we really did call them Evil
Features. I’ll talk about magazines below, but once again, it is pretty hard to
ban something that common unless you want to go on a confiscatory national suicide
mission.
For example, flash hiders sound
dangerous. Let’s say having a flash hider makes a gun an assault weapon. So flash hiders became an evil feature.
Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle
and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as
annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. EVIL.
Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are basically useless,
cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally
touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too.
Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size
shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE!
It has been a running joke in the
gun community ever since the ban passed. When Carolyn McCarthy was
asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied “I think it is the
shoulder thing which goes up.” Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law
abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic
piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime,
but could possibly be a shoulder thing which goes up.
Now are you starting to see why
“assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more
powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally
fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle. Don’t worry
though, because the same people who fling
around the term assault weapons also think of scoped deer rifles as “high
powered sniper guns”.
Basically, what you are
thinking of as assault weapons aren’t special.
Now, the reason that semi-automatic,
magazine fed, intermediate caliber rifles are the single most popular type of
gun in America is because they are excellent for many uses, but I’m not talking
about fun, or hunting, or sports, today I’m talking business. And in this case
they are excellent for shooting bad people who are trying to hurt you, in order
to make them stop trying to hurt you.
These types of guns are superb for defending your home. Now some of you may
think that’s extreme. That’s because everything you’ve learned about gun fights
comes from TV. Just read the link where I expound on why.
I had one individual tell me that
these types of guns are designed to slaughter the maximum number of people
possible as quickly as possible… Uh huh… Which is why every single police
department in America uses them, because of all that slaughtering cops do
daily. Cops use them for the same reason
we do, they are handy, versatile, and can stop an attacker quickly in a variety
of circumstances.
When I said “stop an attacker
quickly” somebody on Twitter thought that he’d gotten me and said “Stop. That’s
just a euphemism for kill!” Nope. I am perfectly happy if the attacker
surrenders or passes out from blood loss too. Tactically and legally, all I
care about is making them stop doing whatever it is that they are doing which
caused me to shoot them to begin with.
The guns that many of you think of
as assault rifle are common and popular because they are excellent for
fighting, and I’ll talk about what my side really thinks about the 2nd
Amendment below.
We should ban magazines over X number of shots!
I’ve seen this one pop up a lot. It
sounds good to the ear and really satisfies that we’ve got to do something
need. It sounds simple. Bad guys shoot a lot of people in a mass shooting. So if he has magazines that hold fewer
rounds, ergo then he’ll not be able to shoot as many people.
Wrong. And I’ll
break it down, first why my side wants more rounds in our gun, second why
tactically it doesn’t really stop the problem, and third, why stopping them is
a logistical impossibility.
First off, why
do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because
usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in
order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We
don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have
more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less
if we have to shoot more.
The last assault weapons ban capped
capacities at ten rounds. You quickly realize ten rounds sucks when you take a
wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after
case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and
still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at
all. Legally, you can shoot them until they cease to be a threat, and keep in
mind that what normally causes a person to stop is loss of blood pressure, so I
used to tell my students that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting
five or seven times. You shoot them until they leave you alone.
Also, you’re going to miss. It is
going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those
groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. The
more you train, the better you will do, but you can still may miss, or the bad
guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and
then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.”
So having more rounds in the gun is
a good thing for self-defense use.
Now tactically, let’s say a mass
shooter is on a rampage in a school. Unless his brain has turned to mush and
he’s a complete idiot, he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he
reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend
himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range.
They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a
second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are
actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil.
In the cases that I’m aware of where
the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves
back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and
kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned
firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices
in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new
magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
A good friend of mine (who happens
to be a very reasonable democrat) was very hung up on this, sure that he would
be able to take advantage of the time in which it took for the bad guy to
reload his gun. That’s a bad assumption, and here’s yet another article that
addresses that sort of misconception that I wrote several years ago which has
sort of made the rounds on firearm’s forums. http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/threads/45671-My-Gunfight-quot-Thinking-Outside-Your-Box-quot
So that’s awesome if it happens, but good luck with that.
Finally, let’s
look at the logistical ramifications of
another magazine ban. The AWB banned the production of all magazines over
ten rounds except those marked for military or law enforcement use, and it was
a felony to possess those.
Over the ten years of the ban, we
never ran out. Not even close. Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are
pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered
disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All it did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding
citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal.
Meanwhile, bad guys didn’t run out
either. And if they did, like I said, they are cheap and basic, so you just get
or make more. If you can cook meth, you can make a functioning magazine. My old
company designed a rifle magazine once, and I’m no engineer. I paid a CAD guy,
spent $20,000 and churned out several thousand 20 round Saiga .308 mags. This
could’ve been done out of my garage.
Ten years. No difference. Meanwhile, we had bad guys turning
up all the time committing crimes, and guess what was marked on the mags found
in their guns? MILITARY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY. Because once again, if you’re already breaking a bunch of
laws, they can only hang you once. Criminals simply don’t care.
Once the AWB timed out, because
every politician involved looked at the mess which had been passed in the heat
of the moment, the fact it did nothing, and the fact that every single one of
them from a red state would lose their job if they voted for a new one, it expired and went away.
Immediately
every single gun person in America went out and bought a couple guns which had
been banned and a bucket of new magazines, because nothing makes an American
want to do something more than telling them they can’t. We’ve been stocking up
ever since. If the last ban did
literally nothing at all over a decade, and since then we’ve purchased
another hundred million magazines since then, another ban will do even less.
(except just make the law abiding that much angrier, and I’ll get to that
below).
I bought $600 worth of magazines for
my competition pistol this morning. I’ve already got a shelf full for my
rifles. Gun and magazine sales skyrocket every time a democrat politician
starts to vulture in on a tragedy. I don’t know if many of you realize this,
but Barack Obama is personally
responsible for more gun sales, and especially first time gun purchases, than
anyone in history. When I owned my gun store, we had a picture of him on the
wall and a caption beneath it which said SALESMAN OF THE YEAR.
So you can ban this stuff, but it
won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop. Unless you think you
can confiscate them all, but I’ll talk about confiscation later.
One last thing
to share about the magazine ban from the AWB, and this is something all gun
people know, but most anti-gunners do not. When you put an artificial cap on a
weapon, and tell us that we can only have a limited number of rounds in that
weapon, we’re going to make sure they are the most potent rounds possible. Before the ban, everybody bought 9mms which
held an average of 15 rounds. After the ban, if I can only have ten rounds,
they’re going to be bigger, so we all started buying 10 shot .45s instead.
You don’t need an assault weapon for hunting!
Who said anything about hunting? That whole thing about the 2nd Amendment being
for sportsmen is hogwash. The 2nd Amendment is about bearing arms to
protect yourself from threats, up to and including a tyrannical government.
Spare me the whole, “You won’t be
happy until everybody has nuclear weapons” reductio ad absurdum. It says arms,
as in things that were man portable. And as for the founding fathers not being
able to see foresee our modern arms, you forget that many of them were
inventors, and multi shot weapons were already in service. Not to mention that in that day, arms included cannon,
since most of the original artillery of the Continental Army was privately
owned. Besides, the Supreme Court agrees with me. See DC v. Heller.
Well we should just ban ALL guns then! You only need them to
murder people!
It doesn’t really make sense to ban
guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant
hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to
stop crime than to cause crime.
I’ve seen several different sets of
numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The
problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal
self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is
enough to cause the criminal to stop.
Clint Smith once said if you look
like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking
for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So
when you pull a gun, you are no longer
prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.
So many defensive gun uses never get
tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time
in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun
away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering
a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as
far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who
was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a
Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was
attacking my one year old son. (amazingly
enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its
life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t
believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic,
all because no shots were fired.
So how often are guns actually used
in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a
year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year,
only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the
guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny
fraction of all our murders.
But let’s not go with the high
estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more
conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still
dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number
once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was
still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.
So even if you use the worst number
provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to
put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally
cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered
every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.
Doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. We should ban them and
take them all away like a civilized country.
Well, I suppose if your need to do something
overrides all reason and logic, then by all means let’s ban guns.
Australia
had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a
program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it
anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass
shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need
to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical
anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug
while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the
evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the
increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-poohing these
stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly
after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far
worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to
live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the
stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to
do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a
trend yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some
really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is
basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously,
the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no
longer being able to legally defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun
control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of
Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny
population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their
gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like
Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of
course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77
and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to
anything which has happened America.
Because once again, repeat it with
me, criminals simply do not give a crap.
That mass killer used a gun and homemade explosives. Make guns harder to get, and explosives become the weapon
of choice. Please do keep in mind that the largest and most advanced military
coalition in human history was basically stymied for a decade by a small group
using high school level chemistry and the Afghani equivalent to Radio Shack.
The biggest mass killings in US
history have used bombs (like Bath, Michigan), fire (like Happyland Nightclub)
or airliners. There is no law you can pass, nothing you can say or do, which
will make some not be evil.
And all of this is irrelevant,
because banning and confiscating all the scary guns in America will be national
suicide.
You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd
Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.
Many of you may truly believe that.
You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and
totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with
you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in
defense of it.
We’ve already seen that your partial
bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite
more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal
is to come and take the guns away. So
let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million
gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons.
The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked
if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t
want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in
a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got
friends who have still usable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been
building more of them this entire time. There
are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough
to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80
million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all
those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the
gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns
are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is
actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns
in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about
earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8
million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to
comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of
them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally
threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their
guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about
700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to
actually fight to keep their guns.
Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their
guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced
at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger
than 10%. Once the confiscations turned
violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw
somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd
Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones…
That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones,
fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the
political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military
vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side
with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun
culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them
who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain
about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful
corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh,
because the gun industry probably has
the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in
the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked
in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity,
and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun,
ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you
willing to have killed in order to bring about your Utopian vision of the
future?
Boo Evil Gun Culture!
Really? Because I hate to break it
to you, but when nearly six hundred people get murdered a year in beautiful Gun
Free Chicago, that’s not my people doing the shooting.
The gun culture is all around you,
well obviously except for those of you reading this in elite liberal urban city
centers where you’ve extinguished your gun culture. They are your friends,
relatives, and coworkers. The biggest
reason gun control has become increasingly difficult to pass over the last
decade is because more and more people have turned to CCW, and as that has
become more common, it has removed much of the stigma. Now everybody outside of
elite urban liberal city centers knows somebody that carries a gun. The
gun culture is simply regular America, and is made up of people who think their
lives and their families lives are more important than the life of anyone who
tries to victimize them.
The gun culture is who protects our
country. Sure, there are plenty of soldiers and cops who are issued a gun and
who use it as part of their job who could care less. However, the people who
build the guns, really understand the guns, actually enjoy using the guns, and
usually end up being picked to teach everybody else how to use the guns are the
gun culture.
The media and the left would
absolutely love to end the gun culture in America, because then they could
finally pass all the laws they wanted.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a country finally
succeeds in utterly stamping out its gun culture. Mumbai, 2008. Ten armed jihadi terrorists simply walked into town and
started shooting people. It was a rather direct, straight forward, ham fisted,
simple terrorist attack. They killed over 150 and wounded over 300. India has
incredibly strict gun laws, but once again, criminals didn’t care.
That’s not my point this time
however, I want to look at the response. These ten men shut down an entire
massive city and struck fear into the hearts of millions for THREE DAYS.
Depending on where this happened in America it would have been over in three
minutes or three hours. The Indian police responded, but their tactics sucked.
The marksmanship sucked. Their leadership sucked. Their response utterly and
completely fell apart.
In talking afterwards with some individuals
from a small agency of our government who were involved in the clean-up and
investigation, all of whom are well trained, well practiced, gun nuts, they
told me the problem was that the Indian
police had no clue what to do because they’d never been taught what to do.
Their leadership hated and feared the gun so much that they stamped out the
ability for any of their men to actually master the tool. When you kill your
gun culture, you kill off your instructors, and those who can pass down the information
necessary to do the job.
Don’t think that we are so far off
here. I recently got to sit down with
some fans who are members of one of the larger metro police departments in
America. These guys were all SWAT cops or narcotics, all of them were gun nuts
who practiced on their own dime, and all of them were intimately familiar with
real violence. These are the guys that you want responding when the real bad
stuff goes down.
What they told me made me sick. Their leadership was all uniformly liberal and extremely
anti-gun, just like most big cities in America. They walked me through what
their responses were supposed to be in case of a Mumbai style event, and how
their “scary assault weapons” were kept locked up where they would be
unavailable, and how dismal their training was, and how since the state had run
off or shut down most of the gun ranges, most
of the cops couldn’t even practice or qualify anymore.
So now they were less safe, the
people they were protecting were less safe, the bad guys were safer, but most
importantly their leadership could pat themselves on the back, because they’d
done something.
Well, okay. You make some good
points. But I’d be more comfortable if
you gun people were force to have more mandatory training!
And I did actually have this one
said to me, which is an amazing victory by Internet arguing standards.
Mandatory training is a placebo at
best. Here is my take on why.
In conclusion, basically it doesn’t
really matter what something you pick when some politician or pundit starts
screaming we’ve got to do something, because in reality, most of them already
know a lot of what I listed above. The ones who are walking around with their
security details of well-armed men in their well-guarded government buildings
really don’t care about actually stopping mass shooters or bad guys, they care
about giving themselves more power and increasing their control.
If a bad guy used a gun with a big
magazine, ban magazines. If instead he used more guns, ban owning multiple
guns. If he used a more powerful gun with less shots, ban powerful guns. If he
used hollow points, ban hollow points. (which I didn’t get into, but once
again, there’s a reason everybody who might have to shoot somebody uses them).
If he ignored some Gun Free Zone, make more places Gun Free Zones. If he killed
a bunch of innocents, make sure you disarm the innocents even harder for next
time. Just in case, let’s ban other guns that weren’t even involved in any
crimes, just because they’re too big, too small, too ugly, too cute, too long,
too short, too fat, too thin, (and if you think I’m joking I can point out a
law or proposed law for each of those) but most of all ban anything which makes
some politician irrationally afraid, which luckily, is pretty much everything.
They will never be happy. In
countries where they have already banned guns, now they are banning knives and
putting cameras on every street. They talk about compromise, but it is never a
compromise. It is never, wow, you offer a quick, easy, inexpensive, viable
solution to ending mass shootings in schools, let’s try that. It is always,
what can we take from you this time, or what will enable us to grow some
federal apparatus?
Then regular criminals will go on
still not caring, the next mass shooter will watch the last mass shooter be the
most famous person in the world on TV, the media will keep on vilifying the
people who actually do the most to defend the innocent, the ignorant will call
people like me names and tell us we must like dead babies, and nothing actually
changes to protect our kids.
If you are serious about actually
stopping school shootings, contact your state representative and tell them to
look into allowing someone at your kid’s school to be armed. It is time to
install some speed bumps.
EDIT: I have been stunned by the
level of response on this post. I wrote it so that it could be shared, but I
had no idea just how much it would be, so thank you. I have received hundreds
of comments, emails, and I don’t even know how many Twitter and Facebook
messages. It is heartening that this made many people think about the issues in
a new way.
I will try to respond and answer
questions as I can, but there are a LOT of them, so I will probably take
the most common ones and do another blog post when I have the chance. If your
comment doesn’t appear immediately, that is because I have to approve first
time posters manually to make sure they are not spam bots.
If I had realized 30,000
people would read this today I would have proof read it. When you find a
typo or something that seems a bit rough, I wrote this 10k word essay
from 9pm to 1am and posted it the next day at lunch.
For those of you who haven’t been
here before, I make my living as a novelist. If you click any of the Amazon or
B&N links off to the right side it will take you to one of my books. Thank
you for your support, encouragement, and honest debate.
EDIT2 After two straight days of
responding to as many debate posts in the comments as possible, I’m fried, and
hanging it up for Christmas. I’ll still be approving posts periodically, but
that’s it for me as far as arguing (and it has rapidly turned into the
same thing over and over again) This post has been read 150,000
times now, gotten national media attention, and been reposted all over the
Internet. Awesome. I was sincerely hoping people would share it, so thank you
very much. Have a Merry Christmas.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/
Posts
