When I was a little kid, it never occurred to my classmates and I that some crazed adult might burst into the elementary school and attempt to murder us. Back in that day, the people likely to do that were institutionalized in the state asylum for the insane.
My friend and student Tony Rodriguez, a street cop and SRO (School Resource Officer, a law enforcement assignment that has sadly become necessary today), offers us the sobering reflection that follows. Thanks, Tony!

Hello All:

I hope this e-mail finds you blessed and safe.

I am sending this e-mail to all my brothers and sisters in public safety, education and ministry because I think this is relevant to all three areas.

I wanted to share a quick story with you about a conversation I had a few days ago with an 8 year old. Sadly, it showed me how times have changed and how our present day violence has impacted the lives of even our youngest children for the worse.

On Thursday I was asked to help at our after school program because several of the normal staff came down sick. These kids range in age from 6-10 years old. They are used to seeing me in an “officer” role (in uniform) all the time since I stop in and see them at least once a week.

This time, it was my day off and I came in regular dress. Immediately, this little girl says “Hey! Where is all your cop stuff!” At first I thought she was trying to be funny/cute as kids are at that age. I told her that, even I get a day off and wanted to come in just to spend it with them for fun! (Even though you guys know I carry enough stuff to give a metal detector a stroke!…wasn’t going to tell them that)

That’s when she took the conversation in a direction that I wasn’t expecting:

She proceeded to ask me how I was going to protect them (the entire group) if someone came in and was a “bad person” I told her that I didn’t think she had to worry about it and that if something came up the adults would handle it.

In the best sarcastic tone I’ve ever heard out of a kid she said: “How can you handle it! You don’t have your police gun or even your handcuffs!”

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked her why she was so worried about it…she simply said “people shoot kids all the time now!”
That started an entire conversation in the group of kids about their fears of violence.

After talking about it for 10-15 minutes with them, I was shocked at how well (unfortunately) they understood the concept of school and societal violence as a whole at that age.

These issues were NEVER a consideration when I was growing up, yet today, this is THEIR REALITY and they are keenly aware of it.

This entire experience made me reflect on just how much our society has changed, even in the last 10 years. I was talking with the 5th grade teacher I work with during my D.A.R.E. sessions and she reminded me of a simple fact that I think we often forget. We have been at war continuously for the past decade defending ourselves and fighting for our Nation’s survival. War and conflict is all these children have known.

I’ve said all that to simple say:

Take care of the babies! They shouldn’t have to live in this kind of world. Whatever profession you are in, fight to make it better for them. I believe that one of the best ways to bless our world other than straight out evangelism is to love our children more than we love even ourselves. That should be one of our primary witness tools to others.

That is all for now.

Keep your faith strong and your mind focused
Blessings to all,
Antonio

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We’ve been discussing the “high capacity magazine controversy” here of late, and it’s good to see someone getting the message across in mainstream media.  Here’s what novelist/critic Stephen Hunter, one of the best writers of our time in my opinion, had to say on the subject in the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/04/AR2011020406709.html

In my last post here, I and several commentators discussed the recent tragedy in rural Alaska, where a good man went to the door unarmed to find himself facing the neighborhood “strange ranger.” The whacko WAS armed…and the homeowner died, and his wife was wounded and left for dead.

Now, sent to me first by my good friend Steve Harris, a gun-wise attorney in the metropolitan South, comes this case from Tennessee:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/feb/09/vickie-graves-shoot-intruder-testify-bill/?partner=popular

For me, the takeaway lesson from the Tennessee case is that if you’re going to have guns available for home defense, make sure every person in the household who is responsible enough to respond to a life-threatening home invasion KNOWS HOW TO OPERATE THEM. It is unclear from the article why the woman of the house was unable to fire the gun she tried to shoot the home invader with. No round in the chamber, and she didn’t know to rack the slide to get the gun up and running?  A manual safety device?  Those have saved good guys’ lives many times, though there’s no hundred per cent guarantee, when bad guys got good guys’ guns away from them and tried to shoot them, but “didn’t know how to turn on the gun.” See my article on the topic in the “Ayoob Files” series in the issue of American Handgunner magazine, currently on newsstands or available online cost-free at www.americanhandgunner.com.

However, the people we share our lives with – who might need that gun to protect our lives, or theirs, or our children’s or our grandchildren’s – can be just as stymied by a manual safety or a lock they don’t know how to release, as a criminal might be. Let’s make sure that those we trust to pick up a gun to defend our home, whether that home is in the backwoods or the inner city, knows not only when but how to use it.

These are lessons that have been written in blood.  To ignore those lessons is to spit on the graves of the good people who died that we might learn them.

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This recent murder in rural Alaska highlights the fact that the namesake of our operation here, the backwoods home dweller, tends to be on his or her own when violent crime threatens in the far hinterlands:

http://www.adn.com/2011/01/23/166331…t-husband.html

Might things have come out better if the homeowner had been armed when he stepped outside? If he’d had a solid piece of cover from which he could have issued a challenge?

Over the past month since the tragic atrocity in Tucson, we’ve discussed here the dangers presented by the violent mentally ill. Gun laws won’t solve it.  More stringent mental health protocols? Well, let’s see…in some totalitarian countries, anyone who disagrees with the government is deemed mentally ill, and sent to a “re-education camp” that’s more like a gulag.  What if the psychiatrist who examines a devoutly religious patient is a militant atheist who interprets prayer as talking to people who aren’t there, and diagnoses the believer as a paranoid schizophrenic who should lose the right to own guns, and perhaps other perks of good citizenship?  What if the psychiatrist who examines the patient is of the opposite bent, and believes that anyone of a belief system other than his is an infidel who must be killed?  Oh, wait, we’ve met him already: Dr.Nidal Malik Hasan, the fanatical Muslim and US Army psychiatrist who perpetrated the mass murder at Food Hood in late 2009.

No wonder society in general, and legislators in particular, won’t touch the idea of locking up dangerous mental patients. Complicated issues abound there.

There’s only one simple answer to stopping murders by the criminally insane, and that’s to be able to stop them one at a time by ourselves. When you’re in the Alaskan bush two hours away from Fire Department response, you damn sure need your own battery operated smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and firefighting knowledge. When you’re in the same place two hours from the nearest law enforcement officer, you need to possess – and have the ability to competently use – the primary rescue tool the officer would bring for an emergency such as this.

That tool, of course, is a defensive firearm.

But for some elements of society, I guess that’s just too simple…

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A few days ago, the weather forecasters said the eastern side of Connecticut was gonna get hit today by Hurricane Earl, shortly after it wiped out the Carolinas at Category Five horsepower, and mere minutes after it had devastated New York City.  The NYC papers told folks to brace themselves…storm shelters were in place for the suddenly homeless…and evacuations were put into effect in parts of the Atlantic Coast.

Well, I spent yesterday and today in the middle of Earl.  There was a sprinkle of rain yesterday. Today the sun shone from a blue sky with a few fluffy white clouds, there was a gentle breeze, and the storm had apparently turned the temperature down from Indian Summer Hell to Paradise setting. We were maybe half an hour inland from the north coast of Long Island Sound. Of the handful of hurricanes I’ve experienced, Earl was by far the most pleasant.

Yeah, you got it…it blew out to sea. I can’t even say “We dodged the bullet,” because to be semantically correct, that would mean that we had wisely seen it coming and cleverly taken evasive action. Hell, I was stupid enough to drive TO the predicted hurricane. There was work I had made a commitment to do there. Nope, no tactical cleverness involved: the damn storm simply missed us, blowing out to sea and petering out to tropical storm level at that.

A lot of folks cancelled Labor Day vacation plans, and a lot of taxpayer money was spent in emergency preparation. But was that all WASTED?  Hell, no!  It was a dry run for The System to deal with something that COULD have trashed the Eastern Seaboard population center, so it damn sure wasn’t for nothing.

It also reminded us of a few things. The Governor of North Carolina activated their proprietary and incredibly stupid law which forbids citizens with permits to carry their guns off their own property during time of declared emergencies.  In short, NC criminalized an entire class of citizens.  Including me and my companion, each carrying a gun as we passed through NC, and doing so legally as far as we knew. Of course, unless the traveler was tuned to the right radio station at the right moment, they could not have known they’d just been criminalized, as we didn’t until we’d already passed through. This does not make me warm and fuzzy.

You can read about it HERE.

North Carolina gun owners have tried to fix this idiocy, and have not yet succeeded. Let’s hope that this time there’s enough outcry that NEXT time they WILL succeed. Deny vetted, law-abiding citizens the right to protect themselves AT a time when localized society is MOST likely to break down, and police service is LEAST likely to be available to protect them?  It’s a perfect storm of madness.

What’s everyone else’s take on this?

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You’ve read here, and in the pages of Backwoods Home Magazine, about the Appleseed Project, a great combination of American Revolution history lecture and strong, basic rifle marksmanship and safety training. Phil Wylie alerted me to a way cool event coming up soon in his home state, Illinois.
The organization is hoping to get its biggest turnout ever, three hundred participants on the firing line simultaneously, at an Appleseed scheduled for September 11-12 at the Aurora Sportsman’s Club in Waterman, Illinois. What better date to make a personal commitment to patriotism and the heritage of the American spirit?
The Appleseed folks expect to have sixty firearms instructors on the line, the best and the brightest of their nationwide cadre of skilled shooting coaches and history lecturers. Maximum cost will be $70, and the event will be FREE for kids, women, military personnel, and graduates of previous Appleseed programs. You can be part of the history of a worthy organization at its largest event to date, and meet a great many like-minded people.
Information is available at www.appleseedinfo.org/300html, and you can make reservations through Illinois state coordinator Dan Hendrickson at IL@appleseedinfo.org. I’d be there if a long-standing training schedule didn’t preclude it, and I think everyone who does manage to get there will have a great experience they’ll remember for a lifetime.

The Backwoods Home cover for the “Appleseed issue”…

…and, thanks to Annie and the headquarters crew in Gold Beach, the poster for the upcoming Appleseed mega-shoot.

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