One thing six-plus decades in this life has taught me is that people are overly-optimistic with our culture’s custom of New Year’s Resolutions. Therefore, I figured I should wait until a couple of weeks in to put my own in perspective.
New Year’s Resolutions often revolve around personal vices. Quit smoking, quit drinking, make your sex life less dangerous. They key here is reasonable expectations. My resolutions in this regard were to make love to only the cleanest and sweetest woman, drink only the finest adult beverages, and smoke only choice tobacco. It’s working so far, which obviously proves that I’m right. J
Another resolution was to put up with less BS, and it’s relevant here because I’ve applied it to the blog you are now reading. In the years I’ve been doing the Backwoods Home firearms blog, the record will show that of 6,417 comments posted here by readers at the time I write this, I approved an even 6400. (This doesn’t count deletion of spam that made it through the spam filter.)
Of the 17 that were not approved for posting over these years, some came from the posters’ own requests: “Mas, can you delete that, I posted to soon,” or something like that. There were a few for rabid racist ranting, and one or two messages were deleted because they viciously attacked others who had posted comments. (I’m the guy who writes the blog, and if you want to attack me, well, I’m fair game. Ad hominem attacks on others who post here? NO!)
One post deletion was for a filthy-mouthed dude who threatened me and others, and babbled about scenarios he claimed to have experienced that were only one step away from alien abduction anal probe stories in credibility. He was also the only person I’ve ever banned from commenting on this blog.
Until now.
The first full weekend of 2012, I was on the road shooting a couple of pistol matches. I fired up the laptop in the car with the air card, and found a spate of posts by someone who has been haunting this blog since the infestation of cop-haters that occurred here in April of 2011, after I posted about positive feelings toward armed citizens by the master police officers who were teaching at the annual conference of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association. This kid – he seems to be in early adolescence, and hasn’t contradicted me on that in his many postings – has for several months regurgitated cop-hating propaganda, often without a sense of time or place since he would introduce it into discussion threads such as memorial times for American servicemen who have given their lives for this country. I tried to explain things to him, and tell him where he could learn the reality. So did others. It fell on deaf ears.
His latest diatribes were the worst yet, comparing American police to assorted genocidal death camp executioners, and implying that anyone who had a permit to carry a pistol was a collaborator in un-Constitutional activities. Reading that crap, on the anniversary of the Tucson shooting, I decided that this blog was no longer going to allow the rantings of someone so out of touch with reality that he made me wonder…”Next Jared Laughner?”
So…so long, “sofa.” I hope you find the help and the understanding you need. It was offered to you here, but you didn’t accept it. I can’t inflict your out-of-touch-with-reality BS on those who read this blog any longer.
The record will show that anti-gunners and others are welcome to speak here. I trust the other readers, and myself, to handle anything they can bring up. Less than one ban a year? I can live with that. It shows that the vast majority who post comments here are thinking, rational human beings.
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…
It’s a story that has played out before: someone thinks if their marriage license and their driver’s license are recognized by the State of New York, their license to carry a gun must be, too. A female medical student at the 9/11 memorial discovered otherwise, here:
The plot thickened. Searching her purse after she tried to do the right thing and declare her little Kel-Tec P32, police found a glassine bag filled with white powder and, not surprisingly, sent it for analysis. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made anti-gun campaigns his cause célèbre, publicly accused her of being in illegal possession of cocaine, here:
The medical student explained that the substance was powdered aspirin. Noo Yawkers don’t know what Southern folks know: powdered aspirin, notably Goody’s and BC Powders, are popular headache remedies south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the defendant and her pistol permit both hail from Tennessee.
For a hundred years, New York’s Sullivan Act has inflicted draconian felony punishment on those who carry or even merely possess handguns, even if they are licensed elsewhere. New York City won’t even recognize a permit issued in Albany or Buffalo. Google Plaxico Burress: even the rich and famous are not immune.
It is common for people innocently and honestly checking firearms at airports in New York to be arrested for felony illegal possession. A victimless crime, classic malum prohibitum, this has a ruinous effect on the lives of dozens of good American citizens every year, not to mention the waste in New Yorkers’ tax dollars. The Tennessee medical student has drawn much sympathy from the general public, and even anti-gun politicians are urging authorities to go easy on the lady, for fear of creating a backlash in favor of House Resolution 822, which would require national reciprocity in recognition of other states’ handgun permits, as noted here: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hold_your_fire_4dW6vKJHy3GFawLPw5riDM.
And of course, some of my large-bore and Magnum-loving friends would say that since she only had a .32, it ought to at the very least be reduced to a misdemeanor.
My hope for the New Year is that HR 822 passes the Senate and becomes national law…that the med student gets a finding from the crime lab of “Yep, it’s powdered aspirin” and gets enough from her libel suit against Mayor Bloomberg and the City of New York to pay her legal fees and compensate her for her suffering… and that some common sense gets restored to the gun law situation in the United States.
I wish you all a happy, healthy, productive and safe New Year.
I appreciate all the comments about “gun folks’ Christmas”… thanks to all.
As we bask in the aftermath of our holiday gift exchanges, Significant Other calls to my attention this cute YouTube rant from a little girl who, in her thus far short life, has apparently already tired of being told “If you’re female, you need Pink Princess Products.”
Significant Other shares the child’s sentiments. Adamantly opposing the current “pretty in pink” pistol marketing, she carries black guns, presumably the better to intimidate those who would try to sell her something in Rose or Raspberry.
How unfortunate that the latest batch of firearms that came in for me to test for gun magazines included this one…
It suddenly occurs to me, the Insignificant Other, that I should perhaps round up some OTHER females to take part in the testing…
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