On January 8, the Brady Bunch suggested a lighting of a candle as a protest to gun violence.
Awww…how sweet.
The 8th, of course, was the one year anniversary of the grotesque mass murder in Tucson, Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner. His most famous victim, left brain-damaged for life, was Arizona Congressman Gabby Giffords. She was clearly his intended target.
The gun-banners made much of the fact that Representative Giffords was shot with a Glock 19 9mm pistol. They neglected to mention that Gabby Giffords had, prior to the shooting, proudly stated that she owned and had a license to carry a Glock 19 of her own. The mass-murderer was put to the ground and captured by courageous citizens, including ARMED citizen Joe Zamudio, who was carrying a pistol of his own at the time, a Ruger P95 9mm.
But lighting a candle will prevent the Jared Loughners of the world from carrying out their monstrous deeds? Good Lord…it’s like the candlelight vigils from the Take Back the Night Movement.
It’s nice to know that people care. Hell, I care. I’ve spent an adult lifetime learning how to ward off monsters such as Loughner, and sharing that knowledge with others.
Some pro-gun bloggers got together and did their own January 8 counterpoint to the Brady thing. I wish I had contributed more to that: all I did was take a picture of some strong women with candles and nine millimeters at a Glock match in Clearwater, Florida on the 8th. (Great match, by the way, and kudos to the Wyoming Antelope Club in Clearwater for putting it on.)
The decades have taught me that women won’t take back the night by marching with candles. They’ll take it back when those who prey on them learn – some the hard and final way – that their intended victims can be more dangerous to them, than they are to their intended victims.
Those you see below have it right.
If some monster tries to rape or murder a woman I care about, I don’t want him to see the flickering light of a candle.
I want him to see a muzzle flash, from the front.
I hate to paraphrase Al Capone, but a candle and a Glock will earn women more safety than just a candle. From left: Gail, Kitty, and Lisa Marie of the Alabama Holster Company’s all-girl pistol team, January 8, at Glock match in Clearwater, FL.
Two recent high profile shootings show us that sometimes, in the aftermath, things go as they should, though in only one of those actual shootings did we have what anyone could call a happy ending.
Both occurred over the holidays. In Washington state, an Iraq war vet diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome that would normally engender our sympathy, snapped and shot four people. He fled to the boondocks, where he encountered a park ranger, a 32 year old mother of two. He shot her to death. The cop-killer was later found dead; it is unclear at this time whether he swallowed poison or froze to death out in the elements, or drowned. (According to one report, he was found face down in a creek. I haven’t seen the autopsy or toxicology screen yet.)
In Oklahoma, a man had been stalking an 18-year old mother of a baby boy. Her husband had died of cancer on Christmas day, and some of the German Shepherds she and he raised had mysteriously died – perhaps poisoned by the stalker, some theorize now. As if she had not suffered enough, the stalker and a hulking friend showed up at her door New Year’s Eve and tried to kick their way in. The young woman armed herself, pushed a sofa against the door, put a bottle in her infant son’s mouth and called 9-1-1. The calm dispatcher advised her to do what she had to do if he made it through the door before the cops arrived.
He did, and she did. She fired a single shotgun blast as the intruder burst through the door with a foot-long hunting knife, plopping him dead on the barricading sofa. His accomplice fled, but was soon in custody. I’m told the local prosecutor has already ruled it a justifiable homicide…and the first to establish a support fund for the young mother was the local PD, the Blanchard, Oklahoma Police Department. Info is here: http://blog.newsok.com/breakingnews/2012/01/04/fund-set-up-for-blanchard-woman-who-shot-killed-intruder/. Thanks to the retired NYPD officer and gunfight survivor who frequents this blog and sends it along.
Learning points?
n In each case, the death weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun. Some in the anti-gun camp have already blamed the law that allows ordinary, law-abiding citizens to be armed in parks like the one where the ranger was killed, for the depredations of a madman who had already violated every law from the Sixth Commandment on down before he reached the park. I try not to use words like “idiocy” when speaking of the other side, but in this case it fits. The firearm is a tool, which carries out the will of the owner. Evil in the first case, good in the second. Yes, it IS that simple.
n The law-abiding armed citizen and the police are natural allies. We see that clearly here, when a gun owners’ civil rights group is the first to step up with a fund for the family of the murdered park ranger…and when the local police are the first to step up to help an embattled young mom who had to kill in self-defense.
I’ll be sending out two donations tomorrow. I hope all who can, will join me. A lawyer friend of mine, whose specialty is appeals for citizens wrongly convicted after self-defense shootings, suggests that flowers for the Oklahoma dispatcher and prosecutor might also be in order…
I am reminded of the two teen thrill killers who conned their way into the home of a beloved couple in Hanover, New Hampshire some years ago. Google “Zantop Murders.” The little fiends butchered that good man and woman like Jack the Ripper.
Not long before the atrocity, the same pair had surrounded a home in nearby Vermont, cut the power lines, and attempted the same thing. This time, though, they were met by a dad who protected his kids with a Glock drawn from his ever-present holster, and fled like the cowards they were.
There is, I submit, a lesson in this.
It’s why I carry a handgun at all times when on my own rural property. When a sudden, unprovoked attack comes, there won’t be time to run to the gun safe.
Condolences to the family and friends of the deceased. May others learn from their sacrifice, that it may not be repeated.
I joke with people that if carrying an iPhone makes you a Yuppie, I am exempt because my iPhone lives in an armored MagPul carrier, and therefore, I am at worst a “Combat Yuppie.”
Ya know, it isn’t a joke anymore.
For decades, I’ve taught Good Guys how to do building searches. Since they came out with pocket phones that take pictures, I’ve included in the curriculum the tactic of putting your phone on photo mode, reaching it out around your cover when you’re doing the search, and simply taking a picture. The camera will instantly show you an image of what’s visible from its perspective, without you having to stick your head out into the field of possible opposing gunfire to see it with your own eyes, and maybe get your head blown off for doing so.
And, for some time, we’ve had iPhone apps for calculating bullet drop at distances: iSniper.
It turns out that our innovative young soldiers and Marines have found more ingenious applications for their smart phones: maps, direct communications on the battlefield, and more. The military establishment had caught up with what our sharp young techno-warriors have often already figured out for themselves, as seen here: http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20111005.aspx
If memory serves, it was Descartes who said, “I think, therefore I am.” Perhaps the new motto for those in mortal conflict may be, “iFight, therefore iPhone.”
Most of you reading this are more techno-literate than I am. Please share here any tips you have for using this technology to fight and reconnoiter, when the stakes on the table are the lives of the Good Guys and Gals.
On 9/11/11, my old friend Tom Gresham dedicated his radio show “Gun Talk” to the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack on our country. He brought in many of us to comment. I made my contribution from a cell phone at the Harrisburg Hunters & Anglers Club, where I was teaching, and mentioned the fact that this region had just been hit with what the newspapers were calling a “hundred year flood,” and “The Great Flood of 2011.”
It was a microcosm of the spirit that pervaded America in general and the city of New York in particular after the atrocity of a decade before. People working together and helping each other. As in the incident of ten years ago, transportation had been shut down. Some of the students couldn’t make it to the class; some roads into Harrisburg were closed by the flood. Flying in from the east coast, I’d been stranded in Philadelphia during the massive rainstorms that caused the flood, and had to rent one of the last cars available at the airport to drive to Harrisburg through solid downpour.
The class still went on, as life went on after 9/11/01. Thousands of people had to be evacuated as the Susquehanna River rose. Countless homes were ruined. There were injuries and deaths. The inconvenience most of us suffered was, by comparison, insignificant.
Yet, coming at the time of the somber anniversary of The Atrocity, it showed that the resilience of American spirit was alive and well. People helping people…helping neighbors, helping strangers.
We have among us senior citizens who remember The Great Depression. Who remember World War II, from which a generation returned from the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man to create “golden years” of peace, prosperity, and productivity.
Their spirit still lives, and it’s something of which all of us in this great nation can be proud.
The threat of terrorism still hangs over our nation, as seen in this headline in the days before the anniversary of 9/11…
…and when the flood devastated the area along the Susquehanna, neighbors helped neighbors and even strangers, in the best American tradition…
…below is the Harrisburg Hunters and Anglers range where I was teaching, the high water on the trap range visible beforehand and the flooded practical pistol range in the background behind the trees. Volunteers are already repairing it.
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